Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We’re together . . . we’re together. I don’t mind where I live, so long as I have you.’

  At last he had lost so much blood that he had to stop pushing, and lie on top of her, panting. He was beginning to feel cold, but he didn’t mind, because he had Jacqueline. He tried to shift himself a little, to make himself more comfortable, but Jacqueline crackled underneath him, as if she were made of nothing but broken glass.

  The afternoon seemed to pass like a dream, or a poem. The sun reached the floor and sparkled on the fragments of bloodied mirror. Jack could see his own reflection in a piece of Jacqueline’s cheek, and he thought to himself, now I know what she means about the last boat whistling in the last harbor.

  Eventually it began to grow dark, and the bedroom filled with shadows.

  For often thro’ the silent nights

  A funeral, with plumes and lights

  And music, went to Camelot.

  Or when the moon was overhead

  Came two young lovers lately wed;

  ‘I am half-sick of shadows,’ said

  The Lady of Shalott.

  Punipuni knocked on Jack’s door at midnight. He made three paces through the room; then stopped.

  ‘Oh, Mr German-cellar,’ he said. He pressed his hand over his mouth to stop himself from sobbing out loud, although nobody would have heard him. ‘Oh, Mr German-cellar.’

  He wrapped Jack’s body in the multicolored durry from the bed, and carried him down to the street. He stowed him into the trunk of his ageing brown Kamikaze, and drove him to the Embarcadero. The night was very clear, and the stars were so bright that it was difficult to tell which was city and which was sky.

  He found a leaky abandoned rowboat beside one of the piers. He lifted Jack into it, and laid him on his back, so that his bloodied face was looking up at Cassiopeia. Then he untied the rope, and gave the rowboat a push, so that it slowly floated away. The reflected lights of Camelot glittered all around it, red and yellow and green.

  Punipuni stood and watched it with his hands in his pockets. ‘Men should never go looking for darkness, Mr German-cellar. You can only find darkness in a closed cupboard.’

  During the night, as the tide ebbed, the rowboat drifted out toward the ocean, under the Golden Gate bridge.

  As the tide began to turn, another rowboat appeared from the opposite direction, and in this rowboat lay a naked woman in sunglasses, lying on a bed of dried brown chrysanthemums. The two rowboats knocked against each other with a hollow sound, like coffins; and then they drifted away, their prows locked together as if there were only one rowboat, reflected in a mirror.

  Reflection of Evil

  It was raining so hard that Mark stayed in the Range Rover, drinking cold espresso straight from the flask and listening to a play on the radio about a widow who compulsively knitted cardigans for her recently dead husband.

  ‘It took me ages to find this shade of gray. Shale, they call it. It matches his eyes.’

  ‘He’s dead, Maureen. He’s never going to wear it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Nobody dies, so long as you remember what they looked like.’

  He was thinking about calling it a day when he saw Katie trudging across the field toward him, in her bright red raincoat, with the pointy hood. As she approached he let down the window, tipping out the last of his coffee. The rain spattered icy-cold against his cheek.

  ‘You look drowned!’ he called out. ‘Why don’t you pack it in?’

  ‘We’ve found something really exciting, that’s why.’

  She came up to the Range Rover and pulled back her hood. Her curly blonde hair was stuck to her forehead and there was a drip on the end of her nose. She had always put him in mind of a poor bedraggled fairy, even when she was dry, and today she looked as if she had fallen out of her traveler’s joy bush and into a puddle.

  ‘Where’s Nigel?’ he asked her.

  ‘He’s still there, digging.’

  ‘I told him to survey the ditches. What the hell’s he digging for?’

  ‘Mark, we think we might have found Shalott.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  Katie wiped the rain from her face with the back of her hand. ‘Those ditches aren’t ditches, they used to be a stream, and there’s an island in the middle. And those lumps we thought were Iron Age sheep pens, they’re stones, all cut and dressed, like the stones for building a wall.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Mark. ‘And you and Nigel, being you and Nigel, you immediately thought “Shalott”!’

