Figures of Fear: An anthology (20 page)

He took the floating bridge across the River Medina to West Cowes – him and a motley collection of cars and vans and cyclists and women with baby buggies. The morning was sharp as a needle but bitterly cold. His breath smoked and he regretted that he hadn’t worn his woolly hat.

He found Vectis Press down a sharply sloping side-turning next to a fish-and-chip shop. It had the name Vectis Press Publishers & Stationers written in gold on the door, and a dusty front window display filled with curled-up sheets of headed notepaper, faded calendars and dead flies. He opened the door and a bell jangled.

Inside, there was a cramped office with stacks of books and files and boxes of envelopes. Through the back door he could see an old-fashioned printing press, as well as a new Canon copier. He shuffled his feet and coughed for a while, and after a while a red-faced, white-haired man appeared, wearing a ski sweater with reindeers running across it and a baggy pair of jeans.

The man cocked his head to one side and looked at Michael and didn’t say a word.

‘I’m – ah – looking for a book you published. I don’t know whether you have any copies left. Or perhaps you can tell me where I can find the author.’

The man waited, still saying nothing.

‘It’s
Queen Victoria’s Mystic
, by somebody called Charles Lutterworth. Published 1987.’

The man nodded, and kept on nodding. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I think I can help you there. Yes.’

Michael waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

‘I – ah – do you have a copy here? Could I … buy one?’

The man nodded. ‘I’ve got eighty-six copies left. You can have them all if you like. Didn’t sell very well, see.’

‘Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘So am I, considering I wrote it.’

‘
You’re
Charles Lutterworth?’

‘Roger Frost, actually. Charles Lutterworth’s my
nom de plume
.’

He went over to an old oak-veneered cabinet and opened it up. It was crammed with books of all sizes. ‘Let me see now,’ he said, and at last managed to tug out a copy of a thin volume bound in blue.

‘There you are. Six quid for cash. What’s
your
interest in it?’

‘I was doing some research. I came across some reference to Abdul Karim’s belief in the resurrection of the dead. I sort of got the idea that Queen Victoria might have found it … well, you know, that Queen Victoria might have been very interested in it, considering the loss she felt for Albert.’

Roger Frost tapped the cover of his book with an ink-stained finger. ‘It’s all in here. All meticulously documented. Chapter and verse. The trouble was, most of the first-hand information came from other Indian servants, and nobody believed what they said. Unthinkable, you know, that our own dear Queen was dabbling in Hindu mysticism.’

‘Did she really think that she could bring Albert back to life?’

‘That’s what Abdul Karim led her to believe. He was more than her
Munshi
, her teacher – he was a highly respected holy man and mystic. It seems he told the Queen that by the end of the second millennium, all disease would have been wiped out, and your dead loved ones could be dug up, cured of what had killed them, and brought back to life.’

‘And she believed him.’

‘Well, why shouldn’t she?’ said Roger Frost. He hadn’t realized that it wasn’t a question. ‘You’ve got to remember that Victoria’s reign saw unbelievable strides in science and technology, and enormous advances in medicine, so it must have seemed like quite a reasonable prediction. She knew the story of
Frankenstein
, too – that was republished in 1831 – and if it could happen in a story, why not for real? After all, a lot of people still believe that resurrection is just around the corner – otherwise they wouldn’t have their bodies frozen, would they? Idiots.

‘It was partly Albert’s fault. He was so enthusiastic about science that he convinced Victoria that, with science, absolutely anything was possible. And if you combine that idea with the terrible grief she felt at losing him, it wasn’t surprising that she accepted what Abdul Karim told her.’

‘And what
did
he tell her?’

‘Some of it’s hearsay but some of it’s documented, too, at Windsor, and in the library in Delhi. Personally, I think that Abdul Karim was doing nothing more than trying to console the Queen – spinning her a bit of mystic yarn, like, to help her recover from Albert’s death. But he performed a Hindu ritual which would ensure that the Queen’s spirit would reappear at the turn of the next century.

