The Heirloom

by Graham Masterton

  He tightened his mouth in assent. It was plain that he didn’t really want to talk about it.

  ‘Extraordinary, that all of those peaceful walks should eventually lead me here,’ he reflected. ‘That’s the oddity of life for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘How’s your drink?’

  ‘I could probably manage another. How about you?’

  ‘I’ll have another whisky.’

  We went into the living-room and waited for Father Corso. The crisp and curled-up body of the trilobite was still lying beside the hearth, but it seemed greyer and smaller now. Most things do in death, including people. I remember seeing my father lying in his coffin in that mortician’s parlour in Anaheim in 1958, and how delicate he looked. There was nothing left of the hearty, slap-dash plasterer; nothing left of the father who used to swing me up on his shoulders and give me rides around the yard. Nothing left but a small, diminished image, as unlike Joseph Delatolla as a photograph taken in the wrong light.

  David said, ‘Maybe we should go and look for the chair. Your priest will want to see it, won’t he?’

  ‘I’m not looking for it unless he’s there. I want to be armed, you understand? Even if it’s only with a bible and a crucifix and a vial of Holy water.’

  ‘You call that armed?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not particularly superstitious. But axes and saws aren’t going to help, are they? That chair responds to violence with more violence, and right below the belt, too.’

  David circled the tip of his finger around his glass, so that it made a high-pitched droning noise. ‘It’s strange that you should have been attacked by that insect,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me something that isn’t strange around here.’

  ‘No – what I mean is that the chair obviously wants something from you. And since it does, why did it have its creature go after you like that?’

  ‘Who knows, for Christ’s sake? You can’t rationalise a what-d’you-call-it. A moral and spiritual Black Hole.’

  ‘Perhaps it was just trying to frighten you into taking some positive action,’ David suggested. ‘Trying to guide you towards that moment when you’re going to have to ask it for something.’

  ‘Well, what did I do? I called my local priest. Why should the chair want me to call my local priest?’

  David’s finger paused on the rim of his glass. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I just get a feeling that we’re being manipulated.’

  It wasn’t long before I saw the lights of Father Corso’s car swivel across the kitchen ceiling. I put down my drink and went to the front door to welcome him in. He slammed the door of his shiny black Rabbit and came across the driveway with an expansive wave of his long inelegant arm.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Father,’ I greeted him.

  ‘I couldn’t very well refuse, could I?’ Father Corso smiled. ‘It’s not every night of the week that one of your congregation offers to demolish every theological concept you ever held to be valid and true. So, lead on.’

  Father Corso was tall, loose-jointed, and physically awkward. He was good-looking if you had a thing for men with black curly hair and dark circles under their eyes. Sara had once described him as looking like Lenny Bruce, after three days on the rack.

  David stood up as Father Corso came in, and switched his whisky from his right to his left hand. I said, ‘Father Corso, this is David Sears. An antique dealer from Britain.’

  Father Corso shook his hand. ‘And a Protestant, no doubt?’ he smiled.

  David smiled rather sourly in return.

  ‘Where is your devil then, Ricky?’ asked Father Corso. ‘If I am going to carry out an exorcism, I must have a devil to exorcise.’

  I pointed towards the hearth. ‘There’s part of the evidence. The Devil’s familiar. It attacked me this evening and I killed it. Or at least I killed that particular incarnation of it,’ I said, looking across at David.

  Father Corso went across to the hearth and knelt down. He prodded the insect’s body with the poker, and it rolled over like an overdone prawn cracker.

  ‘Well,’ said Father Corso, ‘this is certainly a frightening creature. But there is nothing to suggest that it is actually an agent of Satan.’

  ‘Sit down, Father,’ I told him. ‘Let me tell you the whole story from the beginning.’

  Father Corso looked at the Baccarat decanter on the table. ‘A small glass of that might help to stimulate my attentiveness,’ he said.

  ‘That whisky priest,’ quoted David, under his breath.

