Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  “Don’t be silly. One: there’s plenty of room. Sallen often doubles as a guest house. Two: it’s close to Auderlene, next property over. Three: I’m one of the custodians of the place. Keeper of the keys. I can get you in, help you find the thing if it’s still there to be found.”

  I couldn’t believe it and yet, after landing regular freelance work for The Weekend Australian, then meeting a truck driver who’d met a farmer who knew about a forgotten meteorite, it was clearly a world where anything was possible.

  “And four?” I shouldn’t have said it. I was just too happy, too relieved to think twice.

  Gilly pretended outrage. “Now, now! I’d have to know you a lot better before there was any talk of a number four!”

  She gave me a wink that was playfully ambiguous, then went on as businesslike as you please.

  “A few house rules up front, Nev. No one gets to spend the night at Auderlene, so put that out of your head right away. You want to look for a meteor, we do it during the day. The old girl was insistent before she died. She had a special document drawn up back in 1968, had meetings with the local council. She lost her only boy in 1912. Very tragic. An outing with other kids went wrong. Some said murder, others manslaughter. Most said too much skylarking down at the weir one day. Anyway there was no other family. Jeanette Pratican left the house and grounds to the local community of Summerton for ‘its recreation and general well-being’ on the sole condition that three stipulations were met. I can quote them pretty much as they’re written. There had to be ‘no fewer than seven horses kept on the grounds at all times, allowed free run and given proper care.’ The house was to remain ‘untenanted, uninhabited, and unimproved beyond the reasonable maintenance of all existing structures.’ Last of all, while it was ‘to serve as a museum for the common good during daylight hours,’ under no circumstances could anyone ‘remain between seven in the evening and six in the morning.’ Mrs. Pratican was very specific.”

  “Did she give reasons?”

  “Not that I know of. It was take it or leave it. Enough of the Pratican fortune remained at interest to ensure it went the way she said. So you’ll still find the horses, still find Harry Barrowman and his boys doing odd jobs, and the historical society reps—that’s Harry, Chris Goodlan and me—making sure the doors and gates are always locked at sundown.”

  “There are rooms the public doesn’t get to see?”

  “Eighteen of the twenty-two are open. The rest are for archives, office space, that sort of thing. There’s no meteorite in plain view, Nev. None that we’ve seen. We’ve been through her stuff lots of times.”

  “But there are vitrines? Display cases?”

  “There are.”

  “Gilly, with something like this, the angle you take on a story is almost as important as the story itself—”

  The grin was there. “You did mention that.”

  I grinned back. “Reckon I did. It’s just people aren’t that interested in rocks from space. They are interested in rocks from space that seem to have been hushed up and have a story attached. Please, let me know up front. What are the chances of this meteorite business being a local beat-up?”

  Gilly hopped off the bar stool, smoothed her denim skirt, and took her car keys from her shoulder bag. “You’re the one who has to decide that. Let me show you the place. And the suits. Wait till you see them. Wonderful or awful, depending on your taste. You follow me out in your car. I’ve got to get back and work here till four. Chris Goodlan will show you round.”

  Five minutes out of town, Gilly honked the horn of her Land Rover and did a bent-arm pointing gesture at the big house on her left. The sign above the front gate said SALLEN. It looked fine.

  Another thirty seconds along the road and we were at Auderlene.

  Everything Gilly, the truck driver, and his farmer had led me to expect was true. The property was the kind of enclave of transplanted Englishness that was such a cultural signature during the heyday of the British Empire and had endured as cherished benchmarks of Britishness even more vividly during the long afternoon of its decline. You found similar estates, similar enclaves in the once fashionable surrounds of Capetown at Stellenbosch and Franschoek, close by Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park or Ontario’s Almonte, in the exclusive parts of Christchurch, yes, and all over the Indian subcontinent as abandoned touchpoints of what was once the British Raj: a stylish, modest Warwickshire mansion set in spacious grounds, but imposed—like one map intercut with another, leaving oaks dislocating into eucalypts, hedges into scrub, like something out of one of those forever restless colonial paintings by John Glover. In fact, strip away the town and the estuarine harbor from Glover’s 1832 painting, Hobart Town, taken from the Garden where I lived, leaving Stanwell Hall, and you pretty well had Auderlene: an elegant, two-storied mansion set among fields and well-tamed bushland.