‘He actually left a letter attached to his will which required his executors and their assigns to resurrect Albert’s body from the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore as soon as it was scientifically possible, and to inform him that the Queen’s spirit would be waiting for him on the anniversary of his death, at Osborne House, which is where they were happiest.’

‘Why didn’t he leave instructions for
her
body to be resurrected, too?’

‘She wanted Albert to supervise
her
revival personally. After all, she was the Queen, Empress of India, and Albert was the only man she trusted to ensure that all went well. She didn’t know how she was going to die, you see, and she might have been taken by an illness that wasn’t curable yet in the year 2000. In that case, she said, it would be enough to know that
he
had returned to life and vigour, and that she could remain as a shadow at Osborne House to watch him fulfil his destiny.’

Roger Frost handed the book over. ‘Unfortunately, as we all know, we still can’t bring dead people back to life, no matter what they’ve died of, and no matter how much we used to love them. And I’m not saying that I don’t believe in ghosts, but nobody’s ever seen the ghost of Queen Victoria, have they?’

‘I have,’ said Michael.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘There
is
a ghost of Queen Victoria. I saw her last night. I
talked
to her, for God’s sake. How do you think I knew about Abdul Karim?’

Roger Frost looked at Michael for a while with his lips pursed. Then he said, ‘It’s all right. You can have the book for a fiver if you want to.’

‘I saw her. She was crying in her bedroom. Then I met her in the children’s summer house.’

There was a very long pause, and then Roger Frost said, ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

It was eight o’clock, and dark. They stood together in Albert’s writing room, listening to the grief-stricken sobbing coming from the Queen’s sitting room next door.

‘Do you want to see her?’ asked Michael.

‘I don’t know,’ said Roger Frost. ‘I don’t really think I do.’

Michael went to the door and eased it open three or four inches. He could see the small black figure sitting at the writing desk, her head bowed. He beckoned Roger Frost, who, after some hesitation, came to join him.

‘Jesus,’ was all he said.

Later, Michael said, ‘There’s only one thing I can think of.’

‘What’s that?’ said Roger Frost, wiping his mouth and putting down his pint. They were sitting in the Old Anchor in West Cowes, a noisy, smoky bar full of yachtsmen.

‘Well, we can’t just let her wander around Osborne forever, can we? I mean, Albert’s never going to come back, which means that she’s going to spend the rest of eternity grieving for him. We’ve got to find a way to put her to rest.’

‘Loads of ghosts do that – what’s different about her? Just because she’s royalty.’

‘I can’t let her do it, that’s all. I can’t let her suffer like that.’

‘So what do you propose? Get in a priest, and have an exorcism?’

Michael shook his head. ‘I read your book last night. In the appendix, you’ve set out the Hindu ritual that Abdul Karim used to bring her spirit back.’

‘That’s right. That was in some of his papers. I had it translated. Thought it was cobblers, when I first read it.’

‘Well … supposing we use the same ritual to bring
Albert’s
spirit back? Supposing we reunite them – not physically, we can’t do that. But at least we can bring their spirits back together.’

Roger Frost sniffed and helped himself to another handful of dry-roasted peanuts, which he churned around his mouth like a cement mixer. ‘I thought you had a screw loose the moment you walked into the shop.’

In the Durbar Room, half an hour before midnight, Michael laid out a pattern of candles on the polished floor, and drew with chalk the
Shri-yantra
, a circular pattern filled with overlapping triangles. If you meditated on this
yantra
long enough, you could look back into the dizzying mouth of space and time, back and back, to the beginning of creation.

The room echoed, except for its dead spots, and the dripping candle-flames made it look as if shadowy spirits were dancing across the coffered ceiling.

Roger came quietly into the room and stood beside him. ‘I can’t guarantee this is going to work, you know, just because I printed it in my book. For all I know, Abdul Karim was nothing but a shyster.’

‘Well, we can only try,’ said Michael. He picked up the book and turned to the ritual, the
Paravritti
, the ‘turning back up’.

He began to recite the words. ‘We who are looking back into time and space, we call you to find the spirit of our lost son, Prince Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg, and carry him forward on the stream of creation. Let his spirit rise from where it lies asleep so that it can come to join us here.’

