The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal

by KJ Charles

  “Be damned to them.” Simon grasped my wrist, pushed it back down to the bed over my head. I extended my other arm, so he held me pinned with one powerful hand, and licked my lips in a pointed manner. He rose to the invitation, shifting forward to bring his stand to my mouth. His strong calves squeezed my ribcage, his strong fist held me down, and I made noises of approval around his solid prick. Simon groaned in response, his weight pushing me into the mattress in a most satisfactory manner. I squirmed under him, for the pleasure of feeling entirely overpowered, and he dealt with that very effectually by reaching back with his free hand and taking a firm hold of my cock.

  That won him a strangled cry. He tightened his grip, leaned in and murmured, “Is this what you want?”

  I could not imagine how he expected me to respond, under the circumstances. I did my best to make affirmative noises. His thick member battered my lips and his thighs crushed my chest, and I spluttered and choked and thrust against up him with no more finesse than he, until he gave a deep, animal grunt and spent.

  I gulped and gasped as he pulled back and lifted himself off me. He looked down at me, his face flushed and softened with pleasure, then he shifted off me without a word, moved down the bed and took me in his mouth.

  “Simon!” I yelped.

  He had never done that before. I had not imagined he would. Most men of similarly forceful habits would not have dreamed of so debasing themselves, at least in my experience. Yet he did, lips covering me, warm and tight. There was little skill to it, in truth, but great application, and such passionate need and care that I was momentarily overwhelmed. I felt his mouth slide against my skin, his tongue flick and curl tentatively, then he sucked on me and I could not hold back a soft cry. He did it again, and his hand came round to enclose my shaft. Too hard, too firm, the sensation well-nigh intolerable, and I came far too soon, stifling a sound of something between pleasure and dismay.

  He moved up the bed to hold me afterwards, and we lay together, skin to skin, in warm content.

  “Will you come home?” he asked at last. No preamble, naturally.

  I stared up at the ceiling. “Simon, I must have employment. I cannot live as your dependent.”

  “You will find something,” he said, with more faith than reason. “But surely you stand more chance in London than at Caldwell Place.”

  That was inarguable. And I did not want to leave London. I did not want to leave him, and the green joy that grew in me as we lay with our fingers entangled, my head on his shoulder. Still, I needed purpose.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think.”

  He nodded, lips brushing my hair, and we lay together in fragile happiness, until my drowsiness made it necessary for me to return to my room, lest we be discovered in the morning. I dressed, reluctantly, and was grateful I had bothered, because a grey-clad maid was drifting down the corridor as I left his room.

  We roamed the house the next day. It was bright, cold and clear, and we were happy together. Mrs. Fontley smiled at us both. She would doubtless have lost her cheerful demeanour had she known the nature of her guests, but all she knew was that we were in her house and content, and that pleased her. The children charged around us, shyness forgotten, playing complicated and incoherent games. We explored room after room, doors and drawers gaping in each one, found nothing, and went down to the untouched wine cellar. It was cold there, not with the eldritch chill that I had felt in Caldwell Place’s haunting, but with the entirely earthly cold of a damp underground space in winter. I shivered, and Simon put his arm over my shoulder to pull me close. It seemed entirely natural to him, and Mrs. Fontley did not so much as comment.

  The cellar led to another where ale was stored. They brewed their own, of course. My grandfather on my mother’s side had been a cooper, and I held up my lantern to look around with an inherited professional interest. Barrels were stacked all around, some great old things. The light of my oil lamp glinted off a brass plate on one great hogshead.

  “Brewed to mark the birth of Henry Fontley, 1890,” I read. “Your son?”

  “That’s right. A family tradition, to brew a cask ale for the eldest boy that will keep until his twenty-fifth birthday. It was done for my husband, and it will be done for Henry’s son, no doubt.” She smiled as she spoke, thinking of another generation of happy tow-headed children to come, and I smiled back.

  Christ, to think of that as I write these words. To know that Henry Fontley would be dead before he reached twenty-five, his last sight the mud and slaughter of Flanders fields, his ale undrunk and turning to vinegar in his grieving parents’ cellar.