  ‘Why not? It’s in the right location, isn’t it, upstream from Cadbury?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘Come on, Katie, I know that you and Nigel think that Camelot was all true. If you dug up an old tomato-ketchup bottle you’d probably persuade yourselves that it came from the Round Table.’

  ‘It’s not just the stones, Mark. We’ve found some kind of metal frame. It’s mostly buried, but Nigel’s trying to get it out.’

  ‘A frame?’

  Katie stretched her arms as wide as she could. ‘It’s big, and it’s very tarnished. Nigel thinks it could be a mirror.’

  ‘I get it . . . island, Camelot, mirror. Must be Shalott!’

  ‘Come and have a look anyway. I mean, it might just be scrap, but you never know.’

  Mark checked his watch. ‘Let’s leave it till tomorrow. We can’t do anything sensible in this weather.’

  ‘I don’t think we can just leave it there. Supposing somebody else comes along and decides to finish digging it up? It could be valuable. If we have found Shalott, and it if is a mirror—’

  ‘Katie, read my lips, Shalott is a myth. Whatever it is you’ve dug up, can’t you just cover it up again and leave it till tomorrow? It’s going to be pitch dark in half an hour.’

  Katie put on one of those faces that meant she was going to go on nagging about this until she got her own way. They weren’t having any kind of relationship, but ever since Katie had joined the company, six weeks ago, they had been mildly flirting with each other, and Mark wouldn’t have minded if it went a little further. He let his head drop down in surrender, and said, ‘OK . . . if I must.’

  The widow in the radio play was still fretting about her latest sweater. ‘He’s not so very keen on raglan sleeves . . . he thinks they make him look round-shouldered.’

  ‘He’s dead, Maureen. He probably doesn’t have any shoulders.’

  Katie turned around and started back up the hill. Mark climbed down from the Range Rover, slammed the door, and trudged through the long grass behind her. The skies were hung with filthy gray curtains, and the wind was blowing directly from the north-east, so that his wet raincoat collar kept petulantly slapping his face. He wouldn’t have come out here at all, not today, but the weather had put him eleven days behind schedule, and the county council were starting to grow impatient.

  ‘We’re going to be bloody popular!’ he shouted. ‘If this is bloody Shalott!’

  Katie spun around as she walked, her hands thrust deep in her duffel-coat pockets. ‘But it could be! A castle, on an island, right in the heart of King Arthur country!’

  Mark caught up with her. ‘Forget it, Katie. It’s all stories – especially the Lady of Shalott. Burne-Jones, Tennyson, the Victorians loved that kind of thing. A cursèd woman in a castle, dying of unrequited love. Sounds like my ex, come to think of it.’

  They topped the ridge. Through the misty swathes of rain, they could just about make out the thickly wooded hills that half encircled the valley on the eastern side. Below them lay a wide, boggy meadow. A straggling line of knobbly topped willows crossed the meadow diagonally from south-east to north-west, like a procession of medieval monks, marking the course of an ancient ditch. They could see Nigel about a quarter of a mile away, in his fluorescent yellow jacket and his white plastic helmet, digging.

  Mark clasped his hands together and raised his eyes toward the overbearing clouds. ‘Dear Lord, if You’re up there, please let Nigel be
digging up a bit of old bedstead.’

  ‘But if this is Shalott—’ Katie persisted.

  ‘It isn’t Shalott, Katie. There is no Shalott, and there never was. Even if it is – which it isn’t – it’s situated slap bang in the middle of the proposed route for the Woolston relief road, which is already three and a half years late and six point nine million pounds over budget. Which means that the county council will have to rethink their entire highways-building plan, and we won’t get paid until the whole mess has gone through a full-scale public enquiry, which probably means in fifteen years’ time.’

  ‘But think of it!’ said Katie. ‘There – where Nigel’s digging – that could be the island where the castle used to stand, where the Lady of Shalott wove her tapestries. And these were the fields where the reapers heard her singing! And that ditch was the river, where she floated down to Camelot in her boat, singing her last lament before she died!’

