Through a Glass Darkly

by Bill Hussey

  The Bishop visited twice, picking his way down the ward, his hand to his mouth, as if the microbes from a few ragged coughs might carry a pestilence of biblical proportions. He gave me strict instructions that I was not to discharge myself until the doctors saw fit. Then he told me that a temporary replacement had been found to take up the reins in Crow Haven. Father Christopher Garret would stay for as long as was necessary.

  These injunctions washed over me. I had remembered the shadow on the cabin floor and the strange spectacle of Peter Malahyde peeling skin from his face. As soon as I had the strength to lift the receiver, I requested the telephone. The operator told me that Malahyde’s number was ex-directory. Lies about a sick relative would not budge her.

  I lay still all night while, inside my head, I twisted and turned. Logical thought was made all but impossible by an undefined fear that locked the gears of my brain. What had Mendicant done to Peter Malahyde? What was being whispered to him in his dreams? I should have told Peter everything at our first meeting. I hadn’t, of course, because I was of Crow Haven. I had become indoctrinated with that firm conviction that outsiders would not appreciate the reality of the evil that abided there. I should have realised, however, from my own swift introduction to Mendicant, that the Darkness does not always creep slowly into one’s consciousness. Sometimes, almost as soon as an outsider enters the village, he feels the hand of it on his shoulder. Hears the whisper of its agents – of whom Mendicant was only the latest – until after a short, intense inculcation one was ready to believe impossible things. Peter Malahyde was already of Crow Haven. My reluctance to expose the heart of the place to him had delivered him to Mendicant, weak and undefended.

  In the bleakness of these thoughts, an idea came to me. It was the middle of the night, but I managed to convince the nurse that the call was urgent. She wheeled in the telephone and left me. I allowed it to ring for some time.

  ‘Hello? Old Priory,’ said a weary voice.

  ‘Father Garret? This is Asher Brody …’

  ‘Father Brody? Are you all right? Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Listen, I’m rather anxious to contact Mr Malahyde on a private matter.’

  ‘The man who went with you to the hospital? You want to speak to him tonight?’

  ‘Perhaps you could pay a visit tomorrow? Tell him we must talk. It’s a confessional matter. Ask him if he’ll be good enough to visit me.’

  ‘Certainly, if it will set your mind at rest. I’ll see him tomorrow morning.’ Garret sounded uncertain. ‘Well, goodnight.’

  Sleep was difficult. I seemed to be highly tuned into the motions and workings of the hospital: the whirring machinery, the whispers of the nurses, the calls and croaks of my fellow invalids. I was irritable all the next morning, ignoring the chatter of the old lady in the next bed and passing back, without comment, the endless snapshots of grimy-faced grandchildren. At a little after one, I called Garret again.

  ‘Have you seen Peter yet?’ I asked, as soon as I heard the click of the line.

  ‘Father Brody? Erm. Well, yes. I’ve just got back, actually.’

  ‘How did he seem.’

  ‘Seem? He was fine. Said you shouldn’t worry about that chat you were having. He’s cleared his conscience. He also said not to worry about the vase.’

  ‘Vase?’

  ‘The vase you knocked over in the kitchen. When you had your attack. A joke, I suppose … Are you there, Father?’

  ‘He told you I had my attack in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he look all right to you?’

  ‘What is this all about, Father? I think you’re worrying yourself needlessly. Perhaps your recollection of your last meeting with Mr Malahyde is a little skew-whiff.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘He does have a nasty case of eczema or some such,’ Garret said, in a throwaway tone. ‘Quite noticeable. Told me not to mention it, said it might upset you. Can’t think what he meant by that …’

  After nine days’ bed rest, I was allowed to leave hospital. Father Garret drove me back to Crow Haven.