  But he was a laughing little boy then, and none of us knew what was coming to the world, so we smiled in thought of a future that would never be.

  I looked around a little more at the untouched casks as Simon searched with an expression of mild frustration, his strange senses evidently detecting nothing out of the ordinary.

  “What’s this?” I enquired.

  Mrs. Fontley looked over my shoulder at the ancient barrel. It was nothing of great note, except that it stood alone on a shelf, and it was very old, its wood dark with age and dirt.

  “An ancient ale indeed,” Simon observed. “Why that one, Robert?”

  It had caught my eye, that was all. “Mere curiosity.”

  “Ever curious.” Simon leaned forward, touched a finger to the cask, and stilled. I had seen that stillness before, the alertness of a hunting dog. Mrs. Fontley glanced at me with wide-eyed excitement. I put a finger to my lips, not wishing to distract him and hoping that no strange results would ensue in front of our hostess.

  Simon’s head went back, and he pulled his hand away and up. He resembled some painting of an ancient philosopher in the chiaroscuro style. “What is it?” demanded Mrs. Fontley breathlessly.

  “I don’t know,” Simon said. “Tell me about the barrel.”

  Mrs. Fontley admitted ignorance, but fled to fetch her husband, which gave us a few moments alone. Simon contemplated me in the flickering light, eyes deep in shadow but still expressing puzzlement. “How did you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I told him patiently. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing I can identify yet.” He put his oil lamp down. “Come here.”

  “What?” I asked, assuming it was some professional query, and was quite taken aback when he took the opportunity to kiss me with startling thoroughness. I may have yelped. He pushed his hands into my hair, holding me so roughly that he squeezed the breath from my body, and we had reason to be grateful for the stone steps that warned us of our hosts’ return, and for the darkness that concealed flushed faces.

  “Oh, the brother’s barrel,” said Mr. Fontley when his wife indicated the cask.

  “Brother?”

  “I don’t know, that was what my father called it. Perhaps a younger brother’s aged ale? It’s always been here. There was a tradition my father used to carry on—”

  “—which you do not,” Simon finished.

  “Well, no, as it happens, I don’t. I had quite forgot it.” Mr. Fontley looked a little awkward. “It was one of those tasks for the man of the house. My father died unexpectedly when I was fifteen and things were difficult for a while and I dare say I left a great deal undone.” His wife squeezed his arm, and he threw her an affectionate look. “I must admit, I haven’t thought of the brother’s barrel in years. You don’t suppose it’s linked to our problem?”

  “What was the tradition you failed to observe?”

  “To fill it up.” Mr. Fontley spread his hands. “We had to add a cup of ale through the spout every year, to prevent evaporation, you see. We do that with the aged ales for the boys, but the brother’s ale would be undrinkable now in any case. The barrel is centuries old.” He tapped the cask lightly. It made a hollow noise. “Dried up, I think, or very low. What a pity.”

  “Yes,” Simon said. “Do you have a history of the house?”

  They did of course. The old bui
lding was an antiquarian’s dream and the Fontleys respected their past. Mr. Fontley produced a history written in 1796, which I took upstairs, and settled to read on Simon’s bed. (Some ghost-hunters of greater social grace than Simon may mix with their employers after dinner. I have found it easiest to remove him from company altogether.)

  He paced around the room a little as I read, shutting the various drawers that stood open, then began to take off his coat.

  “Is that a suggestion?” I enquired.

  He gave me a look of rebuke, mostly. “We omitted to look at the runes last night.”

  “How careless of us. You know, the writing is far from frantic, considering how active the ghost seems to be,” I observed as he stripped off his undershirt. “Could this be human deception, practised upon the Fontleys after all?”

  “Possibly. But you had something in the cellar.”

  I grimaced at the book, turned the page. “Did I? Simon, I think you overestimate my…whatever ability you believe I have. I am not like you, I am not educated in these matters, I have no occult powers. Really, I just notice things.”

  “You have a nose for a story,” Simon said obstinately. “Look at this.”