  ‘If any of that is true, sweetheart, then this is the hill where you and I and Historic Site Assessment Plc went instantly bankrupt.’

  ‘But we’d be famous, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t. You don’t think for one moment that we’d be allowed to dig it up, do you? Every medieval archeologist from every university in the western hemisphere would be crawling all over this site like bluebottles over a dead hedgehog.’

  ‘We’re perfectly well qualified.’

  ‘No, darling, we’re not, and I think you’re forgetting what we do. We don’t get paid to find sites of outstanding archeological significance interest, we get paid not to find them. Bronze Age buckle? Shove it in your pocket and rediscover it five miles away, well away from the proposed new supermarket site. An Iron Age sheep pen, fine. We can call in a JCB and have it shifted to the Ancient Britain display at Frome. But not Shalott, Katie. Shalott would bloody sink us.’

  They struggled down the hill and across the meadow. The rain began to ease off, but the wind was still blustery. As they clambered down the ditch, and up the other side, Nigel stood up and took off his helmet. He was very tall, Nigel, with tight curly hair, a large complicated nose, and a hesitant, disconnected way of walking and talking. But Mark hadn’t employed him for his looks or his physical coordination or his people skills. He had employed him because of his MA Hist. and his Dip. Arch. & Landscape, which were prominently displayed on the top of the company notepaper.

  ‘Nigel! How’s it going? Katie tells me you’ve found Shalott.’

  ‘Well – no – Mark! I don’t like to jump to – you know – hah! – hasty conclusions! Not when we could be dealing with – pff! I don’t know! – the most exciting archeological find ever! But these stones, look!’

  Mark turned to Katie and rolled up his eyes in exaggerated weariness. But Katie said, ‘Go on, Mark. Look.’

  Nigel was circling around the rough grassy tussocks, flapping his hands. ‘I’ve cut back some of the turf, d’you see – and – underneath – well, see?’ He had already exposed six or seven rectangular stones, the color of well-matured Cheddar cheese. Every stone bore a dense pattern of chisel marks, as if it had been gnawed by a giant stone-eating rat.

  ‘Bath stone,’ said Nigel. ‘Quarried from Hazlebury most likely, and look at that jadding . . . late thirteenth century, in my humble opinion. Certainly not cut by the old method.’

  Mark peered at the stones and couldn’t really see anything but stones. ‘The old method?’

  Nigel let out a honk of laughter. ‘Silly, isn’t it? The old method is what quarrymen used to call the new method – cutting the stone with saws, instead of breaking it away with bars.’

  ‘What wags they were. But what makes you think this could be Shalott?’

  Nigel shielded his eyes with his hand and looked around the meadow, blinking. ‘The location suggests it, more than anything else. You can see by the way these foundation stones are arranged that there was certainly a tower here. You don’t use stones five feet thick to build a single-story pigsty, do you? But then you have to ask yourself why would you build a tower here?’

  ‘Do you? Oh yes, I suppose you do.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have picked the middle of a valley to build a fort,’ said Nigel. ‘You would only build a tower here as a folly, or to keep somebody imprisoned, perhaps.’

  ‘Like the Lady of Shalott?’

  ‘Well, exactly.’

  ‘So, if there was a tower here, where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘Oh, pilfered, most likely. As soon its owners left it empty, most of the stones would have been carried off by local smallholders, for building walls and stables and farmhouses. I’ll bet you could still find them if you went looking for them.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bet you could,’ said Mark, blowing his nose. ‘Pity they didn’t take the lot.’

  Nigel blinked at him through rain-speckled glasses. ‘If they’d done that – hah! – we never would have known that this was Shalott, would we?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Nigel said, ‘I don’t think the tower was standing here for very long. At a very rough estimate it was built just before twelve seventy-five, and most likely abandoned during the Black Death, around thirteen forty.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Mark was already trying to work out what equipment they were going to need to shift these stones and where they could dump them. Back at Hazelbury quarry, maybe, where they originally came from. Nobody would ever find them there. Or maybe they could sell them as garden benches. He had a friend in Chelsea who ran a profitable sideline in ancient stones and eighteenth-century garden ornaments, for wealthy customers who weren’t too fussy where they came from.

