by Otto Penzler
George shook his head. “A cup of coffee, that’s all,” he said, and poured himself some from a silver teapot.
Maxwell smiled. “Off your feed today? Can’t say I blame you. It’s a difficult thing.”
“Enough, Richard,” said George’s father. “No need to upset him. He’ll see soon enough.”
“I’m not upset, Father,” said George, with a cool glance at Maxwell. “I’ll wait to hear Mr. Maxwell’s bogey story. I hope he won’t disappoint me.”
Maxwell flushed, and George hoped he was about to choke on a rasher, but he cleared his throat and smiled again. “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, Master George.”
“I said enough—both of you.” The elder McCormack looked at the pair with disapproval. “This is not to be treated lightly. Indeed, Richard, this may be the most serious moment of George’s life, so please conduct yourself as befits your position. You also, George. You shall soon be laird of Cairnwell, so start behaving as such.” The voice was pale and weak, but the underlying tone held a rigid intensity that wiped the sardonic smiles from the other two faces.
“Now,” McCormack went on, “I think it’s time.”
Maxwell rose. “Are you sure you don’t want the wheelchair?”
“What’ll you do, carry it down the stairs? No, I’ll walk today as my father walked in front of me nearly forty years ago.”
“But your health . . .”
“Life holds nothing more for me, Richard. If death comes as a result of what happens today, so much the better. I’m very tired. It’s made me very tired.”
At first George thought that his father was referring to the cancer, but something told him this was not the case, and the implications made him shiver.
He rose and followed his father and Maxwell as they left the room, passed down the hall, through a small alcove, and into a little-used study. Maxwell drew back the curtains of the room, allowing a sickly light to enter through grimy beveled panes. Then he dragged a wooden chair over to a high bookcase, stepped up on it, removed several volumes from the top shelf, and turned what George assumed was a hidden knob. Then he descended, flipped back a corner of a faded Oriental rug, and scrabbled with his fingers for a near-invisible handhold. Finding it, he pulled the trap door up so easily that George assumed it must be counterweighted.
“Good Christ,” said George with a touch of awe. “It’s just like a thirties horror film. No wonder I never found it.”
“Don’t feel stupid,” said Maxwell, not unkindly. “No one has ever discovered it on their own.” He then opened a closet, inside which were three kerosene lamps.
“No flashlights?” asked George.
“Tradition,” said Maxwell, lighting the lamps with his Dunhill and handing one each to George and his father, keeping the third for himself. Looking at McCormack, he said in a voice that held just the hint of a tremor, “Shall I lead the way?”
McCormack nodded. “Please. I’ll follow, and George, stay behind me.” There was no trembling in McCormack’s voice, only a rugged tenacity.
Maxwell stepped gently into the abyss, as if fearing the steps would collapse beneath him, but George saw that they were stone, and realized that Maxwell, for all his previous bravado, was actually quite hesitant to confront whatever lay below.
They descended for a long time, and, although he did not count them, George guessed that the steps numbered well over two hundred. The walls of the stairway were stone, and appeared to be quite as old as the castle itself.
Halfway down, Maxwell explained briefly: “This was built during the border wars. If the castle was stormed, the laird and retainers could hide down here with provisions to last six months. It was never used for that purpose, however.”
He said no more. By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, the temperature had fallen ten degrees. The walls were green with damp mold, and George started as he heard a scuffling somewhere ahead of them.
“Rats,” his father said. “Just rats.”
For another thirty meters they walked down a long passage that gradually grew in width from two meters to nearly five. George struggled to peer past Maxwell and his father, trying to make forms out of the shadows their lanterns cast. Then he saw the door.
It appeared to be made of one piece of massive oak, crisscrossed with wide iron bands like a giant’s chessboard. Directly in the center of its vast expanse was a black-brown blotch of irregular shape, looking, in the dim light, like a huge squashed spider. Maxwell and McCormack stopped five meters away, and turned toward George.
