by Jerry eBooks
The graveyard would be awash with them, and at the sound of this one’s urgency, others would come.
Another drizzle of dirt and Camden coughed again. Tears leaked from his eyes. The lamp’s flame was guttering, the shadows thrashing against the pine walls of the coffin as the smoke began to mute the light.
Perhaps he had let them wait long enough, after all. His lungs were beginning to burn, his throat closing against the poisoned air. He imagined once they released him, it would take him quite a while before he would be able to do anything but hack forth the vile black sludge he’d ingested during his incarceration.
While fumbling for the bell cord, he grazed the flesh of his hand against a nail that had been driven into the right wall of the coffin. The cord nudged his wrist. Camden hesitated, blinked away the hot tears stinging his eyes and noticed that the nail was not just the result of shoddy, hasty workmanship. It was keeping something pinned there. Something he had missed until now because of the thickening smoke and because the paper was only a shade darker than the wood to which it had been affixed. Also, he hadn’t really been looking for correspondence from his captor when their intent had appeared to be obvious. Take time to think about your situation, and when you’re ready to meet our demands, ring the bell.
With one hand, he snatched the note free, tearing the blank space at the top. The other, he used to sleeve away the moisture from his burning eyes. Then he brought the note up close to his face and began to read. The words were hard to make out at first, but when eventually he pieced them together, he let the paper fall to his chest and lay as still as the corpse he would soon become.
His body went numb.
Above his head, more scratching.
The coffin filled with smoke, and the flame went out.
Darkness.
As the words echoed over and over and over again in his head, the old man tried to draw in enough breath to scream in the oily dark, but could only half fill his lungs before he began to cough and choke and splutter.
He reached blindly for the bell, despite knowing now that there was no use and yet needing so desperately to believe he hadn’t been such a fool. When he found it, he tugged and tugged and tugged again until the cord broke and fell to coil around his limp fingers like a dead snake.
Up there in the autumnal graveyard, he knew, were watchmen. But they would have heard nothing, for there was nothing to hear but the skittering of dead leaves across silent graves. But perhaps, if they were close, they might yet hear him scream, if he could only find the air.
A loud crack and he heard the earth begin to pour into the lower end of the coffin.
Soon, the rats would follow.
Weeping, Camden touched the note, at the words written there by the fair hand of his long lost Rebecca, who, he now realized, he had never really known at all. How, he wondered in his panic, had he so misinterpreted her cunning, her callousness, her hatred of him? How had he not realized that what he had done to her father would leave no room or capability for affection? A lifetime of studying adversaries had left him blind to the enemy within his own chambers. Rebecca, whom he had ample cause to love, if only he’d been able. Now, he wondered if that inability had been caused by some subconscious recognition of her true nature.
Rebecca.
Because she had appeared to love him, and because she had asked for nothing, he had left her everything. So fulfilling her plan all along.
He closed his eyes, the smoke too much to bear, and put a hand over his mouth, a redundant gesture meant to prolong a life already over.
The note, the note. It may as well have been painted behind his eyelids for all the peace it gave him.
Why? he asked himself, but that question and all others, had already been answered.
The note, the note. A simple poem, written in her loving hand:
I can feel you smiling and ever so sure, though you’re buried underground
Content to play at being dead, dependent on a sound
But salvation from god, nor human hand, shall ever for you come
And ample time you’ll have down there, to ponder all you’ve done
As he began to convulse, Camden reached a trembling hand up and out to what he’d thought was a nail driven into the coffin wall. And though he could feel his strength beginning to fade as the first of the rats thumped with a squeal to the floor of the coffin and the smoke filled him with darkness, he managed to work it free.
It was too smooth to be a nail. Too heavy. And rounded at one end.
You stole my father’s livelihood; took my mother’s health
So I’ll think of you and smile as I spend your hard-earned wealth
I am leaving you to die where the dark doth know you well
And consider a debt repaid, while you burn in the fires of Hell.
