The Seance

by John Harwood

  There was still an hour to wait after we had dined—the mist, I noticed uneasily, had grown much thicker—and so we returned to the gallery, where Edwin began to rummage through a tin box standing in the alcove near the armour.

  "I asked Raphael to leave this, just in case ... he didn't tell us he'd brought a second thunderbolt," said Edwin, holding up a greyish cylinder with what appeared to be a tarred length of string attached to one end. He replaced them carefully, took out a wooden mallet, and began to explore the hiding place. Despite the cold, I watched whilst he tapped and twisted and probed at the brickwork. The echoes sounded horribly loud. Ancient Wraxfords, their faces blurred by the grime of centuries, glared down upon us; the light from the windows above the portraits was a dim, featureless grey.

  " The point about these refuges," said Edwin, "is that they were built to withstand direct assault; there are accounts of walls being half-demolished whilst the fugitive, a foot away from the pickaxes, remained undiscovered. Brute force only jams the mechanism; it is a matter of finding the trick of it."

  The walls appeared to be solid brick; I could see no possible opening anywhere.

  "What makes you think there is anything to be found?" I asked.

  "The position of that tomb, to begin with. Why would anyone place a sarcophagus inside a fireplace?"

  "Because it is not really a tomb?"

  "You may well be right, though I wasn't thinking of that; those padlocks haven't been disturbed in decades; they are rusted solid. No; because it ensures that no one will light a fire. Which means there is something inside that chimney to protect."

  In the exercise of his talent, Edwin was a changed man, confident and assured as he had never seemed before. He was using the mallet and a short metal bar, testing each brick in turn. I wished there was something I could do, other than wait and shiver, and try to shake off the sensation of being watched. Though he was not striking the bar especially hard, every blow of the mallet echoed like a volley of gunshots, and sometimes it seemed to me that I could hear footsteps behind the echoes. The light, too, seemed to be growing perceptibly dimmer, though it was not yet three o'clock.

  "Eureka!" cried Edwin. He had worked his way down to the foot of the inside wall, and was kneeling on the floor. Now as I watched he removed a single brick, reached into the cavity (which I should not have liked to have done), and after a brief struggle drew out a scarred wooden rod about the size of a candle.

  "That's odd," he said. "This is a locking pin, which you would only expect to find in place if there was someone inside. I had to crack the mortar, you see."

  I did not quite see, but I caught the note of unease in his voice.

  "You don't think—" I began.

  "Surely not."

  He grasped the edge of the opening he had made. With a rasping, grating sound, a section of brickwork like a low, narrow door swung outward; a cloud of dust and grit rolled out into the gallery, and settled slowly around us.

  "Well," he said, coughing, "there's certainly no one in here—no one living, at any rate." He lit his lantern, and I saw through the floating dust a narrow stairway of brick, spiralling upward into darkness.

  "You see—" His voice was cut off by a noise from the direction of the library. We stood for a moment listening; the sound was not repeated. Edwin stooped, picked up the mallet, and strode the ten paces to the connecting door. I followed, not wishing to be left alone.

  There was no one in the library, and no apparent cause for the sound until I saw that the pages of John Montague's manuscript, which I had left on the seat of a cracked leather armchair, were now strewn upon the floor beneath, with Nell's journals amongst them.

  "A draught, perhaps," said Edwin. But the air was completely still.

  And something else had changed. Outside, where the trees should have loomed a mere fifty yards away, there was nothing to be seen at all; nothing but dense, fleecy vapour, sliding across the glass.

  "Will the coachman be able to find us?" I whispered.

  "I don't know; we must hope it lifts before dark. In the meantime, we may as well find out where those stairs lead."

  With a last worried look around the library, he led the way back to the gallery. As he was about to step into the opening, I was seized by panic.

  "What if you are trapped in there?" I said. "I won't know how to get you out."

  "We can't both go," he said, "just in case..."

  " Then I shall," I said, "at least a little way up, while you keep watch. Truly—I shan't feel so afraid this way."

