Kat on a Hot Tin Airship (Kat Lightfoot Mysteries)

by Sam Stone

  ‘Big Daddy,’ Isaac said. ‘It’s time this was done. You can’ let this go on no longer.’

  Big Daddy crumpled, holding his chest as though he were in tremendous pain as Martin resumed his sawing. With every cut made to the wall he cried out in agony and rolled around on the floor.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Big Momma said. Up until that moment she had been rooted to the spot as though her feet were caught in mud. Now she fell to her knees beside Big Daddy and held him tight even as he struggled against her.

  ‘Go on,’ said Isaac to Martin. ‘This has to be done.’

  Martin studied Isaac for a moment and I realised that we were on the right track, that there really was something to find behind that wall, and that it had been hidden there for some time. Isaac, I realised, was as curious as the rest of us as to what that was. I suspected that he’d had suspicions for a long time that there was a room hidden here, but had been unable to act on it.

  The first panel of wood tumbled inwards and Martin called for a light. Milly looked over at Isaac, and when he nodded to confirm she should obey, she hurried away to the nearest bedroom, returning moments later with a lit lantern. It seemed that everyone wanted to know what we had found.

  Big Daddy was quiet now, though he sobbed against Big Momma like a child who had fallen down and couldn’t get back up again. He seemed terrified by the whole ordeal but his eyes were fixed upon the opening as Martin smashed through a little more, and a bead of sweat burst out on the big man’s forehead, as though it were he that was exerted and not my friend.

  I took the light from Milly and walked towards the hole.

  ‘Is this what you saw, Kat?’ Pepper asked as the three of us looked through the newly-opened doorway.

  The light from the lamp cast a dreary glow into the space. In the centre of the room I saw the same huge bed, sheets rotted and moth-eaten, while a thick layer of dust covered the floor. The room was set much as it had been, except that it was old and deteriorated and stank of stale air and decay.

  ‘Yes. It’s the same room, though I saw it fresh and clean. This is years of rot.’

  ‘Get more lamps,’ ordered Pepper, and a few of the servants went to the task.

  I stepped over the threshold, felt that rush of vacuum sound, but knew that this time I wasn’t crossing some strange dimensional doorway, the sensation was merely because this room had been blocked off for so long from the fresh and natural circulation of air and sound. I turned around, taking in the chest of drawers, the rocking chair in the corner … all the things I had seen in there before. There were shutters and dust-heavy curtains placed over where the window and doorway to the balcony should have been.

  I walked towards the bed. In my mind’s eye I saw once again the lonely little boy sitting amongst the cushions and crying.

  Pepper and Martin had followed me inside, both carrying lamps and the room slowly filled with light.

  ‘What is this place?’ Big Momma said from the doorway.

  ‘I think you will have to ask Big Daddy,’ I said.

  Big Momma turned to look at her husband, who was still, I assumed, on the floor in the corridor.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked him. ‘How long has this room been here?’

  I heard movement outside as the old man staggered to his feet. I left Pepper and Martin to look around, I already knew the place well enough, and I went outside into the corridor to see Isaac and another manservant supporting Big Daddy.

  ‘Take me to my room,’ Big Daddy said.

  They helped him limp away, back to the left wing where he and Big Momma slept. Big Momma stayed and she stared into the room with a look of bemusement and anxiety. She had good reason to be feeling both of these emotions too. Her hand absently picked at the splinters of wood around the opening. This room held the answers to the mystery that had been haunting this family for years.

  ‘I found something,’ said Martin behind me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Martin turned holding something in his hand. He had found it in one of the drawers of the dresser. ‘It’s a book. A journal. By someone called Dando …’

  ‘Dando?’ said Big Momma. ‘But that’s not possible. My son was never in this room …’

  Martin carefully flicked through the book, the paper was old and brittle, and then looked up at Big Momma. ‘It says Orlando Pollitt III in the back.’

  ‘But … but that’s Big Daddy,’ Big Momma said. ‘It’s a family tradition to name the first born son Orlando. Our son is the fourth.’