“Now it begins,” said McCormack, and his eyes were sad. “Go with your lantern to the door, George, and look at what is mounted there.”
George obeyed, walking slowly toward the door, the lantern held high in front of him protectively, almost ceremonially. For a moment he wished he had a crucifix.
At first he could not identify the thing that was nailed to the oaken door. But he suddenly realized that it was a skin of some kind, a deerskin perhaps, that centuries of dampness and decay had darkened to this dried and blackened parody before him.
But deer, he told himself, do not have pairs of breasts that sag like large, decayed mushrooms, or fingers that hang like rotted willow leaves. Or a face with a round, thick-lipped gap for a mouth, a broad flap of bulbous skin for a nose, twin pits of deep midnight in shriveled pouches for eyes. And he knew beyond doubt that mounted on that door with weary, rusting nails was the flayed skin of a woman.
He struggled to hold it back, but the bile came up instantly, and he bent over, closed his eyes, and let it rain down upon the stone floor. When it was over, he spit several times and blew his nose into a handkerchief, then looked at the two older men. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” his father said. “I did the same thing the first time.” He looked at the skin. “Now it’s just like a wall-hanging.”
“What the hell is it?” asked George, repelled yet fascinated, hardly daring to look at the thing again.
“The mortal remains,” said Maxwell, “of the first wife of the sixteenth laird of Cairnwell.” The words were mechanical, as if he had been practicing them for a long time.
“The wife . . .” George looked at the skin on the door. “Was she a black? Or did the tanning—”
Maxwell interrupted. “Yes, she was an African native the laird met as a young man on a trading voyage, the daughter of a priest of one of the tribes of Gambia. The ship traded with the tribe, and the laird, Brian McCormack, saw the woman dance. Apparently she was a great beauty as blacks go, and he became infatuated with her. Later he claimed she had put a spell on him.”
George was shaking his head in disbelief. “A spell?” he asked, a confused and erratic half-smile on his lips. “Are you serious, Maxwell? Father, is this for real?”
McCormack nodded. “It’s real. And under the circumstances, I believe that she did bewitch him. Let Maxwell continue.”
“Spell or no,” Maxwell went on smoothly, “he brought her back with him, she posing as a servant he’d taken on. The captain of the ship—and Brian’s employee—had secretly married them on board, and by the time they docked in Leith, she was, technically, Lady Cairnwell.”
A low, rich laugh of relief started to bubble out of George. “My God,” he said, while his father and Maxwell stared at him like priests at a defiler of the Host. “That’s the secret then? That’s what kept this family shamed for over three hundred years, that we’ve some black blood in the line?” His laughter slowly faded. “Back then I can understand. But now? This is the 1990s—no one cares about that anymore. Besides, whatever genetic effect she would have had is long gone, and this ‘Cairnwell Horror’ isn’t anything more than racial paranoia.”
“You’re wrong, George,” said Maxwell. “I’ve not yet told you of the horror. That was still to come. Will you simply listen while I finish?” His voice was angry, yet controlled, and George, taken aback, nodded acquiescence.
“Brian McCormack,” Maxwell went
on, “once back in Scotland, quickly realized his mistake. Whether through diminished lust or the failure of the spell, we can’t know. At any rate, he wanted a quiet divorce, and the woman returned to Gambia. She refused to be divorced, but he made arrangements to have her transported back to Africa anyway. She overheard his plan and told him that if she was forced to leave him, she would expose their marriage to the world. Why he didn’t have her killed immediately is a mystery, as it was well within his power. Perhaps he still felt a warped affection for her.
“So he locked her away down here, entrusting her secret to only one servant. The others, who had thought her Brian’s mistress, were told she had been sent away, and were greatly relieved by the fact.
