The Seance (14 page)

‘It’s this one, sir,’ said Drayton. His face was ashen pale; the keys danced and jangled as he handed them to me. The key would not go into the lock; there was evidently another one on the inside, turned so that it could not be dislodged.

‘Very sorry, sir,’ said Drayton faintly, ‘I’m afraid I shall ’ave to . . .’ indicating a chair against the wall to our right. ‘Where is the maid?’ I asked as I helped him over to it. He mumbled something unintelligible.

‘And Mrs Grimes? – never mind,’ I said; ‘show me the keys to the other doors.’ He indicated them with a shaking finger and sank down on the chair, one hand pressed against his heart.

The pounding of my own heart seemed unnaturally loud as I approached the entrance to the library. Again the doors would not budge, and the key would not enter the lock. Which left only the gallery. The threadbare carpet had worn right through in places and I did not like the way the echoes rebounded, sounding unnervingly like running footsteps. I glanced at the railing as I came to the last set of doors; the repairs, at least, had been done well enough to leave no trace of the accident – if such it was.

Once again the doors were locked from the inside. I hammered on the panelling, again with no result but a fusillade of echoes. I could go in search of Grimes, but how long would that take? – and would he obey me if I found him? I did not want to enter Cornelius’s domain by candlelight.

Of the three entrances, the door to the study had felt a little less solid
than the others. I retraced my steps towards Drayton, who had slumped lower on his chair and seemed barely conscious, set my shoulder against the upper panel and felt it give. I drew off a little and threw my full weight against the door, expecting the panel to fracture; instead the door burst open with a rending crash, pitching me across the threshold as lock and bolts tore from their sockets; the jamb had been rotten with woodworm.

There was no one in the study, which was perhaps twelve feet by ten, with a fireplace at the far end. Against the wall to my left stood a camp bed, neatly made up, beneath rows of theological works. Further along that wall another door stood open. On my right, beneath the windows, a desk, a tin chest and, incongruously, a washstand. Despite the cold, the air smellt frowsty and stale. And there was something else: a faint odour of ash, which grew stronger as I moved uneasily towards the other door. It was coming from a blackened, calcined mass of paper in the fireplace.

The room beyond was, as Magnus had said, a typical country gentleman’s library, with tall cases on three sides, a ladder for the high shelves, more dark oak panelling, threadbare carpet, leather chairs, a vast fireplace in the end wall. And no sign of Cornelius, even when I braced myself to glance around the corner, into the alcove behind the study wall: nothing but a large empty table; no books or papers on it, or on any of the tables or chairs. Both the doors in the wall adjoining the gallery were closed.

If I should vanish
... Swallowing hard, I strode across to the nearest of the two and grasped the handle, hoping it would be locked. But the door swung inwards with a creak and groan of hinges, opening on to an expanse of bare wooden floorboards, a long table beneath darkening windows. There was the massive fireplace framing the sarcophagus and flanked by the dark bulk of the armour, exactly as Magnus had described . . . but no wizened manikin sprawled upon the floor, and nowhere, as Magnus had said, for him to hide; nowhere but the blackened
figure that loomed higher and higher as I approached until it seemed at least seven feet tall.

Shuddering as if I were about to grasp a serpent, I reached for the sword hilt. As my fingers touched the icy metal, I heard a choking sound, followed by a thud, somewhere at my back. It broke the last of my nerve and sent me retreating headlong through the library. As I burst on to the landing, with the sound of my footsteps reverberating around me, I heard another cry from the darkness below. For an instant I thought it was Drayton, until I saw him sprawled in the shadows beside his chair, and realised that he had answered his last summons.