  Father Corso turned to him, with one dark eyebrow raised. ‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘You’ve read The Power and the Glory too. Good book. Rather too British for my taste.’

  David didn’t answer, but crossed his legs and sat back with a rather childish show of aloofness. I hadn’t actually realised how sectarian English people could be. But then I guess that any nation that can create the Rolls-Royce, and send their children to schools where the boys still have to wear top-hats, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on sustaining a non-elected Head of State, just for the snob value – I guess a nation like that can be chauvinistic about anything.

  Carefully, as if I were giving evidence in a court of law, I explained to Father Corso everything that had happened since Henry Grant’s first appearance in my driveway. He listened to me without saying a word, occasionally sipping at his Cutty Sark, or stroking at his cheek with his long bony finger.

  When I’d finished, he said, ‘You should have come to me before.’

  ‘Sara wanted me to. But I didn’t think you’d believe me.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether I do. You’re talking about the Devil, Ricky, and the Devil is a concept that went out of theological thinking along with half of those phoney saints like St Harriet the Hysterical. There isn’t any way that a modern priest can cope with the actual religious needs of the people around him if he believes in demons. I should carry out exorcisms for post-natal depression, or pre-menstrual tension, or job psychosis?’

  David got up and helped himself to more whisky without offering any to Father Corso. I glanced up at him, but I wasn’t going to start an argument. We were all tired, and doubtful, and fraught.

  ‘Something’s going on here, Father,’ I said. ‘Whatever name you put to it, it’s evil and it’s dangerous, and it has to be destroyed.’

  ‘I agree with you. There’s a very negative situation here. But before we take any action we have to identify what the nature of the negative pressures is. Otherwise, any attempts to deal with them may be as harmful as the pressures themselves. You think your chair is the Devil’s throne. Mr Sears here believes it’s a kind of a nexus, through which malevolent influences can pass between this world and the nether-world. From what you’ve told me, however, I’ve begun to entertain a theory myself that the symbolic images on the chair – the demon-like faces – have become a focus for some very strong negative feelings within you yourself. Like, it’s not actually the chair which is the source of the negative situation, it’s you.’

  ‘Me?’ I asked him, in disbelief. ‘What negative feelings do I have? I’m the least negative person I know.’

  ‘Well, that’s often a characteristic of negative feelings. You don’t know you have them.’

  ‘But, for Christ’s sake, Father, I’m a happy man. Or at least I was until this chair arrived in my life.’

  Father Corso raised his hand, partly as a warning that I shouldn’t break the third commandment, and partly as one of those Biblical gestures that priests always unconsciously adopt when they’re just about to disagree with you. Verily, I say unto you.

  ‘A happy man – a man who is contented with his domestic life-style, his career achievement, and all the ongoing characteristics of his social and intellectual environment – a man like that is frequently most susceptible to deep emotions of destructiveness and frustration. If you want to use an old Biblical phrase –’

  ‘I wish you would,’ David i
nterrupted, with a bored tone of Protestant impatience.

  ‘If you want to use an old Biblical phrase,’ Father Corso repeated, undeterred, ‘you could say that it is an essential human characteristic to strive. And if you have nothing left to strive for, then, quite simply, all those positive energies within you turn around inside of you and build up as negative charge. You, Ricky, may have built up such a charge… and all it took was the Satanic appearance of that chair for your negative charge to be catalysed into physical reality.’

  I turned to the hearth. ‘You mean I created that bug out of my own imagination? That creature came out of my head?’

  ‘That’s exactly it. It’s like a very powerful and lasting form of psychic ectoplasm.’

  David set his glass down on the table with a sharp, punctuating tap.

  ‘In my opinion, Father, it’s more like a very powerful and lasting form of modern theological bullshit.’

  ‘You can think what you like,’ said Father Corso. ‘But if we don’t consider every possibility, we may inadvertently release forces that are far more damaging to Ricky and his family than whatever they’ve suffered already.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ asked David, sarcastically. ‘And what can you think of that’s for more damaging than the death of Mr Delatolla’s dog, and the imprisoning of his son in a coma?’

