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Robin Jarvis-Jax 01 Dancing Jax

Page 35

by Robin Jarvis


  “No, thanks.”

  “Then what are we doing in this hideous kitchen? Come along with me, Martin. Hurry – there’s a lot to see.”

  She left the kitchen and entered the private part of the guesthouse. Martin followed, noticing the subtle changes that took place whenever Evelyn was in residence. There were different photographs on the piano, including a large one of her and Bunty meeting the Queen after a Royal Variety Show, fresh flowers were arranged in porcelain vases that Gerald wouldn’t give houseroom to and a Tiffany lamp shone a warm glow over the wall.

  A large, black trunk was another foreign element in the room. Evelyn knelt before it and turned to Martin.

  “Gerald has his uses,” she began. “Before he departed this morning, I made him lug this old chest down from the attic. Before you see what it contains, allow me to explain…”

  She waved Martin to a seat – one of Gerald’s masculine leather armchairs that had been softened by draping a fringed shawl over it.

  “Has Gerald ever told you where his family came from?” Evelyn asked.

  “From round here, wasn’t it?”

  “Just so, and did he tell you what his grandparents did for a living, his grandmother in particular?”

  “Don’t think that ever came up. I don’t see how this is relevant…”

  Evelyn held up her hand. “You will,” she explained. “Indulge me a little, I beg you.” Resting her elbow on the lid of the trunk, she continued.

  “Before she was married, Gerald’s grandmother was in service. She was the upstairs maid in a grand house, owned by a very well-off country doctor – Bartholomew Fellows.”

  She let the name sink in before carrying on. “Imagine what this town was like, a hundred years ago,” she said. “A thriving little resort with good connections to London, not just by rail but steamer too. Doctor Bartholomew had a very successful practice in the capital before he came to settle here. But his wife died young, leaving him only one heir.”

  “Austerly!”

  “No, a clever little boy called Ezra. And then there was a scandal – the doctor remarried.”

  “Why was that so scandalous?”

  “Because he married one of his servants. No, not Gerald’s grandmother – the woman who was employed as nanny to little Ezra. In Victorian London society, such things simply were not done. It still raises eyebrows when that kind of thing happens today, so think how outraged people were back then. Doctor Bartholomew had no choice but to leave London altogether. He took his new bride and Ezra out to the Suffolk countryside, not far from Felixstowe, and that was when he discovered his new bride was not quite what she seemed.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The new Mrs Fellows, Nettie, was what was known in those days as a fallen woman. She already had a child of her own. She had been seduced by her previous employer and had kept the existence of the poor mite a complete secret by entrusting it to one of those disgusting baby farms – one of the grimmest places imaginable. They were squalid houses where old crones were paid to take in babies because society decreed it impossible for the mothers to keep them. They were terrible times. The shame and stigma of being an unmarried mother was the ruin of many. Women would lose their jobs and their homes if such secrets were discovered and so there was no choice but to pay these greedy hags to mind the baby for them and visit the little mites as often as they could.

  “Of course, those baby farmers weren’t interested in the welfare of their charges. They could have dozens of infants under their roof at any given time and drugged them with laudanum to keep them quiet. If the children didn’t sicken and die from neglect then they were starved to death or perished as a result of the powerful drugs stirred into their milk. It was nothing less than wholesale infanticide. Do you know, there were more laws about the keeping and mistreatment of livestock than there were for children. Anyone could become a baby farmer and advertise their services in the newspaper. Children had no rights at all. There’s Victorian values for you.”

  Her fingers tapped out a tune from HMS Pinafore on the lid of the trunk. Then she sang the words.

  A many years ago

  When I was young and charming

  As some of you may know

  I practised baby farming.

  She pursed her lips with displeasure and shuddered.

  “The infant that Nettie had put into the ‘care’, for want of a better word, of one of those foul people was called Austerly.”

  Martin sat up, but Evelyn had not finished; there was still much more to tell him.