I remember finding the elderly maid Sarah trembling at the foot of the stairs, thinking the ghost had returned (she received the news of her master’s vanishing with indifference, but burst into tears when I told her about Drayton); stumbling out to the cottage and railing in vain at Grimes, who was already in drink; seizing a lantern from his wife and setting off to walk the five miles to Melton in the dark. But the chill would not leave my bones, and the shivering grew worse as I walked, until the teeth were rattling in my head. I think I must have crouched for hours beside the fire at the Coach and Horses, unable to stop my teeth from chattering, with the odd sensation of looking down at myself from somewhere near the ceiling; and then I was shivering in a strange bed, with the dead face of Drayton circling through nightmares while I burned and froze by turns. Other faces came and went in my delirium, Magnus’s amongst them, but I could not tell which were real and which mere hallucinations.

The fever broke on the fourth day, leaving me very weak but otherwise unscathed. The doctor attending me – George Barton from Woodbridge, a genial, commonsense fellow of five-and-forty or thereabouts – told me that the Hall and the wood had been thoroughly searched, without
result. I dared not ask whether they had opened the suit of armour; his bluff, hearty manner did not encourage talk of alchemy and supernatural rites.

Magnus came to see me the next morning, full of apologies for my ordeal; he had been in Devon when the alarm was raised, and had not arrived until late on the following day. There was still no news of Cornelius.

‘Have you been out to the Hall?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I spent yesterday there. Inspector Roper from Woodbridge – are you acquainted with him? – thought that I should look through my uncle’s papers to see if they afforded any clue.’

‘And did they?’

‘I fear not. He seems to have burned a great many – you noticed the ashes in the grate? – including, I believe, the manuscript of Trithemius. There were fragments – I thought I recognised the hand – but it all fell to pieces at a touch.’

I’ll burn my books
. . . the words of Faustus came involuntarily to my lips.

‘I confess,’ said Magnus, ‘that the same thought occurred to me.’

‘And – the armour?’

‘Empty. I showed Roper the mechanism and told him something of my uncle’s alchemical obsession, but he dismissed the whole business as medieval make-believe. He takes the view that Drayton was mistaken in thinking he saw my uncle retire – and yes, I know that you found all the doors secured on the inside, but Roper insists that the door you forced must have been jammed, rather than locked.’

I realised, as I opened my mouth to dispute this, that I could not positively swear to it; the fever had blurred my memory.

‘It isn’t easy, as you see, to argue with rugged common sense. Roper, just to complete his theory, thinks that my uncle left the house some time during the previous afternoon – at any rate no later than dusk – and was caught in the forest when the storm broke. As he says, you could
pass within three feet of a body in Monks Wood and never know it was there.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What do
you
believe?’

‘I am half inclined to agree with Roper, if only because the alternative seems too monstrous to contemplate ... And now, my dear fellow, I must tax your strength no further. Whatever has become of my uncle, I shall have to apply for a judgment of decease, and if you see no conflict, I shall be delighted if you will act for me. I wonder, by the way, since Roper seems determined to ignore the darker possibilities, whether the business of Trithemius and the armour might remain confidential between us; the Hall’s reputation is sinister enough as it is.’

I assured him that it would remain a secret between us, and on that inconclusive note we parted.

Cornelius had not, it transpired, written down any of the strange provisions he had canvassed in his final interview with Magnus, and the terms of the 1858 will remained unaltered, though it would be another two years, as things turned out, before the judgment of decease was granted. He had left one hundred pounds to Grimes and Eliza, and another hundred to Drayton and Sarah (who had evidently been Drayton’s common-law wife; I learned afterwards that his lawful wife had left him many years before). My father had not mentioned these bequests, and I was surprised by their generosity. Everything else went to Magnus: a millstone rather than a windfall, for the estate was heavily encumbered.

There was a strange coda to Cornelius’s disappearance. A couple of months after the event, I was conversing with Dr Dawson, who had charge of the parish infirmary, and he told me the story of a patient who had recently died there. This man, an itinerant stonemason, had been abroad in Monks Wood on the afternoon of the great storm (possibly to check the contents of certain snares, but that was by the by). At any rate, he had missed his way and wandered until he came to the old Wraxford chapel. Oppressed by the airless heat, he lay down to rest a
little way from the entrance, fell into a deep sleep, and woke in pitch darkness. The storm had not yet broken, but with the stars entirely obscured, he dared not move; he could not see his hand in front of his face.

