To the Devil - a Diva!

by Paul Magrs

  So imagine my not inconsiderable chagrin at being silenced and stilled for all this time. For over forty years I produced a million words a year. I plucked them out of the air and tamed them. I hammered them out and nailed them down. My volumes were sturdy coffins buzzing with captive sentences and I delivered them proudly into the world. Great fanfare, annually. My eager audience shivered. They were addicted to my every utterance. I was sorcerer and seer. A prophet really, with a task bestowed upon me from on high.

  There was a warning I had to give mankind.

  That’s what my millions of words represented.

  That’s what the skull beneath the skin was shrieking. Blatant, explicit, under the trappings of popular talespinning.

  But readers can be very stupid, I suppose.

  I met a great many of my legion of enthusiasts during the decades of my effortless supremacy. The fools. They thought I had made everything up. They thought I was indulging, along with them, in dimwitted fantasies, in vicarious thrills.

  Or worse, they would take me all too literally. They thought I had actually partaken of the revolting practices I described in my novels. The dolts imagined I was advocating for all and sundry the joys of the fiendish occult practices I was in fact condemning.

  Even the ones who listened, never listened properly.

  So I speak to you now, from outside time, from outside space, and I am full of hope. Welcome, readers.

  Good evening!

  Here is my study.

  Observe this desk, which has pursued me across the world from home to home. I find it difficult to work at anything else. It’s walnut. Take note of its freight of yellowing papers in apparently untidy stacks. Stories, articles, chapters, letters, all in various states of completion. I tap everything out on that trusty Remington. Gun-metal grey. I keep the machine oiled and serviced, clean as my army revolver – which is cocked and locked in that bottom drawer. Just in case.

  The shelves lining each of these walls: look. This side, everything is mine. All eighty-nine of my novels, in each edition, translated into every language thinkable. The remainder of shelf-space contains my reference works. Invaluable to me, in all aspects of my labours. Arcane volumes and more popular, vulgar works. All concern themselves with the occult. I make no bones about that.

  Let me fill your glass. More brandy. Let us pull our armchairs up to the fire. Admire the mantelpiece. Flatter my taste. Everything here was built and fitted to my exact specifications. I am indeed a hard taskmaster where taste is concerned. Just ask my poor agent, my editor, my servants, and my dear wife, Magda. A man like me has to have things just so. This is necessary, in order to let the precious words come. So many souls are dependent on my work being completed satisfactorily. To my satisfaction. Not, as I have already hinted, for the simple purposes of entertainment. Rather, for the sake of the world.

  Mind your feet. Shift yourself along a bit. You’re scuffing up the circle of salt. Didn’t you see it? Your powers of observation disappoint me. Here, sit within the ring of my protection. As I tell my tale, you must remain inside this circumference. It’s not there for decoration.

  Right. Are we comfortable?

  Let us begin with the eating of brains.

  Don’t splutter so. That brandy is expensive. And don’t pretend you didn’t know what you were likely to hear. This evening you have strayed into the home of Fox Soames. To sit by his fireplace and to hear awful tales from the lips of the great man himself. Don’t make out you didn’t know it would give you the willies.

  I was quite serious. My story for you this evening is concerned with an ancient and delicate procedure that both modern science and morality would declare barbaric.

  But think on this. What a waste it is, that when a human body breathes its last, the precious brain – an organ miraculous in even the dullest of specimens – must also die. What a terrible misuse of material. All the lights go out suddenly, cleanly as the shutting down of the electrical grid. Blackout. And the process is irreversible. Those millions of cells – dark and shiny-moist, as dear as caviar – all die and their hard-won content, earned through the nightmarish work of day-to-day living: all of this is lost. The light is quenched.

  Except.

  There is a theory that those glittering cells may be salvaged and passed on to the remaining members of the tribe. Even our most brutish ancestors came to this conclusion.

  You’ve guessed it.