  ‘Big Daddy is also called Orlando?’ I said. ‘And he was also known as Dando? This all getting rather confusing.’

  ‘Well I wasn’t expecting that,’ Martin said. ‘This was Big Daddy’s room?’

  19

  ‘There was a young boy in the room,’ I said. ‘As well as Callon of course. This child told me he was being punished because he tried to drown his sister.’

  Isaac was in the dining room, placing the highly polished silver onto the table for supper as though nothing had happened. I had tried to talk to Big Daddy but he had a servant posted by his door who wouldn’t let anyone inside. Big Daddy was ‘sick’, he said. ‘An’ Big Momma tol’ me no one was to disturb him.’

  ‘I thought I had this whole thing figured out,’ I said. ‘I thought the boy was Orlando, Maggie’s twin brother, not Orlando Senior – Big Daddy. I didn’t see that coming.’

  Isaac nodded and moved onto the next place setting.

  ‘So, what I’m asking is … what do you know about this?’

  ‘Know? I don’t know anything, Miss Kat. I just had suspicions is all. I was young when Big Daddy was born but I remember there being something about his eyes. Like they was yellow, like a cat’s. At the time I worked the Plantation, not the house. I never seen nothin’ nor been up here until after the last house manager disappear. He was my father, and had the gift too.’

  ‘What gift?’

  ‘We natural priests, Miss Kat, jus’ as you is a natural seer and a demon-killer. Yes, I knowed that was what you was the minute you arrive here.’

  ‘So, your father was a priest. Like you, and I assume your ancestors …?’

  Isaac nodded. This information was predictable but what he said next wasn’t.

  ‘Big Daddy’s father was the original kishi. I knowed that much. But this all raises questions as to what really happened to my own daddy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Isaac stopped working and turned his sincere brown eyes to me. ‘Miss Kat, I is about to tell you something I ain’t never told no one. And I’m not even sure what happened myself.’

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ I suggested.

  Isaac called in another of the servants to take over setting the table, and he followed me out through the drawing room and onto the lawn. It was full dark now, but as usual the oil lamps were lit and we walked down the path to the lake and sat down at the table to talk.

  Isaac lit the lamp in the centre of the table. I think this was because he wanted me to see the honesty in his eyes as he told his story. Then he revealed to me what he believed to have happened all those years ago.

  ‘I was fourteen at the time. My daddy was working up in the big house, having gained the trust of the Pollitts the night that the lady o’ the house gave birth to two chil’ren. My daddy come home all agitated the night they was born and he say they is something wrong with one of the babes. My momma had jus’ had a baby and she was to suckle this other chile too. Masser Pollitt he didn’t want that boy to latch on to his wife’s teat, even though we had no idea why. He had no trouble with the girl though, she was his pride and joy. But he was being all strange-like about the son. He called him Orlando though, as was the tradition on the family. All the first born boys were given this name and his daughter he named Susanna.

  ‘Well my momma suckled that chile up at the house, but I never see him. Sometimes though she talk to my daddy about his eyes, saying that he look nothi
ng like Masser Pollitt, but I paid it no mind, as I knowed Miss Lacey Pollitt wouldn’t have been nowhere else: not a lady like that.

  ‘Miss Lacey though, she was a sweet thing and she love that boy all the same, in spite of him being different. But when he was five, he and Miss Suzanna was found in the lake. I heard tell that young Misser Orlando was holding her head under the water and laughing like a devil from hell.

  ‘The next day though, I was working in the garden. Cutting down the grass to keep Miss Lacey’s lawn nice and I seen young Masser Orlando playing outside with Miss Suzanna. He just like any little boy, and his eyes, they blue. I don’t know why he even talked of as strange.

  ‘What I didn’t realise at the time was, Masser Pollitt had asked to see my daddy and the same deal, the same offer was given to him as I later gave Big Daddy. Masser Pollitt had to pay a price, a sacrifice, and the slaves had to be freed and he had agreed right enough.

