The Amulet (8 page)

"Aye," said Hardy. "And it's not even new. Nothing for us here just now."

"We might need to talk to you again," Newman said to me.

"That's all right," I said, not looking up as they left. "I'm not going anywhere."

I sat there holding the Chandler and drinking whisky until nearly half the bottle was gone and my tears had all dried up.

* * *

I remembered the first time I'd met the old man. All I knew of him before that was the voice at the end of the phone that accused me of stealing his place in the phone book.

I'd arranged to meet him in the bar of The Pond Hotel, and I'd dressed for the part. I had a double-breasted suit, a kipper tie, and a high collared shirt pressed to perfection. Under the jacket I wore a pair of thick black braces, held up, not by metal clamps, but by buttons sewn into the trousers. Nobody would see them, but I knew they were there, an essential part of my detective-noir persona. I smoked a Camel non-filter, and playing with my authentic forties Zippo.

"Let me guess," a voice said. "The Continental Op?"

I looked up, and saw Jimmy for the first time.

"No. Marlowe." I said.

He sat down opposite me.

"Philip or Christopher?"

"How about Lew Harper?" I said.

"No. He'd never be seen dead in that suit. I've got you pegged more as Mike Hammer. You haven't got a big-breasted-blonde assistant who does your typing and breathes deeply a lot have you?"

I shook my head. "But I'm working on it." I said.

"Pity," he said, "I would have forgiven you your transgressions if you had."

He ordered two pink gins, with angostura bitters, and we spent the rest of the night talking about private detectives, both old and new. We agreed about Hammett and Chandler, disagreed about Ross McDonald,
The Rockford Files
, and
Magnum
, and agreed we didn't think Bob Mitchum was Marlowe, but that Powers Boothe had been okay.

They had to throw us out at closing time.

After that we shared cases. Or rather, I pumped him for information, he usually provided it, and I sent him all my divorce cases-the more sordid the better.

I'd prepared myself for his death. I knew it wasn't that far away, but I'd been looking for a hospital bedside, or him keeling over in a bar. I'd never even got a chance to say goodbye.

I put the Chandler in my desk drawer. It would be a long time before I got round to reading it.

* * *

By this time the room had gone a bit fuzzy, and my legs betrayed me when I tried to stand. Although it was now past one in the morning, I called my client-if she could call me after midnight, it was the least I could do to return the favor.

To my disgust she answered on the second ring. I didn't even have the satisfaction of getting her out of bed.

"Mrs. Dunlop?" I said. "Mrs. Arthur Dunlop."

"Mr. Adams?"

I heard the question in her voice.

"I can't find your damned amulet, Nanki-poo won't be singing 'A Wandering Minstrel' again, and my best friend is dead. I'm off the case."

I was just about to put the phone down-and I might have managed it if I had been more sober, then she said the words that made me keep listening.

"We'll double your money," she said.

"You know me so well," I said, and noticed I was slurring.

"Mr. Adams, you are drunk," she said.

"Yes ma'am," I said. "And you are a liar, but in the morning I'll be sober."

Give her credit, she actually laughed.

"Churchill was better. Double the money, Mr. Adams," she said, and hung up on me.

"Damn," I said to the handset, "I wanted to do that."

I woke just as the sun came up. I was still sitting in my desk chair, with one leg on the desk and the other on the floor.

My back felt like I had been stretched on a rack, and several small furry things had slept in my mouth. And not just slept either-my mouth felt like it had been used as a toilet. A cold shower, a change of underwear, two cups of coffee, and my last cigarette went some way to making me human.

Old Joe struck up the first 'Just One Cornetto' of the day. That meant the newspapers had been delivered, and he was ready to receive customers.

When I got downstairs, he had my two packs ready for me, but I made him put them back.

"Camels, please Joe. For old times sake," I said.

"Feeling maudlin?" he asked, but I didn't reply-I was scanning the front pages of the papers. There was no mention of Jimmy, or of the light opera singer John Harris. And I'm sure old Joe hadn't heard either-he'd have mentioned something to me.

