His note read simply, “It has taken hold.”
Chapter Seven
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALAN FAIRCLOUGH
* * *
1
* * *
Alan Fairclough raised his hand over the young man’s face. The face was handsome. Alan would not hire anyone without a handsome face for this. He liked seeing the bruises beneath the eyes, the gashes that opened up above the lips. He liked turning the very beautiful into the very scarred.
When his arousal heightened, he went deep into himself, losing the sense of the physical world, and entered the domain of the gods.
* * *
2
* * *
FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY
The story of my life is not a tragedy, but an adventure from what we believe is true to the extremity beyond truth and minor distinctions of Good and Evil. There is no Good and Evil; there is only evil right now and good right now. How life, as it got its hooks into you, moved effortlessly from the sacred to the profane. All we can truly know of it is the Light, the ever-brilliant Light of Divine Essence. In the deepest cruelty, in the most saintly kindness, in the brutality of human conflict, the Light sparks again and again and again.
The purpose of my life, its mission, is to find the stone from which the spark can be struck and set afire.
* * *
3
* * *
From his earliest years, Alan Fairclough had been destined for greatness. His father was Lord Early, whose ancestral fortune included three great castles in Scotland and Northumbria. His mother was Lady Elaine Romney, a diamond heiress whose grandfather had been South African Dutch and whose father had made a success of the Romney Ironworks as well as the mining operations in Africa. Alan attended Harrow, made the cricket team eventually, and then his world changed so swiftly the shock of it had never quite worn off. His parents died in a sailing disaster off Majorca. Alan was pulled from school and sent to live with his only living relative who would take him. His aunt owned land in a particularly inhospitable part of northern Scotland. While Alan had been protected from the worst of life by his parents, his aunt was cheap and mean-spirited. To build character, she forced him to take freezing baths, and when he disobeyed her, she had him soundly whipped by a tall grim German named Ranulf. His work was to keep on top of fifteen tenant farmers and their rents. By the time he was seventeen, he had been won over by what he then believed was the nobility of poverty. He took to the streets, eventually joining a monastery and foregoing any material comfort.
But just before his twenty-first birthday, lying on his hard bench of a bed, he began to experience erotic dreams for the first time in his life.
In them, he held the poor young street girls in his arms, thrusting into them like a jackal. He tasted the first blood of virgins, and whipped them until their screams turned to moans of delicious surrender. In these stimulating torture dreams, he was Ranulf the German not peach-faced Alan Fairclough The Good. Even in the dreams he was not a willing participant to the pleasure he felt. He felt as if he were being raped even as he slowly pressed a rusty spike into the nipple of an altar boy; he tried to resist, but was overcome by a greater force which shoved him deep into the body of a beggar girl from Calcutta...
When he woke from these dreams, he also resisted them. At first, disgusted with their vileness, then merely curious at his own nocturnal imagination, until finally, he grew to look forward to sleep and its night of dreaming.
As he was in the middle of an orgy of beating up a young hoodlum before raping the boy’s mother, Alan realized with dread that the dream had the texture of reality. As if his memory had become a black hole, sucking in the material world around it until he could not tell what was substance and what was not. He felt his fist connect solidly with the boy’s shoulder as a sexual electricity surged through his groin...
“It’s not a dream!” he cried out as the boy howled, blood bursting from beneath his left eye a split second after being hit. “It’s not a dream!” He screamed at the boy as if it were his fault. Beyond the boy, the mother, her flowing dress torn down the middle, her hands tied to a metal pipe above her head.
Alan let the boy go. The boy ran to sit beside his mother, shivering. The boy was no more than sixteen. The boy held his mother, and both of them wept.
Alan, awake, stared at his bloodied hands. For the first time that he could remember, he began to weep, as well. His tears washed the gray walls of the room, wiped clean the image of the woman and her son, until all he could see was night. All he could say was, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Dawn arrived, eventually, without response. He untied the woman, and dropped five hundred pounds onto her son’s lap.
A small mirror, above a scummy sink, stood at one end of the room. Alan Fairclough went and looked at himself and saw a monster. Neither Alan nor his former tormentor, Ranulf, stared back.
The face was so inhuman he could not place it as anything other than shadow.
Several weeks later, he embraced this image, and began his voyage to seek God in dark places. At twenty-one, he inherited his parents’ vast fortune, and began discovering the extent of flesh, suffering, and pleasure.
But even these had their limits.
When he’d awakened one morning, naked, with two young women and one young man sleeping beside him, curled beneath his arms on a stained and ragged mattress...their bodies so beautiful and fresh the previous evening with the tastes of laudanum and marijuana soaking him. Then, in the noon sun slicing like a steel glint razor through the slats of cheap wooden shutters—now, these bodies were great puddings of rot and disease, and smelled to him of excrement. He noticed sores along the man’s buttocks from the whip, and one of the women had small knife slashes on her left side along her ribcage. The all-consuming flesh lay there, one great tangled body. He had hacked his way out of that den of melting skin. Rushed to his shower, wiping himself clean of the night’s residue.