  And, as Gilly had said, there were horses. All seven came trotting over to the gate as she unlocked the padlock and chain. She gave each one a sugar cube from the pocket of her skirt.

  “Chris is up at the house, Nev. You drive on over and he’ll show you round. I’ll lock the gate behind you. Come back to the pub when you’re done and let me know what you’ve decided about Sallen.”

  There wasn’t a wink this time, but she did give that all-conquering smile.

  A short amiable-looking man in his midsixties was waiting for me as I pulled in. When I’d parked the car, he greeted me warmly by the front steps.

  “Chris Goodlan,” he said, shaking hands.

  “Neville Reid, Chris. Nev.”

  “Come on in, Nev. Gilly phoned on the way over and said to give you the tour. Said you’re doing an article or something.”

  “Hoping to, Chris. Depends on what I turn up.”

  “Well, let me do the honors.”

  The long front hall opened onto large sunny rooms to the left and right, then led us into what had once been a formal ballroom as wide as the house. It was sparsely furnished now, with just a few chairs against the side walls and a chaise longue positioned in front of a large Persian rug laid out in the middle of the floor. Impressive identical staircases to either side led to upstairs bedrooms; a central door beyond the rug continued through to what were no doubt the kitchen and service rooms.

  But what immediately caught the eye were the five suits of medieval armor standing in raised alcoves in the wall between those flanking staircases, three to the left of the main axial door, two to the right; the second alcove of the right-hand three was empty. Each niche was set a foot above the polished timber floor, and just large enough and deep enough—with the one exception—to accommodate its iron suit.

  Though they weren’t really suits of armor, I quickly saw, or even convincing replicas for that matter. I’d done a project on medieval armor back in high school, and had seen museum exhibitions of Kunz Lochner suits from Nuremberg and some fine fifteenth-century Italian suits from Milan. More than a cursory glance showed that each suit here was clearly a single rigid whole, a hollow welded iron statue painted a drab matt black that further ruined any chance of their being taken for the real thing. The pauldrons across the shoulders were curved iron segments clamped and welded onto the breastplates and identical on each one, as if the same template had been used over and over for convenience sake. The groin tassets were flat functional plates, angled and fixed in place as if their creator had been following a simplistic illustration in some old picture book. What would have been the vambraces and rerebraces on the arms and the cuishes and greaves on the legs were not shaped to protect human limbs at all, but rather were completely sealed stovepipe tubes tapered appropriately. Their joint guards—the couters at the elbows and poleyns at the knees—were token fixtures as well, cut and folded, then welded in place, while the gauntlets were locked fists, never to be opened. The feet in their iron sollerets were planted together at the heels, but turned outwards in the same duck-footed stance.

  It was the full-face helmets that gave them their greate
st semblance of authenticity. They looked like true early medieval casques and basinets for the most part, complete with fearsome eye-slits and breathing and vision perforations at the front. Left to right, suits one, three, and five had great helms in the distinctive, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century “bucket” style, like the headpieces of antique robots. Suits two and four had the pointed “pig-faced” visor style from the mid-1400s that had always struck me as so bestial and disturbing.

  Love them or hate them, it was quite a display. Comical yet dramatic.

  And there were contradictions. While they were clearly homemade constructs, the joins and seals that I could see were all full welds. There was no spot welding anywhere.

  “Quite something, eh?” Chris Goodlan said. “You see why the bus tours get a kick out of coming out here.”

  “Very striking,” I said, though I thought they looked awful. Who would give over a feature room like this to such an overpowering display? “They’re more like statues really. Hollow iron statues. You can’t take them apart.”

  “You can’t, no,” Chris said, as if he feared I might try.

