“Locked out, Master, ’ee locked me out … found out, powerful ’ee be. Oi tried to contact … oi tried, but too far, Master … oi were too far off …”
Royston Wentworth clenched his fists and hammered them against the invisible wall. The dull thud gradually gave way to a terrible cracking sound, as though a brick or rock wall were splintering, then there was a mighty crash as the tall, black-clad figure stepped into the room. Several other men were creeping along the passage; they stopped at the doorway, seemingly unwilling, or perhaps lacking the courage, to cross the barrier.
Royston Wentworth stood looking down at the bound figure that cringed in the chair.
“An ass has more wisdom in its head than thou,” he stated.
“Yes, he wasn’t very bright,” Francis agreed. “A spare key would have saved you a lot of trouble.”
The arrogant eyes turned slowly in his direction; the thin lips were parted in a mirthless grin.
“I will pluck your soul from your body and toss it down upon the dark plains, where it will be hunted by the hounds of death.”
“There again,” Francis continued, “you aren’t all that smart.”
“Try to talk English,” Fred instructed. “He hasn’t a clue what you’re on about.”
“I said,” Francis shouted, “your head has lost its wisdom. Oh, damn, I can’t talk this jargon. The idea was for your souls to come across, not your flipping bodies. You’re on alien ground, son. You’re in my territory. Get it? Savvy?”
“’Course he doesn’t,” Fred protested. “He probably thinks you’re taking the mickey.”
It was not clear if Royston Wentworth understood what was being said or not, but his intention was unmistakable. He was moving towards Francis, his arms outstretched, the fingers slightly curved, and he was growling, deep down in his throat. Francis sidestepped, then began to retreat; he slid a small table across the floor so that it bumped against the ledge of the approaching giant, causing him to stumble. Wentworth recovered at once, kicked the table to one side, then continued his relentless advance. Fred picked the table up and threw it at the broad back. It struck Wentworth between the shoulder blades and instantly he turned with incredible speed and made for the petrified girl.
“Move!” Francis shouted. “Run!”
His warning was unheeded. A hand that looked as if it might have been hewn out of granite swung round and slashed across Fred’s left cheek. She went hurling backwards, bounced off a chair, then collapsed on to the floor. Francis forgot his cautious tactics and went in like a boxer going all out for a knock down. He slammed a combination of punches into the hard belly, then executed a perfect upper cut to the jutting chin. He repeated the process three times. Finally, he rubbed his raw knuckles and looked up.
Wentworth’s face wore a derisive grin.
“Bloody hell!” Francis swore as he tried to back away, but the great hand found his throat and he was being forced down to his knees, while the ridiculous thought flashed across his mind: “Is this the story where the baddie wins?”
Consciousness was dissolving into a bottomless pit; his soul was preparing to depart for an unknown destination, when a brown object flew across the room and smashed against Wentworth’s face. The steel fingers were jerked from Francis’ throat and he sank to the floor, gasping for breath.
Wentworth was screaming; his hands were clasped over the cut, inflamed face. Reggie Smith looked down at Francis and shrugged.
“What else could I do? I threw the teapot at him.”
Francis came gradually back to life and gazed upon the writhing giant with speechless astonishment. Not until he had clambered to his feet was he able to give utterance.
“The cup that cheers,” he said slowly. “The lifesaving brew. Reggie, you’re a bloody marvel. Hand me that small table.”
Reggie obeyed and Francis crashed the table down on Wentworth’s head, just as the giant was about to take a more active interest in the proceedings.
“Sleep,” he advised, “and wake up in a more depressing yesterday.”
Wentworth acceded to this request by crashing to the floor, where he lay like a felled oak waiting for the jack-saw. Francis began to straighten the prostrate figure as Fred climbed slowly to her feet and rubbed the ugly red weal that marred her left cheek.
“Rope,” he said, snapping his fingers, “curtain cords, nylons, your knickers—anything.”
After a hurried scramble, which Reggie watched with an appreciative eye, Fred handed Francis a pair of sheer nylons which he used to secure the giant’s ankles and wrists. He then straightened up and surveyed his handiwork with a certain justified pride.
