Herald of the Hidden (17 page)

A sudden judder of white flared in the corner of my sight. I swivelled on my heel to try to see where it was, what it was. Another pale flap fluttered closer to me. I backed away a little, and stared hard into the grey haze of the corridor. And then the shape began to form—a white hole, a writhing blank, a gaping.

I could see, in the dimness, Ralph’s face set in a fierce expression. His stare was fixed and his lips moved rapidly. Still the pale vortex above us rippled and cracked, sending out resounding echoes in the stone-flagged passage. I had expected we might see something like Runciman’s description of the page rising above the desk, and was prepared for that, in some measure. But this was transformed, it seemed to me, in intensity. The apparition was no longer simply a blank sheet brought to cavort in the air, but a dreadful personification of it: a living absence. Because within the quivering form above us there were glimpses of a mouth, and of eyes glistening, like the sheen on paper.

For how many moments we confronted the face in the blankness above us, I cannot say. I tore my gaze from watching it to look at Ralph Tyler, still murmuring and holding his head up to look straight at the thing. There was no sudden breakthrough, I know that. After the slow, slow passage of time, the page of pale flesh above us began to shudder, the crackling subsided, and there was a fading. The glinting of the paper eyes went out last.

**

I sat, staring at my hands, in one of the bare rooms at the back. Ralph tried to be reassuring. ‘I do not think it will return, tonight,’ he said. ‘There is some fierce force caught in the white paper, of course. It took a while to “register” us. But then we began to take our place here: you read some of the manuscripts, and I looked in some of the books, and it began to reach out to us, as it had with Runciman. And there was clearly a desperation there. I think it had grown stronger since the levitation of the paper that Runciman saw. Well, you saw me trying hard, very hard, to make contact with it. I failed, I know that. It didn’t fade because of any act of mine, but just because it had used its strength. I sensed a reaching out—but nothing else. I could not gain an understanding of what this haunting is all about. And yet, I do have an idea or so—reasoned out, not “heard”. I think, if I am right, it may be possible to anneal the thing here. I hope so.’

In the morning, after very little snatched sleep, we asked Thomas Runciman to join us, and he walked over a few hours later. Rather than use any of the almanac rooms, we settled with him in the kitchen, glad of the simple, scratched table, and the warmth of the stove, where we had water simmering.

Ralph gave a brief, subdued account of our experiences, sparing him some details.

‘I am sorry you were subjected to that,’ he said. ‘Even though it proves to me that it was not just some delusion of mine. But now it looks as if the thing, whatever it is, is roaming all over the house. What can we do?’

My friend stared at the table for some moments. A pale light illumined the wood-grain.

‘When I’ve had encounters in the past, I’ve usually been able to understand something about them. A message, an impulse has made itself known. But last night, there was nothing. I was unable to get any sense of what is vivifying the blank paper. However, I do have an idea of what it might be. You kindly gave me a list of the last books you discussed here. I’ve found them—one was in a room at the back, not out in the rooms of the seasons. This was by Torr, the Devon squire. It has a passage that caught my attention—and, it appears, also Mr Amroth’s. I’ll read it to you:

The people here have an elastic sense of time. If they recount a story or event to you, and you ask when it was, they invariably reply to the effect of, ‘oh, it was just the other day’. When you enquire more closely, it transpires that this might mean anything from several years ago to just last week. The formulation is often used, too, for their more fanciful tales. Somewhere in the celestial calendar there must be an ‘other day’ where all these tall things happened.

‘The passage has been marked in thick pencil,’ said Ralph.

‘Do you see what this might have meant to Amroth?’ he continued, ‘In his house, he had all the days thoroughly docketed, organised, described. But here was a suggestion that there was a day that had eluded him—the “other” day. Of course, it’s just a turn of speech, and your author meant his whimsical idea facetiously: but I suggest that wasn’t how it seemed in this house. And indeed, there are faint myths about the idea of a hidden day, where the most extraordinary things can happen. It’s mentioned, for example, in a de Quincey essay, and hinted at in a George MacDonald fable. And I know Amroth has copies of both those, and had probably quite recently consulted them.

‘How can you tell that?’ asked Runciman

‘Because when I found his copies, a groove had been made in the dust where they stood, suggesting they had been drawn out.

‘It’s my idea that he had got ready another sheet, to be devoted to “the other day”, but did not live to start it. And I think he was in a quandary too, about where to place this page. Because it did not belong with any one of the seasons, but really slipped between and among them.’

‘Ye—es, I do see what you mean. It would be quite like him. Towards the end, you know, he became even more absorbed in his great work. The thought that there was, somehow, another day, might both appal, and yet appeal to him: more work to do, you see. He would have been mortified at leaving that unfinished.’