  Nigel took hold of Mark’s sleeve and pointed to a stone that was still half buried in grass. There were some deep marks chiseled into it. ‘Look – you can just make out a cross, and part of a skull, and the letters DSPM. That’s an acronym for medieval Latin, meaning “God save us from the pestilence within these walls”.’

  ‘So whoever lived in this tower was infected with the Black Death?’

  ‘That’s the most obvious assumption, yes.’

  Mark nodded. ‘OK, then . . .’ he said, and kept on nodding.

  ‘This is very, very exciting,’ said Nigel. ‘I mean, it’s – well! – it could be stupefying, when you come to think of it!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark. He looked around the site, still nodding. ‘Katie told me you’d found some metal thing.’

  ‘Well! Hah! That’s the clincher, so far as I’m concerned! At least it will be, if it turns out to be what I think it is!’

  He strode back to the place where he had been digging, and Mark reluctantly followed him. Barely visible in the mud was a length of blackened metal, about a meter and a half long and curved at both ends.

  ‘It’s a fireguard, isn’t it?’ said Mark. Nigel had cleaned a part of it, and he could see that there were flowers embossed on it, and bunches of grapes, and vine tendrils. In the center of it was a lump that looked like a human face, although it was so encrusted with mud that it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

  Mark peered at it closely. ‘An old Victorian fireguard, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Nigel. ‘I think it’s the top edge of a mirror. And a thirteenth century mirror, at that.’

  ‘Nigel . . . a mirror, as big as that, in twelve seventy-five? They didn’t have glass mirrors in those days, remember. This would have to be solid silver, or silver-plated, at least.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Nigel. ‘A solid silver mirror – five feet across.’

  ‘That’s practically unheard of.’

  ‘Not if The Lady of Shalott was true. She had a mirror, didn’t she, not for looking at herself, but for looking at the world outside, so that she could weave a tapestry of life in Camelot, without having to look at it directly!

  ‘There she weaves by night and day

  A magic web with colors gay.

  She has heard a whisper say

  A curse is on her if she
stay

  To look down to Camelot.

  ‘But moving through a mirror clear

  That hangs before her all the year,

  Shadows of the world appear . . .’

  Katie joined in:

  ‘And in her web she still delights

  To weave the mirror’s magic sights

  For often thro’ the silent nights

  A funeral, with plumes and lights

  And music, went to Camelot.’

  ‘Top of the class,’ said Mark. ‘Now, how long do you think it’s going to take to dig this out?’

  ‘Oh . . . several weeks,’ said Nigel. ‘Months, even.’

  ‘I hope that’s one of your University of Essex jokes.’

  ‘No, well, it has to be excavated properly. We don’t want to damage it, do we? And there could well be other valuable artifacts hidden in the soil all around it. Combs, buttons, necklaces, who knows? We need to fence this area off, don’t we, and inform the police, and the British Museum?’

  Mark said, ‘No, Nigel, we don’t.’

  Nigel slowly stood up, blinking with perplexity. ‘Mark – we have to! This tower, this mirror – they could change the entire concept of Arthurian legend! They’re archeological proof that the Lady of Shalott wasn’t just a story, and that Camelot was really here!’

  ‘Nigel, that’s a wonderful notion, but it’s not going to pay off our overdraft, is it?’

  Katie said, ‘I don’t understand. If this is the Lady of Shalott’s mirror, and it’s genuine, it could be worth millions!’

  ‘It could, yes. But not to us. Treasure trove belongs to Her Majesty’s Government. Not only that, this isn’t our land, and we’re working under contract for the county council. So our chances of getting a share of it are just about zero.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ said Nigel. ‘You want us to bury it again, and forget we ever found it? We can’t do that!’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Mark told him, ‘I’m not suggesting that for a moment.’ He pointed to the perforated vines in the top of the frame. ‘We could run a couple of chains through here, though, couldn’t we, and use the Range Rover to pull it out?’