  I took the lantern from his reluctant hand and stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical chamber no more than three feet wide. Dust and grit lay thick upon the stone floor. I shone the beam upward, but could see only the returning spiral of the staircase.

  "I shall have to go up a few steps," I said.

  "Then for God's sake be careful."

  Testing each stair as I went, I moved awkwardly upward, afraid of tripping over my skirts. Musty air stung my eyes; there were cobwebs draped about the walls, but they looked old and brittle, and nothing moved when I shone the lantern over them. This, I thought, was how an ancient tomb would smell, a tomb that had been sealed for hundreds of years, where even the spiders had died of starvation.

  I had completed at least two full spirals before the stairs ended at a low wooden door, set into the wall to form a ledge just wide enough to stand upon. My hair brushed against the stone roof of the chamber. I glanced back down the stairs and was seized with a fit of dizziness so that I had to grip the door handle to prevent myself from falling. The handle turned in my grasp; the door creaked open.

  It was a room—or, rather, a cell—perhaps six feet by four, the roof only a few inches above my head. The door opened inward to the left, leaving just enough room for a straight-backed chair and a table placed against the opposite wall. Upon the dusty surface of the table were a decanter, a wineglass, two candlesticks, an inkstand containing half a dozen quill pens, also thickly covered in grime; and a glass-fronted case, two shelves high, containing what looked like thirty or forty identical volumes.

  There seemed to be no other furniture, but as I stood staring at the desk, I became aware that my lantern was not the only source of illumination. Along the wall to my right were half a dozen dim, narrow strips of light. I took a tentative step forward, felt an icy draught upon my face, and realised that the secret room and its stairwell had been built across the width of the chimney, with slits for ventilation running through the outer wall.

  Three more steps brought me within reach of the bookcase. Through the dusty glass I saw that the volumes were indeed identical, and that there was no printing on the spines; they were leather-bound manuscript books, labelled only by year, and shelved in order from 1828 through to 1866. I set the lantern upon the table, tugged at the right-hand door until it opened with a shriek of hinges, and drew out the last volume.

  It was a diary, written in a crabbed, shaky hand, but legible enough.

  5th January 1866

  Duke and Duchess of Norfolk left this morning; due at Chatsworth tomorrow. Duchess paid me the great compt of saying that the hospitality at Wraxford Hall surpasses any she has received this season. Only eighteen left in the party until Lord and Lady Rutherford arrive on Saturday. Weather inclement, but the younger gentlemen continue to ride. Spoke to Drayton about champagne...

  I read on through entry after entry meticulously describing a series of grand house parties that could not possibly have occurred. The Hall of Cornelius Wraxford's imagination—for who else could have written this?—was surrounded by rose gardens, rockeries, ponds, croquet lawns, and archery fields, lovingly tended by a small army of gardeners. Grand banquets were held each night in the Great Hall, attended by the cream of English society; shooting parties roamed through the coverts of Monks' Wood. I tried several more volumes and found that they were all the same: a daily record of a magnificent life unlived, whilst the actual Hall sank deeper into decay.


  Edwin's voice, muffled but plainly anxious, echoed in the stairwell. I had gone straight to the bookcase without looking round, but now as I turned and raised the lantern, I saw a bundle of old clothes lying behind the door.

  Only they were not just clothes, because there was something in them; something with shrivelled claws for hands and a shrunken head no larger than a child's, to which a few tufts of scanty white hair still clung. The mouth and nostrils and eye sockets were choked with cobwebs.

  I do not think I fainted, but my next memory is of Edwin's arms about me and his voice reassuring me, somewhat unsteadily, that everything was all right.

  "We must not stay here," I said, disengaging myself. "Suppose someone locks us in?"

  " There is nobody here, I promise you. And yes, I think it is Cornelius."

  I picked up the last volume of the diary and, averting my eyes from the ghastly object behind the door, followed him shakily down the stairs and through to the comparative warmth of the library. The fog outside was as impenetrable as before.

  "It is only half past three," said Edwin. "He may still find his way here." But he did not sound as if he believed it.

  "And if not?"

  "We have food and coal enough for the night; let us hope it won't come to that."