“Number one ungodly laid low. Now to put him back where he belongs. Reggie, do you feel strong?”
“No.”
“Good. Catch hold of his legs, while I take a firm grip of his manly shoulders.”
Reggie displayed a certain reluctance to lay hands on the enemy, particularly as four sinister-looking individuals were watching the operation from the open doorway. They had not moved since Wentworth had invaded the sitting-room, but were now showing signs of disquiet as it became evident their leader was being returned unto them. Reggie looked fearfully back over one shoulder.
“What about—those men?” he whispered.
“Don’t worry your little head,” Francis advised, then shouted to Fred: “Switch the television on.”
“Which channel?” Fred enquired.
“Independent. A few commercials should put the fear of the devil in them. They do me.”
Slowly, with great effort, they dragged Wentworth towards the open doorway. The silent audience retreated a few steps and one shook his head.
“That’s interesting,” Francis observed, “they don’t seem keen on having laughing-boy back. That’s too bad. Back he goes, whether they like it or not.”
It proved impossible to throw the body through the doorway for the simple reason, it was too long. Wentworth’s weight negated any idea of tossing him in head first, and Francis was coming to a reluctant conclusion when signs of extreme agitation among the silent audience made him look round.
The television screen was depicting a monkey dressed in 18th-century costume. It was drinking from a teacup.
“There’s nothing I like better than a cup of Rosy Lee,” said the monkey.
The four men turned on their heels and raced down the passage. Their flight was followed by the sound of many doors opening and closing. Then silence.
“You know,” Francis said, taking a firmer grip on Wentworth’s shoulders, “I never realised before the true virtue of tea. Right, let’s get him in there.”
After much straining, heaving and grunting, they deposited their burden upon the stone floor, then looked around. Reggie was shaking like a jelly in an earthquake.
“We’re …” he stopped. The situation robbed him of words.
“In the 18th century,” Francis nodded. “In the Clarence old prison, and heaven help us if the bridge disintegrates before we get back. Still, it would be a shame if we didn’t have a look round.”
Beyond the doorway the sitting-room and the colour television was indisputably 20th-century, but on either side and behind, the distant past was as real as Monday morning. Francis opened one of the doors and entered a cell which was bare save for a plank-bed and an iron bucket. He went back into the passage and was greeted by a terrified Reggie, who was gazing longingly at the cosy sitting-room.
“I think we ought to get back. There are those—men, they keep looking round the corner.”
Even then a fearful face was peering at them from round the nearest corner, but when Francis shouted: “Boo!” quite loudly, it instantly disappeared.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he admitted reluctantly, “but it would have been nice to explore a little longer, particularly if I fetched a camera. Think what the Sunday papers would pay for a photograph of yer actual 18th century.”
“Francis,” Fred called, “come quickly. Gertr
ude is playing up and I can’t do anything with her.”
They tore back into the sitting-room and there was the possessed Gertrude staring at the television screen with obvious terror.
“Hasn’t she ever seen a TV before?” Francis asked Reggie. “The real Gertrude, I mean.”
“She certainly never saw ours, and I don’t suppose her old mother owns one.”
“Then there’s no memory to draw upon,” Francis remarked thoughtfully. “Turn over to the other side.”
Fred pushed a button and there was an instant picture of a big man hitting a little man with all his strength. Gertrude/Wyatt screamed.
“We will put you in yon box,” Francis promised, “and you will be hit by a big man for all eternity.”
The camera moved in to a close-up of the little man’s face. It looked like a lump of raw meat.
“Back to the other channel,” Francis ordered.
A man was running towards the camera; suddenly, a shot rang out and a nasty red stain appeared on the man’s shirtfront. He made an interesting gurgling sound and crashed to the pavement.
“We will make you small, shrink you smaller than small, then put you in yon box,” Francis informed the speechless Gertrude/Wyatt, “for that is the gateway to Hell … Turn over to BBC2, Fred.”