  “When Doctor Bartholomew found out about Nettie’s secret, he was incensed and accused her of marrying him under false pretences, but somehow she managed to calm him. What a character she must have been and how she must have had him wrapped around her finger in those first years. Bartholomew forgave her and even raised the boy as his own, bringing him to Suffolk to grow up alongside Ezra. Then a year later Nettie bore him a daughter, Augusta.”

  Evelyn gazed at the colours and shapes the Tiffany shade threw across the wall. “That’s where Gerald’s grandmother came in,” she said. “She began working in the great house the doctor had bought near here and hated every moment of it.”

  “Why? Were they cruel to the servants?”

  “Not cruel, but extremely strange, as you’ll discover. It was a peculiar house. Bartholomew shelled out a considerable part of his fortune to remodel it in the high Gothic style he admired so much. But he was no architect and so it ended up an ugly, frightful place and the atmosphere within matched it perfectly. Nettie Fellows was never happy there, and her misery mounted with each passing season. She and Bartholomew grew apart and she eventually took to her bed and stayed in it for the rest of her life, never once moving from that room, until they came to carry her out. There were other macabre occurrences in that house and every year the shadows deepened.”

  “But what about Austerly?”

  Evelyn took a deep breath and stared down at the trunk.

  “When Gerald’s grandmother married his grandfather,” she said, “a year before Nettie died, in 1907, she was given this as a wedding present.”

  Evelyn lifted the heavy lid. It contained musty clothes. “A trunk full of cast-offs,” she announced. “Gerald’s grandfather was furious, but didn’t dare say anything and appear ungrateful. They were so poor you see and had to make their way in the world and couldn’t afford to insult the rich doctor in the big house. Anyway, he forbade Gerald’s grandmother ever to wear any of these hand-me-downs. It didn’t stop her looking at them though and that was how she came across this…”

  Evelyn reached into the trunk – delving under the Victorian day dresses and broken corsets – and brought out a large photograph album.

  “This may have been left in here by accident,” she said. “But I don’t think so. I think Nettie wanted someone else to see what her husband was really like.”

  She handed Martin the album and he glanced at the first page.

  “Bartholomew took up the relatively new hobby of photography almost as soon as they moved in,” she explained. “He turned one large room on the first floor into a studio and made the adjoining one his darkroom. He fancied himself as something of an artist and roped many of the household in to take part in historical tableaux so he could photograph them. Have you ever seen such wretched expressions? Nobody is enjoying that.”

  Martin studied the sepia pictures. They showed uncomfortable-looking people decked out in crudely made costumes wielding wooden spears and swords, in ridiculous poses.

  “There,” Evelyn said when Martin turned the page. The next image was of two young boys.

  The eldest could only have been about seven years old. He sat astride a rocking horse, his face in profile, holding a sword out in front as if charging at an enemy. The other boy could have been no more than four. He stood alongside, in a sailor suit, staring straight at the camera. It was a striking face. Martin had seen those penetrating eyes before; last night b
efore Paul’s computer had blown up.

  “That’s Austerly,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s him. There are a few more of him with Ezra or his sister, but always the same intensity of expression – did you ever see such eyes?”

  “It’s as though he’s looking right through the lens, right at me,” Martin murmured, shifting uneasily.

  “Indeed. He was a horrible child. As he grew, his nature showed itself more and more. He would torture pets for pleasure. Once he took hold of Augusta’s canary and squeezed the life out of it because he didn’t like its song. He was inhumanly cruel, but fiercely intelligent. Now turn the page and see the other sort of pictures Doctor Bartholomew enjoyed taking.”

  Martin did so and his eyebrows lifted high into his forehead.

  “Quite,” Evelyn said, reading his reaction.

  These photographs were of scantily-dressed women masquerading as historical or mythical figures. Some of them weren’t wearing any clothes at all.

  “Are these the servants as well?” he asked. “What a dirty doctor.”