  I got up to peer into the mirror at the scrawled, cramped hand repeating itself on his torso. De me, de me, de me…

  “Latin?”

  “Church Latin, by the hand. It means, ‘Let me out’. That is all it says. Let me out.”

  “Let me out,” I repeated. “So, our ghost may have died in confinement?”

  “Perhaps, though I wonder if it is a case of reading down.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, even as the memory of the folklore book came to me. “No, wait, I recall. That is when ghosts are forced into a container, a bottle or some such, by means of people reading the Bible aloud?”

  Simon gave me a nod of approval. I felt an entirely disproportionate glow of satisfaction. “Any sacred text will do, and I once saw it done with Dickens. It is the relentless reading in a spirit of faith that enforces the ghost. And a ghost can be bound into anything. A shoe, a hollow stone, a cat…”

  “A barrel of ale?”

  “Precisely. If he was bound into the ale and kept there while the barrel was full—”

  “And as the ale evaporated this summer he was freed to cause mischief.” I snapped my fingers. “Is that why he does not open bottles of wine or casks of ale? He has had enough of strong drink?”

  “Or fears to be trapped in an open cask again. Perhaps. But why open everything else? And why does he still ask to be freed?”

  “And why confine him in the first place?” I added.

  Simon came to sit on the bed by me. Bare skin, warm and close. He took the history of the house from my hands and closed it. “Do something for me, Robert.”

  I brushed my fingers over his chest, over a dark nipple, watched him shudder. “With the greatest pleasure.”

  He grasped my exploring hand, stopping it in its tracks through the sparse, wiry hair. “Not that. Well, not yet,” he amended, almost with embarrassment, and handed the book back. “Open it.”

  “It was open. You just shut it.”

  “And now I want you to open it.”

  “The exciting life of an occultist,” I muttered. “Very well, if you insist.” I let the book drop open in my hands. “Like that?”

  “Mmm. What does it say?”

  I examined the page. It discussed an early stage in the house’s life, when it was still an abbey. Medieval ecclesiastical history. I stifled a sigh, scanned the close-set type and let out an oath.

  “What is it?” Simon sounded entirely unsurprised.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I did nothing. What have you found?”

  “Tragic Tale of Ill Advised Indulgence and Mistak’n Death,” I read. “A monk of the abbey in the sixteenth century, one Humphrey, drank an entire bottle of the abbot’s peach brandy and collapsed. He was pronounced dead, given the appropriate rites and interred. Strange noises came from the crypt over the next few days…”

  “Buried alive,” Simon said. “Yes?”

  “I fear so. They opened the coffin after about a week, and found his body fresh, lips gnawed and scratches on the inside of the lid. Good Lord, what a terrible thing.”

  To awake from a drunken stupor of days, in God knew what state of painful thirst and hellish head. To find yourself encased in wood, to kick and scream uselessly, to endure the awful dawning realisation over a space of days that there would be no rescue, no alleviation, no escape…

  “Robert.” Simon’s arms were around me. “Ssh, Robert. I am here.”

  “Thirsty,” I managed. He poured me a glass of water from the pitcher by the bed, and I gulped it down, breathing deeply, telling myself it was but my imagination. It was imagination; mine had always been vivid. Still, I leaned against him and took comfort from his strength and solidity.

  “I take it we have found the brother of the barrel,” Simon observed, once I was recovered. He picked up the book and flipped to the next page. “And…yes. The ghost walked, we are told, and was laid by the efforts of the saintly abbot. By reading down into a barrel of ale, I will speculate. Doubtless that seemed appropriate. And while the ale lasted, so did his imprisonment.”

  “Is that why he opens things? To escape?” Simon nodded. I shuddered. “Nobody noticed he was alive when they interred him, nobody remembered him when he was dead. Shut in and forgotten, twice over. Poor Humphrey.”

  “The perils of overindulgence.” Simon’s bare arm was around me, his bare chest pressed to my back. “Thank you, Robert. If we know his story, we can end this.”

  “Why thank me?” I demanded. “How did that happen?”

  “It’s called sortes. A form of divination, seeking guidance in books, by the operation of chance. I thought you might have the knack.”