  He seemed a conscientious fellow, about forty or so years of age. A very practical sort of Christian: quiet, hardworking, devoted. I got the impression that he viewed God as some all-powerful librarian, keeping the sins of Man neatly indexed, apportioning fines for overdue acts of devotion and for any dog-eared souls returned to Him. There wasn’t much spirituality to Garret, but a good deal of humble service. On the ride home, I asked him about his past. Like myself, he had been trained in a seminary from an early age and, after a few novice posts, he had taken a parish somewhere in North Wales. I read between the tight lines he drew that his congregation had not warmed to his stilted and distant ministry. He had come here at the request of the Bishop and would stay as long as he was needed.

  (As it turned out, Garret remained in Crow Haven long after my final, foolhardy involvement with the Malahyde family. After my convalescence, the Bishop insisted that I was not strong enough to see to all parish duties myself. It was nonsense, of course. There was not enough work for two men. I wondered later whether Garret had reported a few of my eccentricities to the Bishop, and, between them, they had decided that it would be best for him to remain by my side.

  It is very strange, for Garret is the only person I know who seems immune to the Darkness. I have seen many people come to Crow Haven down the years. In some cases, like Peter Malahyde and myself, the atmosphere of the place catches hold at once. In others, such as Geraldine Pryce for instance, there is a slow osmosis. Geraldine has never seen anything in the village that defies all rational explanation, yet she now knows, by instinct, what Crow Haven is. Christopher Garret, however, has never succumbed to the evil that walks at his elbow. Perhaps his lack of spiritual imagination has saved him).

  As we pulled up at the Old Priory, I told him I might take a stroll and maybe pop in on the Malahydes.

  ‘You should be resting,’ Garret said, helping me out of the car. ‘In any case, Mr Malahyde is not at home.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Abroad. Three-week holiday. I saw him in the village yesterday. His skin complaint is getting much worse. His doctor thought it might be stress related. Though what kind of stress a wealthy man like that can be under, I don’t know. Anyway, they’ve gone to the Caribbean or some such.’

  His doctor had recommended it. A strange coincidence that the Malahydes should leave the day I returned from hospital.

  A month passed before I saw Peter again. My convalescence was now well and truly over and I was once more active about the village.

  As I left the Old Priory, en route to the post office, Peter and Anne passed by in their car. Neither waved. I wasted no time in following them. I was breathing hard when I came out of the elm-tunnel and approached the house. I hammered on the door, waited a few seconds, and hammered again. Anne Malahyde, still beautiful, but tired and almost bent double under the weight of her unborn child, opened the door.

  ‘Is Peter here?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to see anybody.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s urgent.’

  I pushed by her and went directly to the old library. Perhaps it was a trick of the light: the paintwork of the door seemed ever more cracked and peeling, as if years, rather than weeks, had passed since I had last seen it. I knocked and entered.

  Peter Malahyde sat in Mendicant’s red leather chair, his frame thin and crumpled. His face shone, though the only light in the room came from the cold autumn sun that yawned through the little windows.

  ‘Come in, Asher,’ he said. ‘And close the door. I can’t bear the light.’

  Fifty

  Brody’s Story

  BUNDLE 2 –

  AFTER MENDICANT – 1976 – 1985

  ‘What’s happened to you, Peter?’

  ‘Change … change inside a dream.’

  As he spoke, grains of dead skin fell from the corners of his mouth. I could not know then ho
w far the transformation would go, but already there were signs pointing to the final phases of this living decomposition. His lips were cracked and close-knit sores punctuated his skin. The arrangement of lesions on his face was no coincidence. I knew at once what I was seeing: a slow re-enactment of the tearing apart of Dr Mendicant on the person of Peter Malahyde. In this case, however, the ripping beaks were invisible and worked with a cruel leisureliness.

  ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’ I asked. ‘The man who used to own this house.’

  ‘He came to me in my dreams,’ Peter whispered. ‘Spoke to my fears. Promised me …’

  He held a raw hand up to the light.

  ‘Like Job, he said, you must first be put to the test.’

  A breeze pushed against the library door, opening it a crack. A spear of light cut in from the landing.

  ‘He made a dream seem possible.’