‘But what can be done?’ continued Mr Runciman, rather plaintively. ‘Old Amroth wanted me to open up his house to scholars, even to visitors. I can hardly do that if he, or this great sheet of paper might launch itself at them.’

‘Well, I have a suggestion,’ said Ralph. ‘Why not take one of the blank sheets, have a calligrapher title it up in a fine hand, with the phrase,
The Other Day
, and have a frame made around it? Then put it on a wall that will get the full sun, and let other people, visitors, complete it, as a sort of joint project with Amroth. Just ask them to write whatever “the other day” brings to mind for them. And also let the passing of all the days here play upon it: let time do its work on the open page.’

Thomas Runciman considered this, at first (I could see from his rapid blinking) doubtfully, and then with a growing conviction. And then he nodded. ‘Yes, I see how that might work. At any rate, it may at least hold the thing down.’

After we had returned to 14, Bellchamber Tower, I complimented Ralph on the solution to the mystery. But to my surprise, he shook his head.

‘I am afraid there may be more to it. But I did not think it right to share my real thoughts with Runciman. He was evidently fond of old Amroth, the almanac keeper.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘So you don’t think it
was
his obsession with “the other day” that was at work?’

‘Oh, that might be part of it. But I admit I played that up a bit. Because I really fear there is something else. I think that restless blank sheet was probably the true spirit of Amroth—a man so busy documenting all the days that he lived no days himself. It would explain why I could not form any connections with him. There was nothing there. We each of us have our own inner almanac, don’t we? The moments, the days that mean most to us. We write it with our lives as we go along. But not Amroth. He forgot to make an almanac of himself.’

There was a silence while we both thought about this.

‘So that’s why you suggested putting that page in the sunlight?’ I asked.

The Guardians of the Guest Room

‘My great-uncle was a man of
very
exotic taste,’ remarked Miss Duncan, peering pensively around the guest chamber into which she now ushered the portly frame of a man whose head seemed disproportionately small. The visitor merely grunted.

‘I suppose it will bestow some novelty value upon the place?’ tentatively suggested the nervous young woman.

He eyed her with incredulity. She felt an embarrassed blush leap to her face.

‘I . . . I mean . . . it is a little out of the ordinary. One imagines a certain kind of person might be rather taken by it. . . .’ her voice dwindled away.

‘Trappings, Miss, mere trappings,’ at length blurted the blunt-faced man. ‘Be like living in a junk shop,’ he added coarsely.

The girl was visibly crestfallen.

‘Oh, I am sure you must know best, Mr Melvace. But . . . I do hope we shall be able to arrange . . . equitable terms. You see, there are a number of other creditors . . . interested in the proceeds of this sale . . . I thought, perhaps, it would be possible to meet some of their demands too.’

Mr Melvace, the financial consultant, seemed distinctly unimpressed by this plain appeal.

‘I cannot consider your other circumstances, Miss,’ he said, dismissively shaking his head. ‘My duty is to make what estimate I can of the real market value of this place. My partner and I are owed—a considerable sum, you no doubt appreciate. And we want it back sooner rather than later.’

Malleable, that was the word, decided Melvace, as he lay awake on the heavy old bed, pondering the day’s work. The kid had no idea. She had exposed to him all at once the extent of her distressed situation. Easy to see she couldn’t afford to hold out against the most beggarly settlement.

Her great-uncle, whom she seemed to hold in so much awe, was as big a fool. To fund his aimless expeditions to distant lands he’d forfeited virtually all the conveniences of modern living, set up what passed for a home in this preposterous pile of decay, and furnished it with tasteless curios brought back from his jaunts abroad. And he had gone, when short of money, to an agency such as his own! Melvace entertained no illusions about the nature of his business. His partner was the Giver, the affable, munificent treasurer whose coffers seemed ever open, who spoke disparagingly of tedious paperwork, and asked for his victim’s signatures casually, just as an afterthought, ‘to make things legal, you know’. And he—he was the Taker. He it was who pounced when the time was ripe, waving the papers that had seemed so innocuous, making demands that could not be met, speaking with badly disguised relish of ‘resorting to the courts’, of ruin and disgrace.

Melvace had been the subject of some curious offers in his career. Never quite yet ‘a pound of flesh’—but occasionally a transaction which amounted to much the same, but on a rather more delicate level.

He wondered idly whether this pale, fragile creature would be worth the little effort of sly innuendo and a veneer of genuine affection. Nothing so crude as an outright proposition—just some strong hints, and careful manipulation.