  “I do not have any such thing. I have never in my life just opened a book and found what I needed. I should have been a rather more successful journalist with that up my sleeve.”

  Simon gave a huff of amusement. His breath was warm on my neck. “Indeed. I do not suggest you have gifts of divination, Robert. More that you are…open. To influences, to impressions, to the story. And if a story needs to be told…” He indicated his own inscribed skin. “It will reach for a teller.”

  “I have a nose for a story, true—”

  “Indeed you do. And some senses can be made more acute—noses sharpened, as it were—when one is touched by the supernatural.”

  I had been very thoroughly touched by the supernatural, of course. The thought appalled. “Do you mean to say that my reprehensible ancestor has given me some sort of spiritual clap?”

  Simon actually laughed. Threw back his head and laughed, deep and resonating, so that I could not but laugh too in my pleasure at his amusement.

  “My God, Robert. Come back with me.”

  “I—what?”

  “To London.” He tightened his grip, arms enclosing me with such solid power that I felt quite unmanned. “Work with me. You have a gift for it. So much empathy, so much instinct. I have use for you.”

  “Use?”

  “Need,” he muttered. I could feel his lips against my neck, head resting against mine as he held me. “God damn it, I need you. I can breathe around you, Robert. I need air, and I need you, and in much the same measure. Come home. Stay.”

  Air, he said, and here I was, barely able to inhale with those words squeezing the breath from my lungs.

  “What about Miss Kay?” I managed. “Is there not a danger she will suspect us?”

  “Theodosia might remark it if I laid you over the dining-room table at suppertime. But only to request that we did not spill her soup. She is not concerned with such things.” He kissed my ear. “She would like me to be happy, and she finds you amusing.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Then you will come.”

  “I have not said so,” I pointed out. “I am a journalist, not a g
host-hunter, and I have not at all decided that I wish to change my profession, even if change is being forced upon me. It seems,” I added plaintively, “that all sorts of things are being forced upon me these days.”

  “Is that a hint?” Simon rumbled in my ear, and set about persuading me of his case.

  He was most persuasive.

  The next day, Simon and I and the Fontleys stood in the icy air of the lichyard, over a spot that had been torn earth, and Simon murmured inaudible words. It was not a ceremony of any recognised kind and he was no priest. But he told the story of the dead, took it out into the light once more, assured the spirit it had been remembered, and assisted it to let go its clutch on this world.

  “I’m so grateful,” Mrs. Fontley told us, giving us each her hand. “Poor Humphrey, I feel so sorry for him. I wish he could have stayed, but he wasn’t happy. And I am relieved for my next year’s preserves and the wine cellar, of course.”

  “You wish he could have stayed,” Simon repeated.

  “With the others.” Mrs. Fontley laughed merrily. “Oh dear, you must think I’m odd. But we have so many of them here and most seem content. Well, they don’t make any fuss. The grey people, I don’t know if you noticed?”

  “They’re ghosts? The grey people are ghosts? But—”

  “It’s a very old house,” Mrs. Fontley said. “Anyone who wishes to stay is most welcome to our hospitality. And I do think they are quite happy, as I hope you have been. Thank you so much Mr. Feximal, Mr. Caldwell. Merry Christmas to you both.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I replied faintly, and we went upon our way.

  Devils on Horseback

  By the New Year I had taken my place by Simon’s side. I threw myself into arcane studies, in order to earn my keep and underpin the instincts which I had, reluctantly, to accept I possessed. I settled into the strange house on Fetter Lane with Miss Kay (who has never to this day remarked on the fact that Simon and I share a bedroom) and the mute Cornelia. I even managed to rid myself of Caldwell Place, and wished the buyers joy of it.

  After a couple of months, I wrote up my first of Simon’s stories and sent it to The Strand Magazine. I need not rehearse its popular success or the clamour for more that followed. Miss Kay read it out to Simon, adding a withering commentary at which I had to laugh while I winced. Simon merely said, “Good God, Robert,” but in truth I think he was pleased by his portrayal. Even if he had not been, I doubt he would have objected. Writing satisfied me, so he was content.