  ‘And dreams are all he can give you, Peter,’ I said, leaning toward him.

  ‘No. He hands out nightmares, too. He has been with me every day since the dream. No-one else can see him. He whispers to me in the night. He watches me from the shadows.’

  ‘Listen,’ I urged, ‘you must tell me what you wished for.’

  ‘I wished … I wished to put time in a bottle,’ Peter laughed. ‘To stopper time in a bottle. To make it run backwards. I wished for youth.’

  ‘He can’t give you those things. His only interest is to find a child. He has no use for a man.’

  ‘Oh, I have my use. I am his conduit. He speaks plainly to me now, though it’s fair to say he never actually lied. Just left a detail out here and there. I will be young. Young and unable to touch her … Unable to know her … How did he make me agree to it, Asher?’

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘Can you help me? Can you take it back?’

  ‘I can try. If you tell me.’

  ‘No. No, I won’t. It wasn’t real …’

  ‘You’re being torn apart, Peter. Inch by inch, you’re being stripped away. That’s real. It’s how I saw him die.’

  ‘And how Peter must die,’ he said. ‘He has chosen the path; he must share the fate.’

  ‘Is it you speaking?’ I said, breathless, suddenly aware of all the physical weaknesses that my illness had inflicted on me. ‘You – you have deceived him. He thought it was a dream. He thought … He didn’t know what he was agreeing to.’

  ‘Poor Asher. Time has not been kind, has it? You speak of dreams? It is in dreams that we are at our most honest. He has pledged his word and he will be rewarded.’

  Peter whimpered and started scratching at his already raw skin. I snatched his hands away before he tore his face to the bone. The boils that hemmed his thinning hair broke out and wept. At that moment, I felt something slip out of the room. Perhaps it was Elijah Mendicant. Perhaps it was God.

  There is little point in picking over the details of those last two months. With each passing day, Peter grew less intelligible and, physically at least, more like the corpse of Dr Mendicant that I had cut down and buried in the clearing. After our conversation in the library, Peter became very withdrawn. I could coax no more from him regarding the bargain he had made. I guessed that, in those weeks during my convalescence and Peter’s absence from Crow Haven, there had been a period of transition. A time during which the Doctor’s hold over him had grown stronger until it could not be prised away. Now Mendicant didn’t even bother to prejudice Peter’s mind against me.

  In those first few weeks, when Peter was still well enough to move about, I took him to a number of holy places. We prayed, within the sight of blessed relics, that his affliction might be lifted. I scoured all the books on sympathetic illness and possession I could find, and we tried several rites of exorcism. None was effective. I wondered whether it was because the decay had not been forced upon Peter. This supernatural infection endured because a part of him still wanted the reward Mendicant had promised. There was only one way to break the effectiveness of that enticement. Anne Malahyde had to make what reassurances she could to her husband. If she could persuade him that his feelings of inadequacy were imaginary, then that part of him that yearned for renewed youth might die. But here was the problem: as the illness progressed, and Peter became increasingly unsightly, his young wife would not go near him. Worse still, by the time he was bedridden, she had insisted on him being cared for in the unused part of the house: Mendicant’s old library.

  I sat with him through the long nights. Often he would scream for Anne until the nurse quietened him with a cocktail of drugs. In the early weeks, while he could still speak, Geraldine Pryce paid a visit. She was very brave. I had hoped she might, in time, help me convince Anne to see Peter. As it turned out the ‘disease’ worked through him much quicker than any of us thought possible.

  It was in the early hours of 6th January 1985, the anniversary of my arrival in Crow Haven, that Peter gave up the ghost. Leading up to that day, I had little chance to converse with him. His condition had deteriorated to such an extent that there was always a nurse or the live-in doctor on hand. Conversation was now nigh on impossible anyway. Peter’s vocal cords were peppered with cankers.

  I was dozing in the bedside chair when I felt a cool, fleshless hand in mine.