And the darkness enfolded him. Not the darkness of depression or regret or longing, but the darkness of a man who knows what is true about himself and his appetites.
With that knowledge, all youth abandoned him. All happiness faded, all satisfaction dissipated. He was thirty, then, and had already heard about the creature held captive in the caverns at Maupassane. There were stories of its cries echoing through the small village beyond the cliffs.
* * *
4
* * *
FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY
After all this time, to be so close to the legend, to its origin. I will find the creature if it’s the last thing I do. I will experience the miracle of its existence. I will touch its essence and be transformed. The key has always been ritual. This is what men have forgotten, what has been lost. It is the ritual that turns the lock and opens the door.
My God is the Savage God!
I glory in His Presence!
I will find His Radiance!
Azriel, come! Come with your Light!
* * *
5
* * *
Since these particular holy sisters had died or moved on two hundred years previous, it had been difficult to track down the precise cavern, but Alan Fairclough had a great deal of wealth and he spent much of it excavating the area.
Then, at last, one of the local workmen found the first clue.
The remains in rock, crushed by some collapse in the caves several hundred years previous.
“Beautiful,” Alan had said, as the flares were lit around the remains, casting yellow and orange shadow. “Look at its shoulders. Look at its...magnificence.”
It appeared to be a fossil to some extent, with the arms and spinal column of a human, but its skull, crushed and its jaw separated, had the incisors of a lion, and what appeared to be perforations along the forehead. The wings that had been crushed behind it seemed like a pterodactyl’s, but this was Alan’s fancy playing with him. He could not tell for sure.
He knew that it was a daemon that the holy sisters had kept within this darkness. Its secrets would never be known.
Within eleven months of painstaking excavation, he’d raised the stones and carefully brought it forth from its resting place.
When he beheld it in the light of day, his hair went from jet black to pure white. His eyes, from sparkling jewels to the dullness of cold stone. The Light of the world, he felt, had flickered and worn down—both by the majesty of this discovery and by the knowledge that it was no longer part of life in the flesh.
It was on a trip back to his townhouse in Manhattan. He’d heard a man say something quite remarkable. It had been at a regular afternoon at the private club, the chap mentioned something about a certain family. “The Crowns,” the man repeated when Fairclough asked. “They’re in all kinds of industry. Arms, mostly. Very charitable clan, as well. Six million last year to the Save the Children Fund.”
“I couldn’t help but overhear—you said something about...” Alan Fairclough didn’t even want to repeat it. Perhaps he’d heard wrong.
“The beast? My brother saw it himself. Visited them one summer,” the man said. “They have a pied-à-terre up the coast a bit. My brother’s place is on a little island, right across the water from their place. He’s selling his. While he was doing some renovating, they had him and his wife out to stay with them, briefly. He said for such rich people they have fairly common tastes.”
“The beast,” Fairclough reminded him.
“Yes, so my brother tells me that they own some creature that looks like the devil himself.”
Alan laughed. “Your brother—does he drink?”
The man went silent. After a sip of whiskey himself, he said, “Not these days. He died six weeks ago.”
Alan Fairclough was about to inquire further as to this information, but suddenly it was as if the noise of the club—the laughter at terrible jokes poorly told, the chatter from the men at the bar, the tinkling sound of the piano keys being molested by a less-than-adequate musician—all had been overwhelmed by his thoughts.
The beast.
The Devil.
Holiness.
* * *
6
* * *
Fairclough had tracked down the Crowns’ penthouse in the Lonsdale, off Central Park. He had no problem bluffing and bribing his way up to it, but was sorely disappointed when a lone butler met him at the elevator. The butler was extraordinarily handsome, with dark hair and round blue eyes, a bit of a trace of a scar running down beneath the left eye.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the butler said. “The Crowns are in Bangkok this time of year.”
“Liverpool,” Alan grinned, recognizing the butler’s accent. “I thought you’d be Irish, but that tone.”
The butler half-smiled. “Yes, completely. And you’re—”
“A man of the world, home nowhere.”
“I would’ve said Sloane Square with a bit of Scotland thrown in,” the butler nearly laughed.
“Well, you are close to the mark, you are. Alan Fairclough,” Alan extended his hand.
“Pete Atkins,” the butler said. Then, as if remembering his job, added, “They won’t be back for another month. Not till this nasty winter is over.”
“Business?”
“And pleasure, one would assume. Would you like to leave a message, Mr. Fairclough?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Alan Fairclough said, “Yes. Yes I would.”
He scribbled down a note, folding it once, and passed it to the butler. “How long have you been Stateside?”
“Two years,” Atkins said. “The Crowns are wonderful employers. Not like people say at all.”
“They say?”
“The usual malarkey. Nasty rich people and all that. They been like second parents to me almost.” Atkins then held the note up. “You don’t know them at all, do you?”
Alan tried not to reveal the lie. “We’re old friends. Tell me, they still summer in New England?”