  ‘My daddy performed the ritual somewhere in the house although I didn’t know where this took place, in those days there was no open congregation like we have now, we’d have been shot for witchcraft. The boy was cured, he was every bit a Pollitt now and no demon blood tainted his soul. But Masser Pollitt went back on his promise. He wasn’t freeing no one, not now that he had his son back. What kind of inheritance would a Plantation be without its slaves after all?

  ‘My daddy he took to cursing the Masser, which was how I learned of what had happened. After that he began to share his secrets with me, passing on years of knowledge in a single day by a ritual he made me take part in. My momma was afeared though. She knew no good would come of my daddy putting a hex on the Pollitts – but Masser Pollitt made his agreement and didn’t pay the price. An’ some forfeit had to be given for that. “But I ain’t cursing him, don’t you see?” my daddy said. “He brung this on hisself.”

  ‘My momma pleaded with my daddy to ask the Masser again to pay the price. “The boy has to be turned back,” my daddy said. “The magic can’t be cheated. There will be circumstances of the worse kind.” But he agreed to go and talk to Pollitt one last time that night when he served him his brandy in the study. “After that,” he tol’ us. “I won’t be responsible for what is gonna happen.”

  ‘My daddy never came back that night. And we never saw him again. But in the middle of the night I woke up, scared and shaking. I knowed something had happened to him, and I knowed that I was now the priest of the congregation.

  ‘The next day my momma was crying and holding my little sister. She said she knowed my daddy was dead, but no body was ever brought down from the house. Which was usually the way when a wayward slave was punished in those days. His body, dead or alive would be shown to us all as an example.

  ‘O’ course Masser Pollitt made out that my daddy had run away and beatings of some of the more surly among us began until he was sure we was all cowed. After that I was asked to go work in the big house, taking on my daddy’s serving role. I think this was because the Masser wanted to keep an eye on me. But I kept all I knowed to myself.

  ‘Even though my daddy had said there would be consequences, nothing happened at the big house. Masser Pollitt’s son Orlando grew up fine and so did Miss Suzanna, and then when she entered her thirteenth year all kinds of strange things started to happen. Miss Suzanna went plum crazy with all the fear and scares that old ghost gave her. And Miss Lacey and Masser Pollitt married her off before she was even fifteen. After that, that old ghost done disappear again.

  ‘Young Misser Orlando though, he was a good man. He grew up strong and tall and kind. When the Masser died, his old heart giving out one day, things on the plantation changed overnight. Misser Orlando didn’t like no beatings. He talked nicely to us all and we grew to love him and want to stay and work on Pollitt Plantation as we knew no other place was ever going to be this nice for us. It was like he was trying to make up for what his daddy had done.

  ‘As you know the rest there ain’t no point in me continuing,’ Isaac finished.

  ‘Yes. When Orlando – Big Daddy – married Big Momma, the whole thing started again with Miss Alice.’

  ‘There’s a curse on this place,’ said Isaac looking back at the house. ‘And I don’t know how to lift it. The price wasn’t paid for Big Daddy’s soul, and even though he saved his own son, and did pay, there’s still a reckoning to be made.’

  I left Isaac and went back into the house. I had no idea what I was going to do. Pollitt Plantation was being haunted by Callon. He would continue to stalk the Pollitt females, but where had he come from in the first place? Isaac had said Big Daddy’s father was the kishi, but did he mean Master Pollitt, or did he mean Callon? And if Master Pollitt was already a demon, then why would he have the demon-side removed from his son?

  None of it made sense. Nor did the fact that I could feel that the demon soul of Big Daddy, still in its child form, was trapped somehow between here and the next dimension. It was in a kind of limbo. And, if Dando was the demon-side of Big Daddy, he hadn’t seemed that demonic to me. He was just like any ordinary child, with the exception of his strange eye colour.

  ‘Perhaps it is limbo,’ Martin said when I caught up with him and Pepper in the drawing room. ‘I mean, perhaps that is the forfeit for not paying?’