  ‘Ash-her, way-ka …’

  ‘Peter? Jesus, how …’

  Since the windows had been bricked over, at Peter’s determined insistence, he had not been able to sit up unaided. Now he was perched on the edge of the bed, his hand twitching spasmodically in mine. The nurse, who had been half-asleep, bolted awake as she heard Peter’s voice.

  ‘What’s happening? What …. Oh, my …’

  ‘Get Dr Stoker,’ I told her. ‘Go.’

  She hesitated, looking from me to the wasted figure. Peter turned his torso towards her. To my horror, his head began to rock from side-to-side. Something in that see-saw motion must have decided her. She ran from the room.

  Peter turned back to face me. His jaw strained. The mouth hole in his bandage mask opened wide. It was Peter who spoke, his tones as they had been before the rot took hold.

  ‘This is the end, Brody. The end of one life, the beginning of another …’

  ‘Peter, you must tell me what you promised him.’

  I felt my thumb, which was pressing lightly against Peter’s palm, push through the papery skin. The fingers cracked and splintered. I cried out, but Peter paid no heed.

  ‘I’ve tried to take back whatever promise I made,’ he said. ‘He told me I could put an end to it: if I truly did not want what he offered. But he will take the boy.’

  Pinprick bloodstains broke out on the bandages. Little tributaries ran into each other so that, within moments, the mask was etched with a grid of shaky red lines.

  ‘What boy? Peter, you must tell me …’

  ‘Be vigilant, Asher. The time is some years away. You must wait. You must watch.’

  Blood seeped from beneath the layers of dressing. The mouth opened wider and the screaming started. He clawed at the bandage, exposing raw musculature, veins and cartilage. What I could see of his face resembled one of those anatomical drawings of a partially flayed human head.

  I sat, riveted, repulsed, but unable to flee or to help the dying man. It was then that I heard the scratching upon the sills outside. Hoarse cawing filled the room. It was as if the crows had broken through the bricks and were tearing at the bandages, for now the remaining dressing was ripped from Peter’s face, but not by his own hand. A great, lateral tear exposed both eyes, rolled white in their sockets.

  I just about managed to find my voice:

  ‘Peter, please tell me, what did you promise?’

  ‘A trinity. A dark trinity. My boy …’

  He fell back onto the bed, clutching at his throat. The screams died. His head stopped twisting. His hand twitched once more and then lay still on the counterpane.

  Simon was born on 1st February 1985, less than a month after his father’s death. In the
early days, I tried to keep up a friendly acquaintance with Anne Malahyde. Her own consuming guilt and grief, however, forbade any lasting relationship. A few weeks after the funeral, she asked me to stop coming to the house. That was the last I saw of her for many years.

  To begin with I also saw very little of Simon. A nanny would sometimes take him for a walk and, as soon as I saw the pram pass my study window, I would rush out and inquire after the child. (The nannies, by the way, never stayed for long. Often they would leave in the middle of the night without giving notice). He was a bonny baby and he grew into a happy child. I was filled with hope by his carefree ordinariness. Ordinary I say, and yet surely extraordinary. How did he manage to develop into so normal a little boy inside that house? I thought of him as a resilient bud, flourishing in a desolate wasteland.

  As time went on, we got to know each other pretty well. I made it my business to walk him, each day, between home and school. No-one in the village ever commented on my behaviour. No doubt they trusted that I had good reason to act as I did. Father Garret, who stayed on despite my reassurances to the Bishop that I was quite well, was generally too busy with the minutiae of office to notice my comings and goings. Simon never asked why I took a special interest in him, and I did not tell him that I had known his father. I grew to like the boy very much. Indeed, I might say I loved him.

  Some months after his tenth birthday, they came for him.

  Fifty-one

  ‘Okay, I think I get the picture.’ Jack laid the bundle on the floor.

  ‘There is one final chapter of the story,’ Brody said. ‘The soul-rape of Simon Malahyde.’

  ‘Look, I understand why you think what happened back then is important, but first I have to get what’s happening now straight in my head.’