  If I had to spend the night here alone, I thought, I should go mad with fear. He added the last of the coal—there was more, he said, in the cellar—and built up the fire whilst I told him what I had found, conscious at every pause of the listening stillness around us.

  "So Vernon Raphael was right," he said, "about Cornelius not being an alchemist at all."

  "And about Magnus murdering him?" I asked.

  "No; I don't think so. As Raphael said, it wasn't in Magnus's interest to have Cornelius vanish. He'd gone to all that trouble to create the legend of the armour; why wouldn't he leave the body in it? I wonder, you know, if Cornelius didn't simply die up there, of a stroke or seizure, though it does seem an extraordinary coincidence; unless he was frightened to death by the storm. In fact ... Magnus can't have known about the secret room, or he'd have found the body and saved himself the expense of the court case."

  "Then Magnus knew nothing of his uncle's imaginary life," I said. "I never thought I would feel sorry for Cornelius, but of course the man John Montague described was Magnus's invention. Perhaps he was really quite kind; after all, he kept the same servants all those years."

  "Perhaps he was," said Edwin, turning the pages of the manuscript book, "but why on earth did he huddle in that cell to write all this?"

  "Because ... because it was easier, shut away in there, to imagine the Hall as he wanted it to be," I said. "And because he had to keep it utterly secret—even from himself, in a way. Poor old man! Everything we learn about Magnus makes him seem more evil."

  "And we can't, as you say, even be sure he's dead. Cornelius doesn't mention Magnus anywhere here; he seems to have kept up his imaginary life until the day he died. The last entry is for the 20th of May 1866—'Lord and Lady Cavendish expected Friday'—the day of the storm. It still seems too much of a coincidence, unless ... let me see John Montague's account of the inquest again.

  "Yes; here it is: Mr. Barrett on the effects of lightning. A man was rendered unconscious, and when he recovered, walked away from the scene with no recollection of having been struck.' It could have happened that way; Cornelius might have returned instinctively to his bolt-hole, and there died of delayed shock, or concussion ... but in the meantime, I fear we must prepare for another night here."

  It had grown so dark outside that the fog was no longer visible. The dingy panelled walls, and the rows of leather bindings in their cases, seemed to be soaking up what little light remained. He rose and lit two stubs of candle on the mantelpiece.

  "I think, in the circumstances, we should share the room you slept in last night; we haven't enough coal to keep two fires burning all night, and in any case..."

  "Yes," I said, shivering.

  "Then what I shall do first, before it gets completely dark, is bring up the rest of the coal from the cellar. And no," he said, seeing the fear in my face, "I don't like it, either, but without coal we will freeze."

  He lit his lantern, took up the coal bucket, and went out onto the landing, leaving the doors ajar. His footsteps retreated, boards groaning at every tread, changing to a muffled creak-creak, creak-creak as he began to descend, until the sound ceased altogether and absolute silence returned.

  We had placed two cracked leather chairs before the fireplace, which backed onto the one in the gallery, halfway along the common wall, with rows of bookshelves receding into the gloom on either side of me. The sensation of being watched grew upon me until I sprang up and turned with my back to the fire. Even then it was impossible to see all four entrances at once. I stood glancing from door to door, straining to listen over the thudding of my heart. My twin shadows swayed across the doorway of the study opposite, seeming to move independently. I thought of snuffing the candles; but then I would not be able to see the doors to the landing at all.

  I had learned at school that you could count seconds by your heartbeat. Mine was racing far faster than the measured ticking of a clock, but I began to count, anyway. Only I could not keep it up; I would reach twenty or thirty, and be distracted by some phantom sound or movement, and start again. Thus I endured an indefinite interval, while the windows darkened further and still Edwin did not return.

  I knew what I must do: find the other lantern and go down to the cellar; he might have fallen and sprained his ankle, or hit his head, or ... Only I did not know where the cellar was, and my teeth were already chattering with fear.

  Edwin, I thought, had left the other lantern by the entrance to the secret room. I took one of the candlesticks from the mantelpiece and, shielding the flame with my other hand, moved toward the connecting door.