“Brian then wooed and married an earl’s daughter, Fiona McTavish, and the world had no reason to suspect that it was his second wedding. There was a problem with the match, however. Fiona was barren, and no doctor could rectify the situation. After several years of trying to sire a son, Brian asked his first wife to help with her magic. She offered to do so with an eagerness that made him suspicious, and he warned her that if Fiona should suffer any ill consequences from the magic, he would not hesitate to painfully kill the woman. Then he brought her the things she asked for, and secretly gave Fiona the resulting potion.
“Within two months she was pregnant, and the laird was delirious with joy. But his happiness soured when Fiona became deathly ill in her fifth month. It was only then he realized that the black woman had increased his hopes so that they should be dashed all the harder by losing both mother and child.
“In a fury he beat the woman, demanding that she use her powers to reverse the magic and bring Fiona back to health. She told him that the magic had gone too far to save both—that he could have either the mother or the child. Brian continued to beat her, but she was adamant—one or the other.
“It must have been a hard choice, but he finally chose to let the child live.” Maxwell cleared his throat. “There was a great deal of pressure on him, as on any nobleman, to leave an heir, so we can’t criticize him too harshly for his decision. At any rate, the witch was true to her word. The child was born, but under rather . . . bizarre circumstances.”
Maxwell paused and looked at McCormack, as if for permission to proceed.
“Well?” said George, angry with himself for the way his voice shook in the sudden silence. “Don’t stop now, Maxwell, you’re coming to the exciting part.” He had wanted the forced levity to relax him, but instead it made him feel impatient and foolish. He tried in vain to keep his gaze from the pelt fixed to the door. It had been difficult enough when it was simply the skin of a nonentity. But now that it had an identity, it was twice as horrifying, twice as fascinating. He wondered what her name was.
Maxwell went on, ignoring George’s comment. “Fiona McCormack died in her seventh month of pregnancy. But the child lived.”
“Born prematurely then? Convenient.”
“No,” answered the solicitor quietly. “The child came to term. He was born in the ninth month.”
“But . . .” George felt disoriented, as if all the world was a step ahead of him. “How?”
“The black woman. She kept Fiona alive.”
“I thought you said she was dead.”
“She was. It was an artificial life, preserved by sorcery, or, as we would think today, by some primitive form of science civilization has not yet discovered. Call it what you will, no heart beat, no breath stirred, but Fiona McCormack lived, and was somehow able to nourish her child in utero.”
“But that’s absurd! A fetus needs . . . life, its respiratory and circulatory system depends on its mother’s!” He laughed, a sharp, quick bark. “You’re having me on.”
“God damn you, George, shut up!” The old man’s words exploded like a shell, and sent him into a fit of coughing blood-black phlegm, which he spit on the floor. He rested for a moment, breathing heavily, then raised his massive head to look into George’s eyes. “You be silent. And at the end of the story, at the end, then you laugh if you wish.”
“I don’t know how it occurred, George,” said Maxwell, “but it has been sworn to by the sixteenth laird and his servant, as has everything I’ve told you. You shall see further evidence later.” He took a deep breath and plunged on.
“She gave birth to the child, and it suckled at his dead mother’s breast for nearly a year, drawing sustenance from a cup that was never filled. A short time after the birth, Brian McCormack, with his own hands, flayed his first wife alive, and tanned the hide himself. He must have been quite mad by then. As you can see, he worked with extreme care.”
He was right, George thought. For all of the abomination’s hideousness, it was extraordinarily done, as if a surgeon had cut the body from head to toe in a neat cross section, like a plastic anatomical kit he had once seen. George looked at Maxwell and his father, who were both staring quietly at the mortal tapestry on the door. It seemed that the story was ended.
“That’s it, then,” George said, with only a trace of mockery. “That’s the legend.” He turned to his father with pleading eyes. “Is that all that’s kept us in a state of fear from cradle to grave? That’s become as legendary as the silkie or the banshee? Dear God, is the Cairnwell Horror only a black skin nailed to a cellar door?”
The expressions of the two men in the lantern light added years to their faces. For a second George thought his father was already dead, a living corpse like the sixteenth Lady Cairnwell, doomed to an eternity of haunting the dreams of McCormack children.