  My point is that those bygone hairy fellows, patrolling the frozen plains of northern Europe, were onto something after all. They weren’t quite the primitive sillies modern man fancies. They lived so very close to elemental nature. They worshipped the things they felt imminently: bones, fire, earth and water. Material things they touched in their everyday business. Who amongst us can say the same thing? What, exactly, do you worship?

  Perhaps not so brutish, after all.

  As I discovered, when I ate – just a little, mark you – of my Great Aunt Helen’s freshly-deceased organ. Back in the 1930s.

  She was a formidable woman, rather like a stoat. She lived in a manor I was fully expecting to become accustomed to. I was her only living heir. All the branches of our distinguished family tree terminated with my good self. This was a heavy burden perhaps, for the young, trembling leaf I then was.

  I would look at the glowering portraits hung in the main hall and I couldn’t help wondering at the nature of our curse. All those great bald domes of skulls; the liver-spotted claws. My fiancée and I on that first night at Great Aunt Helen’s stared back at those faces without much enthusiasm. We were young and feeling subtly menaced by this concentration of my forebears. My darling Magda murmured something to me to the effect that she hoped I wouldn’t wind up resembling my grandfathers. They were indeed a terrible-looking lot. I shivered, as if fearful they might be earwigging on us. And their oily eyes seemed to flash in the smoky candlelight.

  Magda was at her most beautiful then. Swan-necked, imperious. We were in our twenties and I was just down from Oxford. I say ‘down’, as the popular cliché has it, and that was just how it felt. I had slithered and descended from all that light and air and lolling around and now real life was beckoning. Here in this ancestral home everything was mouldy and fly-blown. Nothing had moved. No one had passed through the main doors in decades.

  Magda had been at first a little overwhelmed in these trappings. Her upbringing was of a different order to my own. She had been rather stirred by the sight of the manor, knowing that she was destined to share it, eventually, with me. Her posture had stiffened, upon arrival, but by evening some of the gloom had crept into her. She became almost stroppy and satirical. By the time my aunt joined us for dinner Magda was quite tipsy. Bolting back large glasses of cool amber wine. Quelling her nerves and pretending she belonged.

  The old lady was a shocking white. So frail, yet you knew she could lash out. There was still quite considerable force and will stored in that frame of hers.

  That night the talk was cordial and general as she inquired into my education and, gently, as to my plans. She was rather shocked at my determination to pursue a career as an author. I was surprised, myself, at declaring my hopes so suddenly, so openly. It didn’t do, in our world, to show one’s hand so readily.

  Great Aunt Helen thought my ambitions childish, and rather selfish. She wasted no time in letting me know this. ‘Historically, the Soamses have had a knack for dedicating themselves to the study of the Arts. A calling, you might say.’ She looked at me down her long, sharp nose. ‘An almost priestly devotion that we Soamses share.’

  I could sense beloved Magda growing restless and stiff at my side. She reached for the decanter once more and I could see that her movements had become blunt and jabbing. She giggled, ‘Your great aunt wants you to take holy orders, Fox.’

  Aunt Helen frowned. ‘Not quite. I merely want to dissuade my nephew from wasting and abusing his most important gifts.’

  Young fool that I was, I found myself warming to
this obvious flattery.

  ‘We will discuss this further, Fox,’ my aunt promised, and raked a glance over my bride-to-be. Withering.

  Then the talk drifted back to Oxford and how my rooms at St John’s had been close to the main gates, their leaded panes letting in the bright light of those open skies. How I could look over the Queen’s Road to the saloon bar where I met my friends at lunch time. I counted among those friends some of the more senior dons.

  ‘Elevated company,’ my Aunt raised her eyebrows, impressed, as I listed the names of my fellow scribes. ‘You have been lucky to make the acquaintance of such men, Fox. These connections will stand you in good stead.’

  I beamed at her, pleased that my efforts to get myself counted amongst the membership of the Smudgelings had impressed her so. ‘Worming in’ is what Magda generally called it. She thought me foolish for expending so much energy trying to come to the attention of Professor Reginald Tyler and the like.