  At that moment, before Father Corso could answer, I looked across the room and there it stood. Up against the wall, just where a tidy maid might have placed it. The chair itself, carved with snakes and doomed souls. And I thought for one dear and logical split-second that David had probably been right: and that the chair had wanted me to invite Father Corso here, for some purpose that I couldn’t even begin to understand.

  ‘Father,’ I said, in a hushed voice. ‘The chair.’

  And I nodded towards the wall behind him the way a bidder nods at an auction. Don’t look now, but it’s there.

  Father Corso slowly turned around. ‘That’s it?’ he asked me. ‘That wasn’t standing there when I came in.’

  ‘Well, of course it wasn’t,’ said David. ‘We decided to frighten you, so we arranged for a friend of ours to get up in the middle of the night, sneak into the kitchen, and place it there when you weren’t looking.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so hostile,’ Father Corso retorted. ‘I’m just trying to do my best under what you must admit are pretty mystical circumstances.’

  ‘For somebody whose vocation it is to act as an envoy for an invisible deity, and a two-thousand-year-old woman who conceived the son of that invisible deity without any identifiable means of impregnation, I’d say your understanding of the mystical must be rather confused.’

  ‘Do you want me to help or not?’ snapped Father Corso.

  ‘I don’t think you have any choice,’ David told him, laconically.

  Father Corso hesitated, swallowed the rest of his whisky, and then stood up. He advanced on the chair while both David and I sat where we were. He stood in front of it for a while, peering at it narrowly, and then he reached out and touched the man-serpent’s cheek.

  ‘It’s wood,’ he announced.

  ‘Of course it’s wood,’ said David. ‘That’s what makes it so alarming.’

  Father Corso ran his hand over the carved vipers that made up the man-serpent’s hair, and down the intricately-sculptured splat. Then, very quickly, he pressed the black leather seat cushion.

  He came back to the middle of the room. ‘It seems like a perfectly ordinary chair to me.’

  ‘I assure you it isn’t,’ I told him. ‘You want another glass of whisky?’

  ‘No, no thank you. You said it talks?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I nodded. ‘It talks, and it threatens.’

  There was a long silence. Father Corso stood looking at the chair and David and I sat looking at Father Corso.

  Eventually, Father Corso said, ‘This is a little embarrassing. But I want to try one of the very oldest tests for evil spirits.’

  ‘I know that one,’ said David. ‘You invite them to tea, and if they refuse to eat hot-cross buns, you know that they must be disciples of the Devil.’

  ‘Please!’ barked Father Corso, in suppressed rage. ‘I’m trying to do whatever I can, and you’re not making it any easier.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make it any easier,’ said David. He stood up, and poured himself another drink. ‘I’m trying to make you understand that if you don’t believe that this is the Devil’s chair, then you’re doing nothing but fooling yourself and endangering Mr Delatolla.’

  ‘This isn’t the sixteenth century!’ said Father Corso, hotly.

  David pointed to the chair with a rigid arm. ‘Tell that to the Devil. Don’t try telling it to me.’

  Father Corso took a breath. ‘You have some kind of special interest in this, don’t you, Mr Sears? Some interest quite apart from acquiring the chair for a client of yours?’

  ‘I’ve already told you what my interest is,’ said David. He swallowed another mouthful of whisky, and shuddered.

  ‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ said Father Corso. ‘I may be the envoy of an invisible deity, and a sacred Virgin, but I’m not stupid and I’m not gullible.’

  ‘Of course not,’ David replied, turning his back. ‘You’re just unbearably fashionable.’

  Father Corso looked at me in exasperation. But I did nothing more than nod towards the chair again, and say, ‘Go ahead. Test it.’

  Father Corso approached the chair again, unbuttoned his coat, and reached into the inside pocket. He took out a silver crucifix, about five inches long, and a glass bottle of water.