Then a spark of light appeared in the blackness, flickering amongst the trees as it came towards him. He thought of calling out for help, but – though he was not a local man, and knew nothing of the Hall’s reputation – something about its silent, purposeful approach unnerved him. As it came closer still he could make out a human figure, whether a man or a woman he could not tell, with a lantern in its hand. Again he was about to call out, when he saw that the figure was shrouded, not in a greatcoat but a monk’s habit, with the hood drawn over its head. Now he feared for his soul, and would have fled blindly into the wood but his limbs were frozen with dread. Twigs crackled beneath its feet as the figure passed within a few feet of him; it was tall, he said, too tall for a mortal man, and as it went by he caught a glimpse of dead-white flesh – or was it bone? – beneath the hood.

It did not pause, but went straight up to the chapel door. He heard the scrape of a key, the rasp and snap of a lock, and then a creaking of hinges as the door swung inward and the figure passed into the chapel, closing the door behind it. The glow of the lantern shone out through a barred window at the side.

Now was his chance to flee; he knew that if the figure emerged again, it would see him. But he could only move as far as the light from the window would guide him, for fear of falling and having the creature rush upon him. He began to creep around the side of the chapel, keeping to the edge of the dim semicircle of light. Then he saw that the glass had gone from the window, leaving only four rusty bars between himself and the scene within.

The hooded figure stood with its back to him, facing a stone coffin by the opposite wall: the lantern hung upon a bracket overhead. Even as he watched, it leaned forward and raised the lid of the sarcophagus with a
grinding of stone on stone. Again his limbs failed him; he could only watch as the creature took down its lantern, slipped over the edge, and in one swirling movement lay down within the tomb, lowering the lid as it went, until only a thin line of yellow light remained. A moment later that too was extinguished, and he was plunged once more into absolute darkness.

Then his nerve gave altogether and he fled blindly into the wood, stumbling and rebounding from one obstacle to another until he ran head-first into a tree trunk, to be roused an indefinite time later by a gigantic crash of thunder. Even beneath the trees he was drenched to the skin, and when he finally stumbled out of Monks Wood the next morning he was in a worse case than I had been. He was taken to the infirmary, where he survived the first bout of fever and was able to relate his strange tale to Dr Dawson, but his lungs never recovered, and another infection carried him off within the month.

Dawson, though he thought it picturesque enough to be worth relating, naturally dismissed the unfortunate man’s story as a delirious dream. Of course I agreed with him, but it reminded me uncomfortably of the old superstition about the Hall, and the image of the shrouded figure with the lantern troubled my imagination for many months to come.

t began with a fall, soon after my twenty-first birthday, though I recall nothing between going to bed as usual and waking as if from a long, dreamless sleep. I was found, early on a winter’s morning, lying at the foot of the stairs in my nightgown, and carried back to my room, where I lay unconscious, scarcely breathing, for the rest of that day and all of the following night, until I woke to find old Dr Stevenson bending over me. His head was surrounded by the most extraordinary halo of light, suffused with all the colours of the rainbow, a radiance so subtle and yet so vibrant as to make me feel I had never seen colour before. I lay entranced by the beauty of it, too absorbed to follow what he was saying. And for a while longer – minutes, hours, I did not know – everyone who came to my bedside was bathed in paradisal light, as if my mother and my sister Sophie had stepped from the pages of an old manuscript book I had once seen. For each of them the light was subtly different, the colours shimmering and changing as they moved and spoke.
A verse kept running through my mind: ‘Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ But then my head began to ache, worse and worse until I was forced to close my eyes and wait for the sleeping-draught to take effect, and when I woke again, the radiance had gone.