  ‘Oh, they’re an awful bunch, Helen.’ She was slurring now, and I saw my aunt flinch and blanch at the interruption – and the familiarity. But Magda went on. ‘They sit about in that gloomy old bar, nattering on about their funny old books. Drinking the most horrible orange-coloured beer. And it’s not as if they’re doing anything important. They’re writing stories about dragons and goblins and pixies. Children’s stories! That’s what they’re all writing! And now Fox has caught the bug, too.’

  My great aunt stilled her with a single look. ‘I approve of Fox spending time with these men. For they know the power of the word. They know the magic of the word.’

  I was nodding excitedly, feeling the effects of the wine myself, by now. ‘That’s what Professor Tyler keeps saying. To write a thing … is to make it so.’

  ‘Then he is a very wise man.’ My aunt smiled. Not a very warm expression. ‘He understands the first precept of magic.’

  ‘Magic!’ Magda laughed.

  Dinner was at an end, soon after that. Out swept Great Aunt Helen, dragging the white train of her gown over the flagstones. She took the glow of my self-satisfaction with her, and both Magda and I vaguely sensed that we had disappointed her.

  Then, in the middle of that night, we were woken suddenly in our damp bedroom. Magda was first on the alert, tugging at my arm.

  My aunt was shrieking and ululating from her own room, down the corridor. It was an awful racket. Who’d have thought the old dame had so much breath in her?

  Full of gumption and spunk and, strapping as I was at that age, I hurried down the passageway to rap upon her door.

  ‘Great Aunt Helen?’ I called, feeling a fool.

  The shrieks had subsided into moans. I knocked again, more urgently.

  ‘Are you unwell? Shall I call for help?’ Though who there was to call out to in the middle of the Norfolk wilderness, I’m sure I didn’t know.

  At last her quavering tones filtered back to me. ‘It is nothing. Leave me.’

  And nothing was said the following morning.

  Great Aunt Helen was bright and – for her – almost chatty as we picked over some decidedly rank kippers. I could see darling Magda’s face screwed up in displeasure at the quality of the fare, but also at the dirtiness of the napkins, the mess of crumbs on the tablecloth. My fiancée was hungover and not enjoying her stay so far at all.

  That day – to ameliorate the atmosphere and mollify my sweetheart – we took a trip into Norwich. I had recently furnished myself with a motorcar and I was keen to get away from the darkness of the manor. I wanted the two of us to go bowling through narrow country lanes hanging with baby’s breath and wild poppies. We wanted to suck in the heady, healthy aroma of the East Anglian landscape: turkeys, pigs and broccoli. Then, a few hours of watching Magda fingering dress fabric and quizzing jewellers’ assistants would settle my nerves. I was, as it happened, quite rattled by Great Aunt Helen’s nocturnal outburst.

  ‘Was she drunk?’ Magda asked me as she clambered out of the car. I had parked right beside the cathedral, under the sticky green shelter of a tall lime. ‘She was drinking rather a lot at supper, I recall.’

  ‘She wasn’t drunk,’ I said tersely. Magda was making me protective of my aunt.

  ‘Not that I could sleep anyway,’ Magda sighed. ‘That mattress was sopping and stank of cats.’ Then she put aside all thoughts of our uncongenial home-from-home and devoted herself to the task of exploring the shops.

  That night Great Aunt Helen had another of her queer fits. This one was even more violent. Again I found myself banging on the sturdy wood of her bedroom door.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Fox,’ Magda had grunted. ‘Would you ask her to put a sock in it?’

  When I hammered and called this time, there came no reassuring words from my aunt, inviting me to mind my own business, assuring me she was actually fine. She simply kept on wailing and keening as if pursued by Beelzebub himself. Somewhere in the back of my fuddled mind I was wondering if Aunt Helen was plagued with the same vile nightmares that I had suffered since childhood. Perhaps they were just another familial inheritance.

  Now she sounded as if she were in the throes of agony. I could even hear her thrashing about on her bed. That couldn’t be any good for a lady of her years.

  So I took a deep breath, took hold of the brass doorknob and clicked open the door.