  “No, I think they were from the village. Gerald’s grandmother certainly didn’t recognise them as being part of the household. Imagine how shocking that would have been at the time when even the sight of a bare leg was enough to cause outrage. No wonder Nettie fell out with him.”

  Martin leafed through several more saucy pages. Then he paused when he saw a much more formal, and clothed, portrait of a severe-looking woman sitting stiffly on a chair with Ezra and Austerly on either side. The boys were a few years older now.

  “Is that Nettie?” he asked. “She’s younger than I thought – and just look at Austerly’s face. It’s thunderous.”

  “Oh, no, that isn’t Nettie,” Evelyn corrected. “That was the new governess, Grace Staplethorpe. You’re right about Austerly though. He detested her. She was very strict and denied him the freedom he had been used to. The other servants didn’t like her much either. She was a highly-strung, self-righteous zealot and totally unsuitable for that position. She staunchly believed in the fire and brimstone of the Bible and was determined to put the fear of God into the Fellows children.”

  “Did she succeed?”

  Evelyn regarded him over the rim of her spectacles. “Quite the reverse,” she stated sombrely.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Martin, slide that photograph from its securers and turn it over.”

  The man obeyed and saw that it had been written on. Brown-black ink flowed across the back of the photograph in confident, copperplate handwriting.

  When I was six, Grace Grace of the sour stony face entered my life and the mutual loathing was immediate.

  Martin glanced up in astonishment. Evelyn nodded slowly.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is the handwriting of Austerly Fellows. At some point, I think when he was about ten or eleven, he found this album and wrote on the back of the photographs. Most of his notes are pure filth, but this, and another, are… illuminating.”

  Martin read on.

  I hated her as I had hated no other previously. She punished me far more frequently than she did Ezra. She beat me with fervour and told me stories of hell and damnation. And so, after only two months, I determined to systematically destroy her and commenced a campaign against her sanity. She tried to make me fear the power of heaven so I vowed to terrorise her with the certain might of the Devil and all his works. I whispered and worked at her. I made her believe demons were coming to claim her. I put dead things in her bed, drew uncharms in her shoes, wrote infernal menaces in her ditchwater diary and made a talisman to attract dark elements. I sewed this into her pillow and her nightmares were exquisite. How I loved to hear her screaming in the silent watches of the night. I was so artful that, within one lunar month, victory was mine…

  Martin put the photograph down.

  “What did he mean by that?” he asked.

  Evelyn leaned over and took the album from him. She turned to the next page and removed another photograph, trying not to look at it. Turning it around, she read from the back.

  Behold my triumphant face. I can recall, quite distinctly, the sheer elation of that day. This was my first thrill of tangible power – my first murder of a human being.

  Evelyn frowned and the photograph fell from her fingers.

  “That morning,” she explained, “Grace Staplethorpe was found hanging in the stables. Before Doctor Bartholomew called the police, the ghoulish man photographed her and called upon the children to assist him. This despicable picture is of the six-year-old Austerly grinning gleefully into the camera as he holds her legs steady so the image did not blur. I don’t think you want to see it.”

  “No, I don’t. What sort of a horror was he?”

  “As an adult, he was even worse,” Evelyn said. “When he finally inherited the big house, he pronounced himself the Abbot of the Angles and practised all manner of terrible things in there. He founded horrible cults and made that place a byword for evil. You weren’t brought up in these parts, Martin. You never heard the bogey stories that were whispered about it. He was one of the Devil’s own, there’s no doubt about that.”

  “Devil worshipper?”

  “Oh, yes. Gerald’s grandmother heard frightful stories from the servants she kept in touch with, before he replaced them with foreigners he brought back with him from the East. He was the fiend of the neighbourhood, a reputation he justly deserved. It was said he had sold his soul to the Devil, but I don’t think he’d had one to begin with. One night, in 1936, he held a special gathering of his most infernal group…”

  “What happened?”