“There’s more,” said Maxwell, in such a way that George knew immediately that they had not been looking at the door as much as what was behind it.
Maxwell fumbled in the pocket of his suit coat and withdrew a large iron key, which he handed to McCormack. The old man hobbled to the massive door and fitted the key into a keyhole barely visible in the dim light. It rattled, then turned slowly, and McCormack pressed against the iron-and-oak panel. The door did not move, and the dying man leaned tiredly against it. Maxwell added his weight to the task. Though George knew he should have helped, he could not bring himself to touch the tarry carcass the older men seemed to be obscenely caressing. The door began to move with a shriek of angry hinges, and George thought of a wide and hungry mouth with teeth of iron straps, and wondered what it had eaten and how long ago. Then the smell hit him, and he reeled back.
It was the worst smell he had ever known, worse than the sour tang of open sewers, the sulfur-rich fumes of rotten eggs, worse even than when he had been a boy and found that long-dead stag, swarming with maggots. He would have vomited, but there was nothing left in his stomach to bring up.
His father and Maxwell picked up their lanterns. “Do you want to come with us,” Maxwell asked, “or would you rather watch from here at first?”
George was impressed by Maxwell’s objectivity. It was as if the man were viewing the situation far outside, watching a shocker on the telly. George wished he could have felt the same way. “I’ll come,” he said, and jutted his weak chin forth like a brittle lance.
Holding the lanterns high, the three entered the chamber. It was a small room six meters square. A rough-hewn round table with a single straight-backed chair was to their right as they entered, another chair, less stern in design, to their left. It was the bed, however, that dominated the room, a massive oaken piece with a huge carved headboard and high footboard, over which George could not see from the door. Maxwell and McCormack moved to either side of the bed, and the old man beckoned for his son to join him.
The woman in the bed reminded George of the mummies he had seen in the British Museum. The skin was the yellow of dirty chalk, furrowed with wrinkles so deep they would always remain in darkness. The same sickly shade sullied the hair, which spread over the pillow fanlike, a faded invitation to a lover now dust. She wore a night-gown of white lace, and her clawed fingers interlocked over her flattened breasts, bony pencils clad in gloves of the sheerest silk. She h
ad been dead a long, long time.
“The Lady Fiona,” whispered McCormack huskily. “Your five-times great-grandmother, George.”
Again George felt relief. If this was the ultimate, if this dried and preserved corpse was the final horror, then he could still laugh and walk in the world without bearing the invisible curse all McCormacks before him bore. He held his lantern higher to study the centuries-old face more closely. Then he saw the eyes.
He had expected to see either wrinkled flaps of skin that had once been eyelids, or shriveled gray raisins nesting loosely in open sockets. What he had not expected was two blue eyes that gazed at the smoke-blackened ceiling, insentient but alive.
“She’s . . . alive,” he said half-wittedly, so overcome by horror that he no longer cared what impression he gave.
“Yes,” said his father. “So she has been since the spell was put on her.” George felt the old man’s arm drape itself around his shoulder. “The sixteenth laird wanted her undead misery ended when the son was weaned, but the witch said it could not be done. He tortured her—in this very room—but she would not, possibly could not, relent. It was then that he killed her by skinning. He kept his wife upstairs as long as he could, but the . . . odor grew too strong, and the servants started to whisper. So he brought her down here, and here she has been ever since, caught in a prison between life and death.
“She neither speaks nor moves, nor has she since she died. Giving birth and feeding her child were her only acts, and even then, records the document, she was like an automaton.”
George’s head felt stuffed with water, and his words came out as thick as a midnight dream. “What . . . document?”
“The record Brian McCormack left,” answered his father, “and that the servant signed as witness. The history of the event and the charge put on every laird of Cairnwell since—to preserve the tale from outside ears and to care for his poor wife ‘until such time as God sees fit to take her unto Him.’ It is the duty of the eldest son, such as I was, and such as you are, George.”