"I just fancied a change," I said, taking a
Herald
and paying him. "Can a man not change his mind?"

"Not after five years. And not as often as a woman," Joe said, and laughed. "And talking about women-I've remembered where I saw that stoater before-the one that visited you a couple of days ago."

I'd been on my way out, but I turned back.

"Don't tell me. Artie Dunlop."

The old man looked shocked.

"She's mixed up with 'The Undertaker'? Then maybe it isn't who I think it is. But I saw her double in Blackpool, in a fortune telling booth. About ten years ago now, but I never forget a pair of legs."

"I don't think so," I said. "She doesn't seem the type." But then I remembered how she seemed to know about the typewriter. Then again, she'd known I was drunk last night as well, but that hadn't been difficult.

I left Joe with the promise that I'd keep him posted. There was little chance of that-the only time you told Joe anything was if you wanted the whole West End to know quickly.

I stepped out of the shop, and found Doug trying to force something through my letterbox.

"I only want it if it's a plain brown envelope stuffed with twenties," I said in his ear. He jumped, suddenly flustered, and spilled a wad of A4 sheets across the pavement.

I helped him pick them up.

"They're all out of sync now," he said accusingly. "I hope you're not in a hurry to find out what I found."

I looked at the pile of papers.

"Christ, Doug. How much is here?"

"Don't worry," he said. "It's not as bad as it looks. There's a lot of repetition-I haven't had time to sort it out yet."

"You weren't up all night, were you?"

He looked sheepish.

"I got carried away," he said. "You know how it is."

Actually, I didn't-I'd so far managed to avoid hooking up to the Internet. I preferred to get my information first-hand, or as near to it as possible.

"I suppose I'd better give you some coffee," I said. "I wouldn't want you falling asleep at your desk-who knows what the world would come to."

I led him up the stairs. He tutted when he saw the whisky bottle. I didn't tell him why I'd been drinking; the wound was too raw. If I started talking about the wee man again, I'd start drinking again. Much as the idea appealed, I had work to do.

"Park your bum," I said and motioned him to the desk. "And tell me what kept you away from the triple-X sites."

"It'll be easier if you read it," he said. "It's a bit far fetched, and you'll have a lot of questions."

"Okay. I'll do you a deal," I said. "You shuffle them back into the right order, and I'll make the coffee."

When I got back with the coffee there was a neat pile of paper on the desk in front of my chair.

"Fast work," I said. "Have you been practicing your poker shuffle again?"

"It wasn't as bad as it looked," he said.

"What is it about?" I asked.

"Just read it," he said. "You'll be entertained, if nothing else."

I gave him my newspaper, a coffee, and a cigarette, then I settled down to read.

The top pages were all about Arthur Dunlop. There were fuzzy pictures taken with long telephoto lenses, masses of press speculation, hundreds of column inches, and nothing I didn't know already.

"Thanks for this," I said. "But it's all standard stuff. What about the Gilbert and Sullivan link?"

Doug leaned over and sorted the papers before handing them back to me.

"There you go. There's the good stuff."

The heading at the top of the first page read "http://www.moonlichtnicht.co.uk/harris.html."

"What's this-the Harry Lauder appreciation society?"

That one went over his head.

"No, it's a 'magazine of the weird'. One of the sites where conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists gather."

"UFO...what? I said.

"Just read it, will you," Doug said. "I've got to be at work in half an hour."

* * *

It all began on September 20th, 1987. John Harris was a musical prodigy and a Doctor of Physics, a youth with perfect pitch and an interest in the acoustic properties of archaeological sites. He had already, at the age of twenty-four, published several papers that had stood archaeology on its head.

He had made it clear that ancient man had been much more 'acoustically sophisticated' than had been supposed, building their tombs, halls and homes as perfect places in which to sing and play music. His book The Acoustics of the Ancients was already much sought after by those in the know, and he was working on a blockbuster tentatively entitled Did Cheops play Jazz? with which he intended to prove that the Great Pyramid at Giza was actually a giant acoustic amplifier.