The screech of brakes, the roar of guns, the thud of fists on bare flesh, followed by an ear-splitting scream. Something grey, a wisp of mist, streaked towards the open doorway and instantly the passage vanished, to be replaced by the familiar hall. Francis wiped his brow.
“Never thought it would work. Lucky they chose a simple mind. Any sign of the real Gertrude, Fred?”
“No need to worry.” Fred was untying the confining cords. “As soon as she wakes up, the rightful spirit will return. Just as ours does when we wake each morning.”
“Has—has the bridge gone for good?” Reggie asked, looking anxiously at the empty hall.
“Sure thing. The anchorman has belted back across the river. It might be as well if you did some alterations to the hall. Replaced the floorboards, did a spot of redecoration, so that the vibrations are changed. But I think your house will behave itself from now on. Ah, I see our wanderer has returned. Best turn the television off.”
Gertrude opened her eyes. She looked slowly round, then up at Reggie Smith.
“Mr. Smith, sir, I’s ’ad a funny dream. I was walking round the ’ouse and nobody took notice of me.”
“Now you must go home, Gertrude, for night has fallen.”
She rose from the chair, looking fearfully at the overhead lamp, then at the drawn curtains. “My mum says I’m not to be out after dark. And me asleep in your best armchair, sir.”
“Why mustn’t you be out after dark?” Francis asked slyly. “Afraid of ghosts.”
“No, I doesn’t believe in that nonsense. It be the men with evil in their ’earts, that do prowl around in the darkness.”
Francis smiled.
“May wisdom always be with you, Gertrude.”
*
They crowded round the car expressing gratitude, the women cooing, the men doing their best to be hearty, their minds already forgetting. It was Betty Smith who asked the final, so far unanswered question.
“Miss Masters … Fred, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but surely your initials are F.M.?”
“That’s right.” Fred climbed into the seat next to Francis.
“Then … why the letters E.V. that are so beautifully embroidered on your dress? What do they stand for?”
The car began to glide slowly away; Fred’s voice came back to them, clear, untroubled: the voice of Helen calling over the walls of Troy.
“Ex-Virgin.”
Reuben Calloway and Roderick Shea
VULTURES GATHER
by BRIAN MOONEY
Reuben Calloway was born in 1928. Abandoned at birth, he lived in a series of foster homes until adopted at three years of age by widowed archaeologist Simeon Calloway. He subsequently travelled the world with his father, who encouraged an early interest in the occult developed in Egypt and India. After working for the British Intelligence Corps, serving in West Berlin in the early 1950s, he accepted a position with Southdown University in Hampshire, where he prefers research and investigation into the outré to teaching.
Father Roderick Shea was born in 1940. He first met Reuben Calloway in 1967 and his life has never been the same again. He has some psychic gifts (as did several of his Irish ancestors) but has never been happy about this.
Brian Mooney describes Calloway as being “Something of a scruffy Orson Welles, with all the arrogance but without the charm.” He made his first appearance as a minor character in an unpublished Lovecraftian story that the author never bothered to rewrite, and his name is mentioned in ‘The Guardians of the Gates’ (Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos #2, 1977). The first story to properly feature Calloway and Shea, ‘The Affair at Durmamny Hall’, appeared in the special Occult Detectives issue of Kadath (July, 1982). Calloway is by himself, on the trail of a European werewolf, in ‘The Waldteufel Affair’ (The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, 1994), and the pair returned in ‘The Tomb of Priscus’ (Shadows Over Innsmouth, 1994), in which they discover a Roman archaeological site is being used as a gateway to bring back the Ancient Ones.
REUBEN CALLOWAY, REPLETE with rich food and vintage wine, was only slightly surprised when his host interrupted sleepy contentment by announcing: “I have good reason to believe that I’m going to be murdered and I’d like to ask your help.” He had half-expected something like this. After, there was no such thing as a free lunch—or as in this case, a free country weekend with all meals thrown in.
Calloway had always enjoyed the good things of life when he could get them and the dinner he had just eaten—from the paté with melba toast to the overgenerous portion of syllabub followed by a selection of cheeses—had been a glutton’s delight. But he did not know Sir Isaac Pryce well—he had only briefly met the baronet during a somewhat pompous university ceremony—and he had wondered why he should be invited to the millionaire’s home.