  “Off the record, what do you think of them?”

  “Well, they’re part of the place, aren’t they? Old Nettie Pratican—”

  “Off the record, Chris. Just between us.”

  Chris Goodlan chuckled. “Bloody eyesores, if you ask me. But Mrs. Pratican loved ’em well enough.”

  “Loved them? Really?”

  “Well, she had ’em made, didn’t she? Set ’em up like this. I mean, she had Myron Birch and his boys turn ’em out back in 1914.”

  “Any of the Birches still around?”

  “Killed on the Somme in September 1916, all of ’em, if you can believe it. Father and sons. Bloody tragedy. The mother had already died. They made these for Mrs. P. before they went away.”

  “Where’s the sixth one?”

  “There were only ever the five, Nev.”

  “There are six alcoves.”

  “Lots of folks ask about that. But only five suits were made. Maybe there was meant to be a sixth and it was never finished. The Birches never said, but then again they were none of ’em much for writing stuff down.”

  “Did Mrs. Pratican leave any specs? Invoices? Diary entries?”

  “Nothing we’ve found. No meteor either, Nev. Sorry.”

  “Chris, I have to ask. You’ve probably lived here quite a while.”

  “All my life, man and boy.”

  “Any chance that meteorite they talk about was melted down and included in this lot?”

  Someone else might have showed surprise at such a notion or expressed curiosity as to why someone would do such a thing. Not Chris Goodlan. “Gilly said you might be doing a piece on the Star. Well, I’ve got to tell you, Nev. From what I heard growing up, that meteor wouldn’t have been much larger than my fist. It wouldn’t be enough to do much good. Those suits are mostly just fourteen or sixteen gauge sheet iron reworked, as far as I can tell, but that’s still a lot of metal. You can climb up and take a look yourself if you want. Grab a chair from out back. You’ll see they’re hollow sheet iron.”

  “But it could have been included? If a metallurgical analysis was ever done, say?”

  Again Chris Goodlan looked worried. “Couldn’t allow anythin’ like that, Nev. Things have got to be left.”

  “Of course. But hypothetically?”

  “Well, sure. Anything’s possible. Could’ve been melted right in when the Birches got working.”

  “Where did they have their workshop?”

  “The foundry was in town. But if you look round back through the trees, you’ll see some old work sheds just off the estate. They set up a small furnace there and brought out what they needed.”

  “For secrecy?”

  Now Chris did look puzzled. “Convenience, I would’ve thought. Just large enough for the cutting and welding. And Mrs. P. could check on the progress.”

  It all sounded reasonable enough. The angles for my article seemed to be growing fewer by the minute.

  “So what’s with the curfew, Chris? No one being allowed to stay over?”

  “Beats me, Nev. One of the rules though. Doors are locked by five or six most days. It’s how she wanted it.”

  “But why?”

  “Why indeed?” Chris said. “She was a weird old bird. Got weirder when Andrew died.” Then he sighed and slapped his thighs as if he had decided it best to change the subject. “But she did leave us Auderlene. Let me show you the rest of the place.”

  Chris Goodlan was patient and very helpful. He waited while I checked in cupboards and cabinets, shifted smaller items of furniture, even moved things on shelves to look at what might be concealed behind. He reassured me five or six times that he had nothing better to do, that he was supposed to be keeping an eye on things. “Nothing personal, mind,” he kept saying. It was in the rules.

  There were indeed the vitrines and display cases Gilly had mentioned, things that clearly served as the sort of cabinets of curiosities that would probably have housed an unusual found object like a meteorite. There was nothing that looked remotely like it might be the Pratican Star.

  I examined anything that could have been fashioned out of meteoric iron just in case: metal statues and figurines, lamp stands, decorative buckles, finials and locks. They all turned out to be bronze, brass, or pewter as far as I could tell, many with conspicuous craftsmen’s marks stamped into them.