On that day in September, John was studying tablets in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow University. These tablets had been brought from Ur by the infamous Johnson expedition, and he'd had to get special permission from the University authorities just to look at them. He was working on a new theory-that some of the untranslated tablets actually held an undiscovered form of musical notation.

John hoped that, by gaining knowledge of how the Sumerian's music was structured, he would be able to finally translate, and play, music that had not been heard for more than three millennia.

He had spent the bulk of the summer in a small triangular room in the attic, annoying the numismatist next door with his constant attempts at articulating the 'music' he was reading.

Today he thought he might finally have it cracked. Abut eleven o'clock in the morning he had finished transcribing the tablets into what he could recognize as music. He started singing.

And hell came to Glasgow University. Witnesses in the corridor said that the walls seemed to shimmer and shake. Some reported an intense, numbing cold, others a stifling heat. But all remembered the deep, atonal chanting that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

The numismatist reports that the wall between the rooms became transparent at one point, and that John Harris himself seemed to be fading in and out of reality.

Out in the museum itself, a party of schoolchildren fled in fright as a stuffed woolly mammoth began to wave its trunk and show suspicious sign of life. Farther back, in the storerooms beyond, a paleontologist was studying a fossil fish when he found he was looking into a deep pool of sea water, with his fossil fish, now suddenly re-animated, swimming happily in it.

Finally, there was a piercing scream. The numismatist had to break open the door, and found Harris on the floor. He was breathing and his eyes were open, but his face was contorted in terror, and his arms were raised as if to ward off an unseen attacker.

The woolly mammoth was found half in and half out of the roped area in which it was displayed. In the storeroom, the paleontologist found that his fossil fish was now embedded in the stone floor beneath his feet.

* * *

I raised my head.

"You were here in '87, weren't you?" I asked Doug.

He nodded.

"Do you remember hearing anything about any unbelievable nonsense in the Hunterian Museum?"

He shook his head.

"I'll tell you later. Just keep reading," he said. "It gets better."

* * *

It was while Harris was recuperating in hospital that things took a strange turn. Firstly he was visited by two men dressed all in black. They spoke at him rather than with him, and told him that he was messing with forces he couldn't understand. They told him that if he didn't desist, they would be forced to take action. Strangely, after they were gone, nobody in the ward apart from Harris remembered seeing them.

* * *

I put the papers down and lit another cigarette.

"What is this shit? It's like a teenager's episode of
The Twilight Zone
," I said.

"
Doo
-doo
doo
-doo," Doug sang, in a passable imitation of the theme tune. "Just keep reading. You must be close to the bit that concerns you by now," he said.

I sighed loudly to let him know how disgusted I was, but in reality I was keen to keep reading. I needed to know how my singing friend was connected to the case...

* * *

Harris had another visitor soon afterwards. This man has never been identified, but some have suggested that it was a distant relative of the Johnson who had financed the expedition to Ur. Yet others would have you believe it to be Arthur Dunlop, although why a Glasgow gangster would be interested in esoteric acoustical studies has never been explained. Whoever it was, they were to have a profound effect on John Harris's life afterward.

The man funded Harris's research for the next year. Even while lying in a hospital bed, Harris broke all ties with the scientific establishment, and no more is recorded of his work, either in note form or on any computer we can find.

On leaving hospital, Harris went straight back to the Hunterian Museum. The University wanted to deny him access to any more of their exhibits, but it is recorded that the Museum received a large charitable donation in the winter of '87. After that, Harris had no trouble continuing his studies. It seems his benefactor was at work behind the scenes.

Harris immersed himself in the Ur tablets, studying everything that had ever been brought out of the ancient city. Now that he knew how their music was constructed, he was on a quest to translate as much of it as he could find, and find out what uses the people put it to.

It is to be conjectured that the direction of his research was by now being directed by the mysterious benefactor. Whatever the cause, his search took on an increasingly esoteric, even occult, tone. By spring of '88 he had what he believed to be a full incantation, a song used by the peoples of that time to contact their gods.