He let his gaze wander around the room. She had certainly not exaggerated her great-uncle’s ‘very exotic tastes’. In the dim light which filtered through the curtains of appalling fawn-pink, he could make out a number of the ludicrous, repulsive ornaments the eccentric traveller had kept as mementoes of his missions. No-one could accuse Melvace of having any knowledge of either geography or ethnology, yet he felt he could place some of the trophies. There was a distinct preponderance of
faces
, he noticed: a huge, man-size, shield-shaped mask hung upon one wall, with leering white lips, hollow eyes, and painted ritual decorations. He fancied that would come from some primitive Pacific tribe. Then, over on the battered old side-table, there was a carved mahogany head, with a serene, implacable expression, and oddly elongated ear-lobes, a product of some dense African jungle, he supposed. Most striking of all, though, was the face with the lozenge-shaped eyes and radiant sun-rays all around it, engraved in a little golden amulet which was affixed to the door; the wan light gave it a curious, glistening sheen that he did not quite like. Ensconced amongst such trapping as these, it was impossible not to feel a certain unease, under the baleful eyes of relics from barbaric lands. But Melvace disdainfully shrugged aside any morbid emotions on the matter, and, pulling the bedclothes around him, endeavoured to find contented repose.

Miss Duncan was not sleeping. At an old desk in her great-uncle’s study, she pored over a pile of tattered notebooks, each crammed with pages of hurried, sprawling handwriting in deep-hued ink or, occasionally, faded pencil. Every now and then, her gaze would alight upon an entry of apparently some significance, and marking the place, she would copy out certain details onto a sheet in front of her.

She had entertained a genuine fondness for her great-uncle, in the little time she had known him. There never was any doubt in her mind about the value of his work. Alone amongst the evangelists and empire-builders of his day, he had urged a need to understand and accept the indigenous cultures of the new races and civilisations which were being ‘discovered’. He had warned long and often of the dangers of imposing European ways, faiths and values upon other societies. All the ‘junk’ which that detestable Melvace had so crudely dismissed had been freely given to her great-uncle by the people he had come into contact with: often enough he had exchanged objects of equal attraction and worth.

She therefore felt that this self-imposed task of compiling an inventory of every item he had brought back from far lands, together with notes on when, where and how it had been acquired, and some comments on its significance, was a happy duty. He had always meant to undertake the survey himself, in the days when advancing age precluded any more globetrotting; but although he had at intervals begun this project, he would often become newly absorbed in his old records of the various journeys, and turn instead to writing papers or memoranda on some new aspect which occurred to him as important.

This curious heritage aside, however, Miss Duncan had also been bequeathed a host of debts, incurred by her great-uncle in raising funds for his work, which had rarely been sponsored by either the authorities or learned bodies. The desolation of the old oratory which her great-uncle had made his home had warded off the attentions of his creditors for a considerable while after his demise: it was a long and tiresome journey across barren moorland, and most had contented themselves with terse, threatening messages through the staunch but ponderous offices of the post. These were invariably discarded into a box marked ‘Barbarians’, which her great-uncle had used for the same purpose, on the grounds that such usurers and leeches were more entitled to the name than those ancient and honourable races it had been his privilege to encounter.

Melvace, lying on his stomach, with the blankets hunched up high, did not feel comfortable. There was the niggling impression that the various bizarre countenances within the room were glaring down on his supine form, malevolently. It was as if their eyes were boring into his solid, snug carcass. He twisted round and blinked into the empty air. Still there was the drawn, lingering light from the French windows, poorly obscured by those garish drapings. Darting nervous glances, he observed the hideous grin of the mask, the black, blind stare of the carved head; and the soft eerie glimmer of the amulet. It was really insufferable to be obsessed by these pathetic, trashy exhibits. Yet their mute hostility was not readily dismissed: every time he tried to look away, and settle down to a good night’s sleep, they swarmed again into his thoughts and demanded his awed attention.

Hah! He would fix them, the heathen idols. With a sudden surge of energy and decision, he leapt up, strode to the door, detached the shining emblem, and put it unceremoniously in a drawer. Then he turned to the wall-hanging and, with considerable effort and not a little brute force, twisted the mask to face the other way, revealing simply a hollow grey interior. Finally, he grasped the mahogany head and thrust it inside his wardrobe. Having thus competently dealt with every one of his brooding predators, he returned to his bed, not without a certain smug feeling of self-satisfaction. . . .

Miss Duncan, still immersed in her nocturnal researches, seemed to be entranced by a particular passage which presented an unusual fascination in her great-uncle’s old journals. Her pen poised but neglected in one hand, she was turning the pages with a growing enthusiasm. Through her mind there flickered the image of a certain specimen of her great-uncle’s collection, deposited now in the guest room . . . and what he had to say of it was most interesting indeed.