Still, Calloway wasn’t proud and his stipend as a university reader didn’t stretch to much in the way of good living. He had accepted the summons, had cancelled several tutorials with students both brilliant and hopeless, and had journeyed to the remote Yorkshire mansion as quickly as his creaking old pre-war car would allow.
Following pudding, the two men had gone from the dining room into Pryce’s library where they sat by a huge log fire. A spacious octagonal room, the library was furnished with floor-to-ceiling cases crammed with all manner of books, ranging from sturdy volumes bound in beautiful leather to a collection of well-thumbed paperbacks.
While they waited for Elmore, Pryce’s butler, to serve coffee, Calloway explored the bookshelves. A devoted book-man, he revelled in eclectic collections such as the one he found here, a collection which encompassed almost every subject that a right-minded person (that is, someone like himself) would find interesting and entertaining.
There were books on philosophy, ancient and modern, ranging from Democritus through the Athenian and Platonic schools to Hegel, Kierkegaard and Russell. There were classics in no particular order: tightly packed collections of Dickens and Scott squeezed an unfortunate Jane Austen between them while a slightly more relaxed George Eliot leaned for support against Wells and Kipling. The Brontës were more aloof, sharing a top shelf only with Collins. The French and Russians were well represented, Dumas, Zola and Balzac intermingling with Tolstoy and Turgenev.
There were works on medicine and astronomy, botany and entomology. Most of Eleanor Omerod’s books were there together with a particularly fine edition of the Reverend Wood’s Illustrated Natural History which Calloway recognised as being worth several months of his salary. Another case contained several different versions of The Thousand and One Nights. Not only were there the more common Burton and Madrus and Mathers translations but also, Calloway noted, an English ve
rsion of the early Galland edition together with Torrens’s 1838 book and Paynes’s collection from 1882. In the same cabinet, a tired-looking Boccaccio swapped quips with that jolly vulgarian Rabelais.
There was humour: Wodehouse, Thurber, Belloc, Thorne Smith. And crime fiction. The near-fascist Bulldog Drummond vied for honours with a debonair Saint, prissy Poirot, supercilious Holmes and a regiment of their like. There was Golden Age SF, and one bookcase was devoted entirely to supernatural fiction. It amused Calloway to see among the latter almost every one of the cheaply printed anthologies issued by various Fleet Street newspapers during the Thirties. Excellent collections all, but many wealthy persons might have shunned them as being beneath their pockets’ dignity. Then there were editions of Stoker, M. R. James, the Americans Poe and Bierce and Lovecraft, many others.
What pleased Calloway most was the fact that all of these books appeared to be well used and not just installed on the shelves as furnishings. “You really are a man after my own heart, I think,” Calloway said as he returned to his chair by the fire.
“Here, have a look at these,” the baronet said, almost shyly as if wary of being thought trivial. “They are my very favourites, for they were the first books that I chose for myself as a school prize.” He passed over two books which he had picked up from a coffee-table.
Calloway turned the books over. Respectively, they were titled The Boy’s Book of General Knowledge and The Boy’s Book of Puzzles and Brain-teasers. Inside they were inscribed: To Isaac Pryce, for exceptional effort—June 1904.
“You couldn’t better those books for content and entertainment,” Pryce said. His smile was charming and proud, as if he were ten or eleven again.
“I agree,” Calloway replied gently. “Thank you for showing them to me.”
Sir Isaac Pryce was a strange man in some ways, Calloway had decided earlier. The millionaire had been born wealthy through various inheritances and had made a substantial second fortune in Africa; he was obviously well educated and well read; yet much of the time he acted the Victorian dinosaur or vulgar nouveau riche character, as if he inhabited a short story by Somerset Maughm. For instance, he had told Calloway—in fact, practically bragged—that he spoke no word of any foreign language. “There’s always someone around who speaks English,” he asserted, “And if not they’ll always understand English if it’s shouted loudly enough.”
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