  David kept his back turned as Father Corso crossed himself, and then drew the sign of the cross in the air over the chair.

  ‘If the Devil is concealed within you, I command Him to manifest Himself,’ said Father Corso. ‘If the Devil is hiding inside of you, I command Him to appear.’

  ‘I suppose you think a Jungian analyst with a pointed beard is going to pop out of nowhere and confirm your theory of negative situations,’ put in David, caustically.

  Father Corso ignored him. He had a carefully-memorised ritual to perform, and it was obvious now that he was trying to build up and sustain an aura of his own – what I can only call a force-field of Catholic strength. I had never seen it attempted before, and I don’t suppose that Father Corso had ever had occasion to try, but it was remarkable to watch. No matter how trendily he usually talked – regardless of Christian interfaces and ongoing socio-theological dialogues – he was drawing now from the fundamental and traditional powers of his belief.

  ‘I adjure thee… if spirit you are… to go out. God the Father, in His name, leave our presence. God the Son, in His name, make thy departure. God the Holy Ghost, in His name, quit this place.’

  With a sweeping stroke of his arm, Father Corso splashed the Devil’s chair with Holy water, first one way and then the other, in the sign of the cross.

  ‘Tremble and flee, O impious one, for it is God who commands thee. Tremble and flee, O impious one, for it is I who command thee. Yield to me, to my desire by Jesus of Nazareth who gave His soul. Yield to me, to my desire by sacred Virgin Mary who gave Her womb.’

  It was difficult to hear at first, but gradually it grew louder. A deep, irresistible hum, like a high-voltage generator. The same hum that I’d heard before. Father Corso must have heard it too, for his voice became suddenly more strident.

  ‘By the blessed angels from whom thou fell… I demand thee be on thy way.’

  I stood up, and crossed the room to stand right beside him. He was breathless, as if he’d just been doing twenty push-ups, or jogging around the block.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ I asked him. ‘Do you have any idea at all?’

  He didn’t look at me. His cheeks were anointed with sweat, and he was shaking like an alcoholic with the horrors.

  ‘It’s something,’ he said, in a choked voice. ‘There’s some influence there… something very…’
<
br />   He took two or three deep breaths. Then he said, ‘It’s come here… for a purpose… it wants something…’

  ‘Do you still think it’s me? Is it really me that’s creating these influences?’

  ‘I can’t – I can’t really say – I – I’m having a hard job holding it.’

  I took his arm, and gripped him tight. ‘Let it go,’ I told him. ‘If it’s taking control of you, let it go.’

  ‘I’m not – I’m not too sure that I can.’

  ‘Come on, Father. Just let it go. It tried to get hold of me once, remember, and all I did was reject it. Come on, Father, let go.’

  David, with an alarmed expression, quickly put down his drink and came over to help me.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He started to go through the exorcism ritual. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Then all of a sudden he said he couldn’t hold it any more. Look at him. He looks like he’s having an epileptic fit.’

  Father Corso threw his head back. His neck was knotted with tightened sinews and veins. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets.

  ‘Negative – charge –’ he said hoarsely.

  I looked towards the chair. The face of the man-serpent was staring as fixedly as ever. And where the drops of Holy water had sprinkled across the seat and the woodwork, steam was rising. The Holy water was gradually being boiled away.

  ‘Let’s get him out of here,’ I urged David. ‘He’s going to get himself hurt if he stays any longer.’

  But it was too late. It had probably been too late the moment that Father Corso had agreed to come over and help. The priest was abruptly and violently shaken in our hands like a rag doll being worried by a fierce dog, and he let out a grunt of pain and desperation.

  ‘Can’t – hold – it!’ he screamed. ‘Can’t – hold – it!’

  Bright red blood gushed from between his lips. He had been gritting his teeth so tight that he had bitten right through his tongue. And blood sprang from between his fingers, where his nails had dug in agony into his palms.

  ‘Get him out!’ I yelled at David. ‘Get him out!’