  There was still a faint glow of twilight in the windows overhead, but the darkness at the far end of the gallery was already impenetrable, and the dazzle of the candle confused my eyes. The black bulk of the armour loomed between me and the entrance; instinctively, I circled around it, grit crunching beneath my feet, until I could see the mallet and chisel lying on the floor, but no lantern.

  Then I remembered that when Edwin had helped me down the stairs from the secret room, I had been carrying Cornelius's journal, but no lantern, and he had lit the way with his own. Mine was still burning on the table in the secret room.

  The last of my strength deserted me, and I sank to the floor, just managing to set the candlestick upright beside me. Hot wax stung the back of my hand. You must get up, you must get up, a voice in my head was saying, but my limbs would not obey.

  I was crouching a few feet from the fireplace, almost in front of the sarcophagus, which lay just within the circle of light from the candle. If you cannot stand, you must crawl, said the voice. I was making another effort to rise when I thought I heard a sound from the fireplace. I clenched my teeth to stop them chattering. There it was again, a heavy, muffled, grating sound, like stone sliding upon stone. It seemed to be coming from beneath the floor in front in me.

  The grating ceased; for several seconds there was absolute silence, then a faint metallic creak. I held my breath; the candle flame steadied.

  The lid of Sir Henry Wraxford's tomb was slowly rising.

  My heart gave one appalling lurch and stopped beating altogether. The next second, as it seemed, I was on the far side of the connecting door, with the key rattling in the lock as I fought to turn it. I could see the faint glimmer of my candle shining through the gap beneath the door. Then another, stronger light began to play about my feet; there was a creak, and thump, and the sound of footsteps approaching.

  I thought of running for the stairs, but I had no light, and the visitant would hunt me down. The door handle rattled; the door shook; the footsteps moved purposefully away. In a few moments, it would be on the landing. I had not time to run and lock all the doors at the
far end of the library. I thought of the weapons arrayed along the gallery wall—too high for me to reach. The tin box Vernon Raphael had left—there might be something in it I could use to defend myself, if my shaking hands could hold it, and I did not faint.

  The grey cylinder Edwin had found. I could light it with the candle and throw it at—whatever was pursuing me. Most likely I would die, but if it seized me, I would die anyway, and far more horribly.

  The footsteps were still receding. I gripped the key with both nerveless hands and twisted. There was a rasp and a snick, but the footsteps did not pause. I withdrew the key and slipped back into the gallery, just as a light passed out through the double doors at the other end. The beam of a lantern played across the wall beyond; then the footsteps moved off along the landing, boards creaking at every tread. For a moment I thought I might be spared, but then I heard the squeak of hinges as my pursuer entered the library. I tried to slip the key into the keyhole, but my hand was shaking so violently that I dared not let the metal touch.

  My candle still burned where I had left it on the floor. There was the tin box, two paces away, partly obscured by the shadow of the armour. Footsteps moved within the library—one, two, three, and then a pause. Light flickered beneath the door. Biting my lip to stifle a moan of terror, I stole over to the box and opened the lid, but could see nothing within. My fingers touched something round, and I drew out the cylinder. The footsteps were moving again—I could not tell which way.

  I moved toward the candle, almost tripping over the hem of my dress. As I knelt to the flame, I realised I had no idea how fast the wick would burn. The floor seemed to be dropping away beneath my feet. If you faint, it will catch you, said the voice. Better to die instantly: I touched the end of the wick to the flame and it began to burn with a faint, sputtering, reddish spark, but crawling so slowly I could scarcely see it move.

  In that extremity of terror, I saw my only chance of salvation. I darted over to the armour, grasped the hilt of the sword, and placed the cylinder inside as the plates sprang open. Then I tore at my dress, ripped away a handful of fabric, and slammed the plates upon it. The footsteps paused, and then moved rapidly toward the door. I fled blindly into the darkness until I collided painfully with a wall and had just time to huddle, only half-concealed, behind a musty tapestry before a lantern beam swept across the floor, flitted over the open tomb, and settled upon the folds of fabric caught between the plates of the armour.