Roger Frost, with a very serious face, began to recite the ‘
Om …
’ There was a time when Michael would have found it ludicrous, but here in the Durbar Room, with midnight approaching, and the figures of Indian gods and goddesses leaping in the candlelight, it sounded sonorous and strange, as if it were a summons that could wake up spirits from days and years and centuries long forgotten.

‘We call on our lost son Prince Albert to open his eyes and return to the house of his greatest happiness. We call him to rejoin the ones he loved so dearly.’

It was then that Roger touched Michael’s arm. From the far door, a small dark shadow had appeared, a small dark shadow with a pale, unfocused face. It made no sound at all, but glided toward them across the floor, until it was standing just outside the circle of candles.

Roger said, ‘I’m seeing things.’

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘She’s there.’

‘What are you doing?’ she said, in that tissue-papery voice.

‘The ritual,’ said Michael. ‘Abdul Karim’s ritual. We can’t bring back the Prince Consort’s body. We don’t have the power to do that. But perhaps we can bring back his spirit.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘You can have his spirit back here, at Osborne. You can both be together again.’

‘What?’ She sounded aghast. ‘Don’t you understand? Once you’ve called up a spirit, it can never go back.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that, once you’ve summoned him, he’ll have to stay with me, whether he wants to or not, forever.’

‘But I thought that’s what you—’

Michael was interrupted by a sound like nothing he had ever heard before – a low, agonized moan that made him feel as if centipedes were running up his back. He felt a sudden draft, too – a draft that was chilly and smelled of dust and long-enclosed spaces. The candle flames were blown sideways, and some of them were blown out altogether, so that the Durbar Room became suddenly much gloomier.

Out of the darkness, a dusty-grey figure appeared, so faint that it was almost invisible. It seemed to be moving toward them, but Michael couldn’t be sure. The small shadow woman took two or three steps away from it, toward the door. Michael stood where he was, his fists clenched tight, his breath quickening, his heart pounding harder and harder.

The figure stood still for a moment. It was no more substantial than a grey net curtain hanging at a window. Michael thought that he could see a luminous white face, and the indistinct smudges of side whiskers, but that was all. Gradually, as it came nearer, its substance began to thicken and darken.

By the time it was standing by the pattern of candles, the shape was clearly Prince Albert, a small, portly man in young middle-age, deathly white, with a sharp nose and an oval face, and drooping moustaches. He was wearing a dark uniform decorated with medals and a large silver star.

His image wavered, in the same way that a television screen wavers when somebody moves the aerial. He turned this way and that, as if he couldn’t understand where he was or what was happening.

‘Albert,’ Roger whispered. ‘It’s Albert, you’ve brought him back.’

The figure opened and closed its mouth but didn’t seem able to speak. Michael kept squeezing his eyes tight shut and opening them again, because he simply could not believe that this was real.

It was then that the shadow-woman walked around the
Shri-yantra
and glided slowly toward Albert with both arms outstretched.

‘My love,’ was all she said. ‘Oh, my love.’

Albert stared at her. At first it was obvious that he didn’t recognize her. She came closer, and took hold of both of his hands, and said, ‘It is
I
, my love. They’ve brought you back to me.’

‘Back?’ he whispered, his voice thick with horror. ‘
Back?
’

‘This is Osborne,’ she said. ‘You never lived to see this room. But this is Osborne. We can be happy again, my darling. We can stay here forevermore.’

Albert slowly pushed her away from him, still staring at her. ‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked her. ‘Can this really be you? What’s happened to you? Your hair! Your skin! You’ve withered away! What kind of devilish spell have they cast on you?’

Michael said, ‘No spell, sir. Only time.’

Albert frowned at Michael like an actor peering into a darkened audience.
‘Time?
’

‘You died at the age of forty-two, sir,’ put in Roger. ‘Your Queen here was eighty-one when she went.’

Victoria looked up at him in anguish. ‘I am still myself, my love. And I have kept my love for you intact, for so many years.’