Despite the agony, the torment, the panic that came with being unable to draw a breath, Camden could not help but grin as the life left him and more rats began to wriggle into his coffin. He could not feel them as they hit his useless legs, but he could feel the vibrations through his body.
He turned the smooth object over in his fingers before letting it drop to the floor.
Foolish old man.
He had led a life of conquering that would make Napoleon proud. He had been merciless, undone only by the occasional foolish notion, and even then, he had restricted such lapses to matters of romance, never business. And they had come together to destroy him anyway. Losing the use of his legs had not softened him one bit, or forced his dismissal from the game of chess that was his life, a game in which he had always considered himself one step ahead of the competition.
And in the end, he had been fool enough to gamble everything on a simple little bell, the tolling of which would free him to better evaluate the situation so that he could dominate it and emerge the victor once more. A bell from which the clapper had been removed, muting it. Rebecca, knowing him perhaps better than he ever had, or ever would, know himself, had used it to nail the note to the wall.
And when the smoke, the earth and the rats descended upon him in one cracking, roaring, screeching mass, he had time for one final epiphany.
If he had never quite loved Rebecca, he certainly did now.
For she was nothing less than his equal.
Few people shed any tears when Padraic Rossa died at the age of 89, even his publishers, because he hadn’t produced a book that was either comprehensible or commercial since the mid-1970s, and he was probably the most cantankerous man that Irish letters had ever known. Even Brendan O’Neill, who was loved by authors everywhere for his emollient reviews in the Cork Examiner, had called Rossa “a foul temper on legs.”
Rossa’s last work All Hallows Eve was published in 1997 and was little more than a splenetic rant about the way in which the Irish had allowed the rest of the world to turn a sacred Celtic ritual dating back to the 5th century into a “cash cow for the makers of plastic pumpkins and Hallmark Cards.”
“It was one thing to turn our folk music into fiddle-de-dee for the tourist trade, and our magical beliefs into garden gnomes. But by allowing the commercialization of Halloween we have dragged the souls of our dead ancestors out of the eternal shadows and hung them up in the common light of the marketplace for every inquisitive passer-by to finger.”
When it was published two weeks before Halloween, Rossa’s book was widely excoriated in the book pages of the Irish Times and several other newspapers and magazines for being “a saliva-spraying welter of Celtic superstition and Druidic mumbo-jumbo by a man who seems to believe that ‘fun’ is a notifiable disease.”
You no doubt remember, though, that five of the reviewers who gave Rossa such critical notices disappeared on the night of All Hallows’ Eve, and no trace of them was ever found. There was a lengthy investigation by the Garda Síochána, during which Rossa was questioned several times, but he made no comment about their vanishing, except to say that they had probably got what they deserved. Nervous jokes w
ere made in the press about “the curse of Padraic Rossa” and stories were told in Henchy’s Bar that he had summoned up Satan to drag his critics down to hell, their way lit by embers, in turnip lanterns, as Satan did to all unrepentant sinners, at Halloween.
After he died, Rossa’s huge Victorian house on the steep hill overlooking the River Lee in Montenotte came up for auction almost immediately, since there were bills to be settled and Rossa’s books hadn’t made any decent money in decades. The coal bill alone hadn’t been paid for six-and-a-half years.
I was called up by Irish Property to write a feature about the house and I went up there one slick wet Thursday morning with John McGrorty, who was to take the photographs. John was a very humorous fellow with a head of hair like a bunch of spring carrots and a taste for ginger tweed jackets.
We parked in Lovers’ Walk and John took a selection of pictures of the outside. The house was a four-story building in the Gothic style, painted pale green, with dark green window-frames, as tall as a cliff. I think “forbidding” would be your word for it. It stood on the brow of the hill with the river far below, and from the steep back garden you could see all of Cork City and all the way beyond to the drizzly grey-green hills.