  But it gave us lots to talk about, mostly about how such items fitted into the town’s history. Things became so easy between us in fact that, over a cup of instant coffee Chris fetched us from the kitchen, I was able to bring up Gilly Nescombe’s role in the whole thing.

  “Chris, what’s Gilly’s place in this? She doesn’t seem like a history buff. She’s not a relative.”

  “Just someone who values what we have,” he said, willingly enough it seemed. “But you go easy on her, Nev. She’s had a hard time of it, what with the miscarriage and the divorce four years back. Other things.”

  “Other things?” I couldn’t help myself.

  Chris cooled a little. He’d said too much. “She’ll bring it up if she wants to. I’m saying it in a neighborly way, you understand, but you just go easy.”

  I did end up staying at Sallen. Gilly put me up in a large airy room on the northern side of the house, and I met her other two guest house regulars, Lorna Gillard and Jim Camberson, over a fine roast chicken dinner around seven o’clock that evening.

  If her “number four” quip from the morning had been any kind of come-on, there was no sign of it. Which was probably just as well; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so taken with someone. But in view of Chris Goodlan’s advice, I made sure that I remained appropriately interested yet suitably gentle and respectful.

  Still, the possibility of alienating Gilly was soon to be much more of a reality. I’d decided that I had to see Auderlene again, had to go inside on my own and—yes—after dark. It wasn’t just that the old mansion had been calling to me through my bedroom window while I was unpacking, nothing so simple or melodramatic. As much as I wanted to look around without being watched, it was more a case of getting the feel of the place in all its phases, grabbing some genuine atmosphere, even angles on future pieces I might try. My vacation was almost over and I’d come all this way. I was having an adventure. It would be wrong, a breach of trust certainly, but what real harm could it do? I’d just play dumb, be the too-eager outtatowner who never for a moment thought it was such a big deal.

  Dinner was followed by two hours of cards and some rounds of Pictionary that were more fun than I ever thought such things could be.

  At 10 P.M. I excused myself and made a strategic withdrawal, trying my best to follow Chris Goodlan’s advice.

  Back in my room, I stretched out on the bed fully clothed and waited for the household to settle.

  Now Auderlene did seem to call to me across the fields of dry grass and eucalyp
ts, no more than ten minutes away in the fragrant spring evening. I had to see the place at night. It was starting to feel like a compulsion.

  After an hour or so of doors closing and the house growing quiet, the time seemed right. It was 11:20. If Gilly caught me going out, I’d say I needed some air, that my mind was racing with ideas and possibilities, that I had to relax myself a little.

  No one noticed me as far as I could tell. The faint sound of a television came from one of the other guest rooms, otherwise nobody stirred.

  The keys marked AUDERLENE 2 were on a hook by the back door. Within minutes I had them in my pocket, had my torch from the car, and was crossing Gilly’s property toward Auderlene’s southern boundary.

  More than ever I was keenly aware of failing these new friends in a fundamental way. With every step I kept trying to justify it to myself, going over the excuses I’d give if Gilly had heard me go and confronted me later. Like that I’d noticed something at the old mansion earlier that day that I hadn’t asked Chris about and it was bothering me, wouldn’t let me rest. Like that I hadn’t believed the curfew business was meant to be taken seriously, not really; I’d meant no harm. Or perhaps telling it like it was, that this had become something all its own, vitally important in an odd way. I had to see the Pratican place alone and during curfew. Just did.

  No excuses seemed to cover it, but the fact that I kept trying to come up with them said everything about how I felt about being in Summerton. At Sallen.

  But soon I was at the front steps of the old house and there were other things to think about. There had been no alarm fittings that I had seen, no security keypads or warning signs. Auderlene wasn’t set up that way yet. There were just dead bolts on the access doors and the ground-floor windows, a padlock on the gate out by the road.

  I would have rather used the back door under the circumstances, but, while the front door faced the highway at the end of the drive, that was the approach I knew.

  There were six keys on the AUDERLENE 2 ring and I began trying them. The fourth turned smoothly in the lock; the main door opened without so much as a squeak.