  Inside there was just a spill of milky moonlight from under the ill-fitting curtains. I waited till my eyes gradually became used to the dark. Here the noise was much worse. The old girl was really letting rip. She was squawking and caterwauling fit to burst and, as I had suspected, she was flinging herself about with abandon in her four-poster bed. I was frozen into immobility. Somehow, observing such a bizarre spectacle seemed to me distasteful, even obscene. It looked as if my octogenarian aunt was in the fevered and passionate grip of some phantom lover. Her nightgown was awfully rucked up.

  I told myself: be a man. I steeled my nerves and hastened to her bedside.

  Instantly Great Aunt Helen fell silent and still. Her bright blue eyes flew open and fixed me with a terrible look. She said, very distinctly: ‘He will not get out of me. My head feels like it will burst with the pressure of him. I am so scared, Fox. You have to help me. You must help me.’

  Then she passed out cold on her rumpled, perspiration sodden sheets. How odd, I remember thinking, that her words to me had been so composed and exact. And I also felt as if, by stepping up to that grand bed and listening to those weirdly calm sentences, I had taken my first real step into a story from which I would never escape.

  The following morning I decided that, if Aunt Helen attempted once more to pretend that nothing untoward had occurred, I would confront her. Magda egged me on, as she briskly powdered her face at the gorgeous dressing table. I glanced at her reflection in that mottled looking glass and received a sudden impression of how my beloved might look when old. The ambience of the manor and my aunt’s peculiar habits were getting to us both. But Magda’s voice held steady as she instructed me: ‘Have it out with her, Fox. Otherwise I’m going straight off to London. I’m not staying in the middle of nowhere with some horrible shrieking old woman.’ Then my darling heart turned her attention to her new Norwich-bought boots, which had little buttons all up the sides.

  I bearded my great aunt in her den. She was writing letters in her study. In the wash of morning light from the french windows she looked very drawn and wan. I felt a slight satisfaction that there was none of yesterday’s dissemblance. As we faced each other across her desk it was obvious that we both remembered and acknowledged what had passed in the depths of the night.

  ‘I want to know what this is all about,’ I said, palms flat and sweating on the worn, cool desk.

  As if in relief, my aunt sagged a little in her chair. Her resolve was melting. She could see that she now had a man to depend upon. I was gratified by this. I was there to help her.

  She asked me, ‘Has Magda heard my cries?’

  ‘She is as concerned as I am, Aun
t Helen,’ I said stiffly. Really, I look back and I must have been such a pompous ass. So full of myself. I was convinced I could protect my formidable Aunt.

  ‘That girl is not worthy of you,’ my aunt said. ‘You know that, Fox. She has her sights set high and you have given in to her. She is the first woman who would let you do as you would with her and you have made the mistake of promising her the earth. So grateful are you for her favours. I imagine that you will regret that, nephew.’

  I felt myself grow red with embarrassment, and then fury. But I couldn’t get any words out in retaliation.

  ‘She is common, Fox. All too common. Hasn’t she wondered at all why I have let the two of you share a room under my roof before you are married? Has she not questioned anything?’

  I was reverting to a schoolboy. I was mortified. ‘Magda realises that my upbringing, my education, were unorthodox … and she herself is a very modern girl …’

  ‘A whore,’ said my aunt simply.

  Our gazes locked and I was speechless.

  ‘You mention your education, Fox, and how it might be seen as unorthodox. There was a reason you were sent there. All that way north, to that particular establishment.’

  I frowned. Aunt Helen had never mentioned my schooling for a long time, had never gone into its particulars, though it had been her signature on the monthly cheques. Until I had left and found myself at Oxford I hadn’t thought my alma mater at all out of the ordinary run of things. But recently I had seen that it was. Nobody I knew had been to such a school as I had.

  Do what thy wilt be the whole of the Law. The first, most important rule of the school. The only important law in the world. Because of my education in the north, human love and sexual relations – human passions of every sort – held no mysteries or fears for me. Everything was natural and easy and I counted myself lucky to find a young woman like Magda who wasn’t put off by the things I took for granted.