We rang the doorbell at the glass front porch and a young woman from the auctioneers came to answer it. A large yellowish slug was clinging halfway up the window and John touched it with the tip of his cigarette so that it shriveled and dropped onto the flagstones.
“You’re a sadist,” I told him.
The young woman from the auctioneers was pretty enough, with a short brown bob and a pale heart-shaped face and sea-green eyes and rimless glasses. “My name’s Fionnula,” she said, holding out her hand.
“I’m John,” said John, “and this is Michael. Do you know what ‘Fionnula’ means in Swahili?”
Fionnula shook her head.
“It means ‘bespectacled beauty from the auctioneers.’”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “and do you know what ‘John’ means in Urdu? It means ‘red-headed chancer in a clashing orange coat.’”
“Well, girl, you give as good as you get,” John told her. “Are you going to be conducting us on a tour of these delightfully gloomy premises, then?”
The hallway was vast. Over a marble fireplace hung a dark oil portrait of Padraic Rossa himself, clutching his lapels as if he were trying to tear them off his jacket. He had a blocky-looking head, and he looked more like a bare-knuckle boxer than a writer.
“He was a sour-tempered man and no mistake,” said Fionnula. “I met him only the once. I came up here to make a valuation but he wouldn’t let me into the house. He said that he wouldn’t be dealing with an empty-headed young girl who knew nothing of the Celtic tradition.”
She showed us the drawing-room with its heavy velvet curtains and its strange paintings of pale men and women, peering out of the darkness with luminous eyes. Some of them had beaks like owls, while others had foxes’-claws instead of hands.
“You could well believe that Rossa was a close friend of his Satanic Majesty, now couldn’t you?” said John. The flashes from his camera seemed to make the people in the paintings jump, as if for a split-second he had brought them to life.
We toured the bedrooms. The ceilings were damp, and in some places the wallpaper was hanging down. In Rossa’s own bedroom, the mattress on the four-poster bed had a dark stain in the middle of it, and there was an overwhelming smell of urine and death.
At last we came back downstairs to take a look at the dining-room. At the far end of the room stood a huge mahogany cupboard, with carved pillars and bunches of grapes, which must have been used for storing china. In Ireland we would call a cupboard like this a press.
“That is a massive piece of joinery and no mistake,” said John, taking pictures of it. Its finial touched the ceiling, and it had a wide drawer underneath with handles in the shape of demons’ faces, with rings through their noses.
Fionnula turned the key in the lock and opened up the press so that we could look inside. It was completely empty, but it was unexpectedly large inside, almost three times as deep as it looked from the outside. It had that sour vinegary smell of old cupboards that have been closed up for years.
“You could almost live in this,” said John. “In fact I think it’s bigger than my flat. And look . . . what’s that written on the back?”
The back of the press was covered in lettering, faded black, with some gilded capitals. It looked like Gaelic.
“We’ll have a picture of this,” said John. “Here, bespectacled beauty from the auctioneers, do you think you could hold my light for me?”
He helped Fionnula to climb up into the press, and then he climbed in after her. He handed her his electronic strobe light and started to take pictures of the lettering at the back. “Now I recognize some of the words here,” he said. “Beó duine d’éis a anma . . . that means ‘a man may live after his death.’”
He peered at the lettering even more closely. “This is some kind of Celtic incantation . . . a summoning-up of dead souls. It must be connected with Rossa’s book on All Hallows’ Eve.”
As his fingers traced the words, however, I heard an extraordinary noise. A slow, mechanical ticking, like a very loud clock, but punctuated by the clicking of levers and tumblers, and the flat donk sound of expanding springs.
“What the hell’s that?” asked John, turning around. But before any of us could do anything, the huge doors to the press swung silently shut, and locked themselves, trapping John and Fionnula inside.
“Will you open the effing doors, Michael?” shouted John. “This isn’t a joke!”
“For God’s sake, let us out!” said Fionnula. She sounded panicky already. “I can’t stand enclosed spaces!”