  The family was conspicuous by its absence. Amelia and Michel Beaugard had left that morning with their sons, but Maggie, Henry and Big Momma were also nowhere around.

  ‘Certainly the hauntings are connected,’ said Pepper. ‘But what punishment is there in the demon half of Big Daddy being caught in limbo? It can’t hurt anyone. Nor can it rejoin with Big Daddy, who to all intents and purposes has lived a good life and doesn’t deserve such an evil end anyway.’

  I was convinced that Big Daddy knew something. He had been afraid when we broke into the concealed room, and he had seemed to experience physical pain. Whether this was because he remembered the pain and trauma of the separation I didn’t know.

  ‘We need to speak to him,’ I said. ‘He needs to know the truth.’

  ‘Agreed. But maybe Big Momma should be brought into this first. She might help us approach him,’ Henry said from the doorway.

  I turned around to see my brother and his wife Maggie.

  ‘My daddy has a right to know what happened to him. And so does Orlando,’ Maggie said.

  It was then that it occurred to me to wonder where Orlando was. I hadn’t seen him since our ride that morning. There had been so much going on, that I hadn’t given him more than a cursory thought, and then only when his name had cropped up in the context of the stories that had been told.

  ‘This has been a long day,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should sleep on it. But has anyone seen Orlando at all since this morning?’

  20

  I found my nightdress laid out on the bed and Milly running a bath for me as I entered my room. I was still in my breeches, having totally forgotten to change and remove my guns, but no one had said a word, or expressed any view that this wasn’t normal. Not even my brother who, now that he knew his wife hadn’t betrayed him, was being surprisingly accepting of the weirdness of the situation.

  I thanked Milly and as she left, slipped gratefully out of my clothes and into the warm water. As I washed away the grime of the day, rinsing my hair, and lathering it with scented soap, I mulled over everything that had happened trying to make those elusive puzzle pieces fit in place.

  Master Pollitt, Big Daddy’s father, had started all this but it still seemed to me that the only people who had suffered were Big Daddy and his family. It hardly seemed fair. But that was the way of demons and unpaid-for magic. It never went how you expected.

  I still couldn’t understand who or what Callon was either. He was, presumably, the real father of both Big Daddy and Orlando. A tangled web if ever there was one … Which meant that somehow Maggie Pollitt did have demon blood in her, but it was inactive because … wait … Big Daddy had the demon-side ripped from him. But Maggie …

  No. I sh
ook my head. The thought was too ridiculous. Maggie was completely human and always had been, because Big Daddy was human when he married Big Momma and Maggie was conceived. It was only Orlando who had been fathered by Callon when Big Momma was already pregnant.

  I sighed. This was all so complex and confusing. There was still so much information to assimilate but my head hurt from it all and I felt weary.

  I felt guilty about the mindless destruction at the end of the landing. The hole had been a gaping dark maw in the dull gaslight as I had come onto the landing. It had seemed to stare at me accusingly. And other than finding Dando’s journal – which told us nothing as it merely contained the scribbled drawings of a child – and the revelation that Big Daddy had once been the nephilim child, we had gained nothing by opening up the room. After all, what Isaac had told me since about his own father was something that I might have learnt anyway. All we had proved was that there was a room hidden behind the wall.

  So – I had seen it: the room was real. So what! My revelation of this part of the mystery had only served to hurt a lot of people and I couldn’t help feeling bad about that.

  We had now outstayed our welcome at Pollitt Plantation, and I was certain that Mother would have plenty to say once she heard about it. I was only relieved that she and Sally were absent and now on their way home to New York. At least they were safe and could not be manipulated by Callon. In fact, I doubted that any of us could now that we knew exactly what his motive was.

  In the meantime I only hoped that we could come to some satisfactory resolution for the family’s sake that would make all of this worthwhile. Of course it would mean convincing Big Momma and Big Daddy to trust us again. After what had happened today, I wasn’t sure they ever would. But I knew I would have to try.