  “No one knows. The nearby villages felt the ground shudder and heard screams coming from the house. Those who were brave enough ran to see what had happened and saw figures in coloured robes fleeing for their lives through the woods. Austerly Fellows disappeared that night. No one who survived the experience ever told what had occurred. A number of them, including Augusta, his sister, had been driven insane. But the rumour spread through the villages that Austerly had called up the Devil that night. At first they thought Old Nick had taken him down to you know where, but as time went by, word got about that Austerly’s presence was still very much in the house. He’s been there ever since, biding his time, waiting and watching.”

  There was a silence. Martin leaned back in the armchair.

  “No,” he said at length. “I can’t believe that. That’s what Paul was trying to say. Devils and demons? It’s not possible.”

  “And where is Paul now? He believed – and the book of Austerly Fellows got him. Don’t underestimate the power of words, Martin. For thousands of years sacred writings have ruled the world. Don’t you think Austerly Fellows knew this? Don’t you think he would have attempted to write his own powerful book to do the same? A Devil’s Testament – an unholy writ.”

  “But Dancing Jacks is for kids.”

  “So was the gingerbread house where the witch lived, the witch who wanted to eat Hansel and Gretel. Don’t dismiss something simply because it’s aimed at children, Martin. It can be just as deadly – if not more so. The earliest fairy tales were extremely gruesome and sadistic. Besides, what do the Catholics say? ‘Give me a boy until the age of seven and I’ll show you the man.’ Indoctrination begins with the young, Martin. Austerly Fellows was merely following a proven pattern with his insidious children’s book.”

  Martin glanced out of the window. They had been speaking so long, it had grown dark outside. “Do you think Paul might be at that house?” he asked.

  “You can’t go there!” Evelyn cried.

  “I certainly can’t if you don’t tell me where it is.”

  “I won’t do that, Martin.”

  “Please. For Paul’s sake – for Carol’s!”

  Evelyn wrung her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “If you’re going then I’m coming with you,” she announced.

  Martin laughed grimly. “That house is no place fo
r a lady,” he said. “Besides, I need you to call Carol and tell her where I’ve gone. I don’t have a mobile any more.”

  “Martin, don’t go there!”

  “We both know that I have to. Who else is there? I can’t call the police. Can you think where else Paul might be, because I can’t. If there are any answers in that house then I’ve got to find them.”

  Evelyn placed the photograph album back in the trunk and closed the lid. “Very well,” she said. “But remember this: possibly the greatest danger you face is the one you’re taking with you. There is still doubt in your eyes, still disbelief that this can be happening. You must understand how real this is and know that there are such forces in the world. Austerly Fellows was no ordinary person, no ordinary man. He may not even have been human – his mother, Nettie, knew. That’s why she took to her bed.”

  “Hang on, I don’t understand. What are you saying? Not human?”

  “Nettie broke down once and confessed to my… to Gerald’s grandmother. The infant she had entrusted to the baby farmer had had a birthmark on his knee. The child she had brought home to Felixstowe from there didn’t. No one knows what happened to the real Austerly, but one thing is certain, the creature who grew up in that big ugly house wasn’t him. It was a monster.”

  Chapter 28

  How deep do the roots of the minchet tree reach? Down to the secret darkness, beyond the glistening paths of grave maggots and further yet. Past old dry bones, past forgotten tombs of ancient chieftains, down into the unlit caverns of the Old World… where the pets are waiting.

  THE ROADS OUT of Felixstowe were empty that evening. Martin followed the directions Evelyn had reluctantly given him – past Trimley St Mary and turn right before reaching Trimley St Martin. As he drove, the dark emptiness of the open farmland streaking by, he tried to make sense of everything he had been told. He couldn’t. It was too big, too frightening to dwell on. What he had to do was concentrate on Paul. The rest of it, Dancing Jacks and the evil of Austerly Fellows, were things he could worry about once the boy had been found. Then he would fetch Carol and they would all drive as far from this crazy mess as possible.

 

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