I turned the key, but the doors wouldn’t budge. I went to the sideboard and pulled open the drawers. One of them was full of tarnished cutlery, so I took out a dinner-knife and tried to pry the doors open with that. They still refused to open. Both John and Fionnula were hammering and kicking on them, but they were so solid that they didn’t even shake.
It was then that I heard two more sounds. A high-pitched squeaking, like a screw turning, and then a sliding noise.
“John!” I shouted. “John, are you all right? I’m going into the garden, see if I can find a shovel or a pick or something!”
But John yelled, “The ceiling! The ceiling’s coming down!”
“What?”
“The ceiling’s coming down! It’s going to crush us!”
The squeaking went on and on. I ran into the rainy garden and came back with an iron fence-post, and I beat at those doors until the fence-post almost bent double. John and Fionnula were both screaming and then I heard something break, and John crying out in agony. “Oh Mary Mother of God save us! Oh Mary Mother of God forgive me!”
After that there was nothing but a slow complicated crunching. I stood outside the press with my eyes filled with tears, trembling with shock. Eventually the squeaking stopped, and then I heard ratchets and cogs, and the doors to the press slowly opened themselves. Inside, there was nothing at all. No John, no Fionnula.
For a moment I couldn’t understand what had happened to them. But then I saw blood dripping from the edge of the drawer at the bottom of the press. I took hold of the demon’s-head handles and slowly pulled it open.
If you have never seen human beings compressed until they are less than an inch thick, it is almost impossible to describe them to you. The most horrible thing is their faces, which look like pink rubber Halloween masks, with scarlet lips and empty, liquid eyes.
But John and Fionnula’s bodies weren’t the only remains in the drawer. Underneath them were the crushed remains of several other people, their skin as papery and desiccated as wasps’ nests.
I could only guess how Padraic Rossa had persuaded his critics to step into his cupboard. Perhaps he had pretended to be conciliatory, and invited them up to his house to explain the mysteries of Hal
loween to them. Then perhaps he had suggested that they examine the Celtic incantations at close quarters. Whatever had happened, he had made sure that they, too, had a very bad press.
The first Amanda Sutter knew of the pumpkin, the strange pumpkin, was a day in late September.
She had spent most of that morning and early afternoon shopping in Half Moon Bay, and it was almost two o’clock when she pointed the old Dodge pickup south on Highway One. She watched for the sign at the farm road, as she always did; finally saw it begin to grow in the distance, until she could read, first, the bright orange letters that said SUTTER PUMPKIN FARM, and then the smaller black letters underneath: The Biggest, The Tastiest, The Best—First Prize Winner, Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, 2006.
Amanda smiled as she turned past the sign, onto the farm’s unpaved access road. The wording had been Harley’s idea, which had surprised some people who didn’t know him very well. Harley was a quiet, reserved man—too reserved, sometimes; she was forever trying to get him to let his hair down a little—and he never bragged. As far as he was concerned, the sign was simply a statement of fact. “Well, our pumpkins are the biggest, the tastiest, the best,” he’d said when one of their neighbors asked him about it. “And we did win first prize in ’06. If the sign said anything else, it’d be a lie.”
That was Harley for you, in a nutshell.
The road climbed up a bare-backed hill, and when she reached the crest Amanda stopped the pickup to admire the view. She never tired of it, especially at this time of year and on this sort of crisp, clear early fall day. The white farm buildings lay in a little pocket directly below, with the fields stretching out on three sides and the ocean vast and empty beyond. The pumpkins were ripe now, the same bright orange as the lettering on the sign—Connecticut Field for the most part, with a single parcel devoted to Small Sugar; hundreds of them dotting the brown and green earth like a bonanza of huge gold nuggets, gleaming in the afternoon sun. The sun-glare was caught on the ruffly blue surface of the Pacific, too, so that it likewise held a sheen of orange-gold.