Melvace drifted between dream and wakefulness. In his mind there danced the slender, wistful figure of the girl. He moaned drowsily. Yes, she
would
be worth cultivating in his persuasive, practised way. He knew the form. Prey as much as possible upon her anxieties about the money troubles, let her be positively aching for a simple, straightforward way out, contrast the unpleasantness of the processes of law and the rigours of dearth and drudgery, with the half-promise he offered her. Then let the careful, callous logic of her situation take its course. It was abominably easy for him, and so simple to pretend, afterwards, that she had misunderstood the significance of their little transaction.

There was a harsh rattle and a heavy crash: Melvace, jolted from his voluptuous reverie, started up abruptly and looked wildly around. A flare of panic blazed across his mind. Then he saw that the far wall was empty, and he heard, spinning and rumbling on the floor, the monstrous, overturned mask. He cursed loudly—his pulse was pounding, and his brow had broken out in a clammy sweat. Damned fool! With a sickly reassurance, he told himself he must have disturbed the grotesque totem when adjusting it earlier—clearly it had unbalanced itself and toppled from its perch. A nasty fright. However, it would not do to leave it there, where he might very well stumble over it when rising—it must be propped in a corner out of the way. He would also like to satisfy himself as to the cause of the sudden, precipitous descent.

Reluctantly, he got up once more, edged his way carefully around the bed to the dressing-table, fumbled for some matches, and lit a lamp. Its amber glow portrayed the scene exactly as he had deduced it. The brackets on the wall were distorted a little, and the mask lay in a haphazard fashion upon the floor. He took hold of it resolutely, and, gasping at the weight and the awkward shape, which made it so difficult to carry, manhandled it with short, panting, painstaking steps into a corner, where he consciously pushed it face downwards. He exhaled blusteringly at the exertion.

Miss Duncan only vaguely heard the commotion—it did not intrude upon her consciousness much at all. She was still eagerly perusing the astonishing details concerning a gift her great-uncle had received from a particularly ‘degenerate’ tribe in Papua—she read the entries over and over with a macabre delight. And now the gift was in the very guest room where . . .

Melvace felt very hot and bothered. He really must have some fresh air. The rude awakening from his blissful contemplations, the streak of sheer shock which had scorched his nerves, and then the laborious lugging of the fallen mask, had all taken a toll. To breathe in the cool night air for a few minutes would calm him a little, give him a chance to resume his equanimity. He stepped towards the French windows, and, pushing aside the gruesomely-hued curtains, fumbled with the catch. The doors snapped open rather sharply, letting in a gust of seething wind. The curtains flapped vigorously. Jerked forward by the impetus of the swinging door, he grabbed aimlessly with his free hand and, in his descent, succeeded in ripping a curtain, with a rasping tear, from its hangings. It tumbled down heavily upon him, and he was enveloped in a mass of thick cloth, which had about it a pungent odour that was very unpleasant.

The other curtain, billowing frantically in the wind, struck his face, flicking an eye so that it stung unbearably. Clutching this wound in an agony of surprise, he tried unsuccessfully to fling off the cumbersome weight upon him. Tottering desperately, dividing his attention between the searing pain of the afflicted eye and the suffocating drapings, he became enmeshed in the other, still captive, curtain, and struggled with this blindly.

Then there came a tight knot to his throat. It was as if these hideous pieces of lurid material, coarse and stinking, were grappling by an active will at his neck. Forgetting his smarting eye, in the throes now of a grimmer struggle, he tore wildly at them; still they wound tighter, relentless. The more he contorted himself in a frenzied effort to escape, the greater he wound himself into their garrotte.

In a few moments, his lifeless form dropped falteringly through the heavy folds to the floor.

In her inventory, Miss Duncan wrote carefully:

Two human hides, from the freshly dead acolytes of a shaman, Papua, 186-.

She read again her great-uncle’s notes:

It is the tradition of this people to flay their close friends and relations, after their decease, and to make use of the resulting pelts as hangings in their huts. It is considered a great and noble art to successfully detach the entire skin; and equal skill is evinced in the treatment of it with a kind of preservative, a concoction of many saps, juices and herbs; further, the womenfolk may weave into the (if I may so express it) pickled flesh, a coarse fibre to make it more staunch and durable. These very personal mementoes of a loved one may appear to us somewhat grisly, but the practice is deemed both natural and a sign of great human affection by this race.

Viewed in this light, I was happy to accept from my mentor and friend, the local sorcerer, the gift of two skins which had adorned a pair of young helpers, who had succumbed to poison in some unwise experiments. He explained that these had no immediate kin, and their deaths had been neither venerable nor honourable, so I might take them with no qualms, especially as they had been my guides on a number of occasions, and once protected me from the alarmed molestations of a neighbouring tribe. Their spirits, it was explained, would be grateful to me for saving their mortal remains from the indignity of rotting, for it was adjudged amongst them a shameful fate for the body to be left to decay; it implied the deceased had been held in no esteem or affection.