Atkins nodded. “Yes sir. Stonehaven. A lovely village I’m told, right on the water. From the pictures it looks like castle to me. The property’s been with them for hundreds of years. Come on, then,” he said. Then he led Alan Fairclough into a modest parlor with three overstuffed chairs, a long table, and a half-dozen pictures on the wall. “It’s called The Shields,” Atkins tapped a photo. The picture was an old one. It showed a Bearcat in the driveway, and a white mansion behind it. A rich dowager and her driver stood in the foreground. “That’s Miranda Crown. They called her the Queen. She died a ways back. I heard from cook she was fierce.”
“The Crowns must have quite a history.” Fairclough glanced at the other photos beside this one. One caught his eye. He stepped over to it for closer inspection. “This one,” he said.
“1914,” Atkins said. “I know because Master Crown told me it was taken the morning his father was born.”
In the picture, four men, one in military garb, stood outside the mouth of a small cave. “That’s Master Crown’s grandfather.” Atkins tapped the glass.
“Where was this?”
“France. Outside Paris I think.”
“The war,” Fairclough said. “Doesn’t look much like they’re concerned with war, does it?”
Atkins was silent for a moment. “You say you’re an old friend?” There was suspicion in his voice.
“Well, truth is, I lied,” Fairclough admitted. “I know old friends of theirs from the club. I wanted to contact them.”
“Good show,” Atkins chuckled. “You had me fooled, just about. But I knew if you were an old friend, you’d know about them and war.”
Fairclough didn’t look away from the picture. “Yes?”
“Their girl, Diana, told me that they began all wars. I believe her.”
Fairclough barely caught this comment. “I’ve been there,” he said.
“France?”
“Yes,” Alan whispered, almost to himself. “That cave.”
* * *
7
* * *
Rupert Lewis had been the name of the man at the Club who had first mentioned what Crown possessed. Fairclough got hold of him through some easy connections—the Rafael Finches whom he dined with occasionally, and with whom he often entered New York’s seedier S&M clubs for a weekend of inspiration. On the phone, Fairclough asked, “Did your brother ever sell that summer place of his?”
“You have some memory,” Lewis said on the phone, obviously barely recalling their conversation. “No, and now his widow can’t seem to unload it either. It has some structural faults from a tropical storm three years back. It’s quite grand, really, but his property is probably more valuable than the house itself. It takes up most of a small island. Less than a hundred acres. Interested?”
“Very,” Fairclough said. “Make that extremely.”
The next afternoon, Alan Fairclough drove up from the city, taking 95 the whole way, past the usual and better-known turnoffs where he had known others’ summer places in Old Lyme or Old Saybrook, Stonington, Mystic—until he found Route 3. Then another ten miles down a two-lane road full of potholes and bumps, shrouded from sunlight by thick brambly trees shorn of leaves by winter. He thought he’d made a wrong turn—then, the sun, a small cove, woods everywhere, he drove past boatyards into what he could only describe as the most quaint New England town, still fairly untouched by New York and Boston on either side of it, both gradually growing out like parasitic routes. But here, an abandoned Customs House that looked as if no one had yet thought to use it, a public library the size of a one-room apartment, three churches with perfect steeples, and the empty streets of a fishing village at midwinter. It almost made him nostalgic for something he’d never had nor wanted.
At Land’s End point, he saw the small islands off the coast, the three Avalons, and the smallest was no doubt where Rupert Lewis’ brother’s summer home ate up half its geography.
Then, losing himself again in the narrow streets, th
e clapboard and brick piles of houses along frosty lanes, he turned toward Juniper Point, and the row of enormous white houses that formed a horseshoe just the other side of the village. They were close enough to join with the Borough of Stonehaven as a unified architecture, but far enough away for luxurious privacy.
A small brass plate attached to a low wrought iron gate proclaimed, The Shields, All Are Welcome, None Shall Be Turned Away. Stables to the north of the house, a caretaker’s cottage beside the six-car garage, a boat slip off the south end, and a lawn that was smaller than he had expected, with no garden to speak of. But the house, a Georgian fake, its columns too short, its windows too large, its flourishes barely regarded. Yet it was magnificent. The Crown place was, itself, more than a feast for the eyes and soul.
It was a face of white carved from the very landscape that surrounded it, holding in contempt all that it held within its gaze: the Avalon Sound, the woods, and even Alan Fairclough in his small black Mercedes as he parked it in the circular drive.
* * *
8
* * *
His first impression of Diana Crown, who was then only barely five or six, was that she was rather homely and unkempt. He mistook her for the caretaker’s daughter, until her hackles got up at this suggestion. Then she became a little tyrant.
“I am Diana Crown, daughter of Darius and Honor Crown, and right now, sir, you are trespassing.” She still had that little girl lisp, but her vocabulary, and the authority with which she used it, seemed beyond her years. Her hair was blond, but matted impossibly with some kind of gummy substance as if she’d been rolling in clay.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 9