They Used Dark Forces (24 page)

In consequence, he felt no surprise when the Satanist roused him from sleep by again bursting in on him early on New Year's Day. Malacou's face was haggard and his eyes wild. He seemed utterly distraught as he stood for a moment staring down at Gregory. Suddenly he gave a wailing cry, then gasped:

‘Woe is me! Woe is me! My Master has betrayed me. Khurrem is dead! Khurrem is dead!'

Pulling himself up in bed, Gregory cried, ‘Good God! I knew she intended to leave you but not … not that way.'

‘She asked for death,' Malacou wailed. ‘She has taken her own life. Immediately I woke I knew that something terrible had happened. I hurried over to the Manor. And there she was. Dead! Dead with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets still clutched in her hand. Oh, woe is me! Woe is me! I am undone and desolated. I loved her beyond bearing and she is now gone from me.'

Gregory had put Khurrem's letter beneath his pillow. Fishing it out, he opened it and read the spiky handwriting, which ran:

I
can stand no more, so I have decided to take my life. My regret at Herman Hauff's death plays no part in this. I did not love him, but as his wife might again have found some peace of mind. I did not hate my father for what he did to me when I was sixteen and the guilt for allowing him to continue as my lover was as much mine as his. But more recently he has used my body for his abominable rites. The thought of what may result from this haunts me with terror. His caresses have become loathsome to me, and for having forced me to become a hand-maiden of evil I can never forgive him. To his other sins must be added his driving me to put an end to my earthly being. May he meet with his deserts in the Hell that he deserves and may the Lord God of Israel have mercy on my wretched spirit
.

Khurrem von Altern

Having read this terrible missive, Gregory said gravely, ‘Khurrem left this with me yesterday afternoon. She told me to read it this morning, then give it to you.'

Malacou took the letter and his thick red lips moved slowly as he read it through. When he had taken in its contents he let it flutter to the floor. Then falling on his knees he began to moan and bang his forehead on the ground.

Suddenly Gregory felt impelled to look away from him towards the door. His eyes dilated, for he could have sworn that for a moment Khurrem was standing there. She was pointing at her father and her soundless words rang through Gregory's brain like a trumpet call.

‘Now! Now! His mind is distraught. He cannot resist you. Now is your chance to defeat him.'

Instantly he seized his crutch, slipped out of bed and stood over Malacou. Still on his knees, wringing his hands and tearing at his hair, the Satanist wailed, ‘I have lost her! I am accursed! Oh, woe is me! What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?'

‘I will tell you,' Gregory shouted at him.

Ceasing his cries, Malacou stared up at the figure towering over him.

‘You will go downstairs and fetch that drawing of the Sephirotic Tree,' Gregory said firmly.

‘You … you have thought of some way to help me,' Malacou stammered. ‘Yes, yes; the stars have declared you to be my friend and guardian.' Staggering to his feet, he lurched out of the room. Two minutes later he came running back, clutching the ancient parchment.

‘Now,' Gregory commanded, ‘tear it up.'

Malacou's eyes filled with amazement, then they flickered. He shuddered, his hands trembled and from his mouth saliva ran down his chin. ‘No!' he panted. ‘No! I cannot. It is a sacred document.'

‘You must,' Gregory cried harshly. ‘You must! Only by recanting from evil can you hope to escape the curse that Khurrem has put upon you.'

For a long moment the eyes of both of them remained locked in silent battle. Gregory was praying frantically, ‘O Lord, help me to overcome him! Dear Lord, help me to overcome
him!' Suddenly his body responded to a divine command. Placing the foot of his injured leg firmly on the ground, he threw away his crutch.

He did not fall or even need to ease the weight his foot had taken, but remained drawn to his full height glowering at Malacou. At the sight of his action the Satanist wilted. His eyes fell and with shaking hands he tore the parchment from top to bottom.

That evening, the 1st of January 1944, Gregory left Sassen. On the 25th of the month he landed safely in England.

Five hours after Gregory landed in England he was sitting in the lofty book-lined room that had been the scene of the beginnings and ends of all his secret missions. It looked out from the back of Carlton House Terrace to the Admiralty, the Foreign Office and the other massive buildings in which throbbed the heart of Britain's war machine. The fact that it was raining did not depress him in the least.

Beside him on a small table were the remains of a pile of foie gras sandwiches off which he had been making a second breakfast, and nearby stood an ice-bucket in which reposed a magnum of his favourite
Louis Roederer 1928
. From it his silver tankard was being filled for the second time by his old friend and patron, Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust.

Sir Pellinore was well over seventy, but the only indication of his age was the snowy whiteness of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and luxuriant moustache. His startlingly vivid blue eyes were as bright as ever, he stood six feet four in his socks and, as a person, was one of those remarkable products that seem peculiar to Britain.

In his youth he had been a subaltern in a crack cavalry regiment and during the Boer War he had won a well-deserved V.C. A few years later his ill-luck at some of the little baccarat parties given by friends of his for King Edward VII, and his generosity towards certain ladies of the Gaiety chorus, made it necessary for him to leave the Army and he had accepted a seat on the Board of a small merchant bank.

His acquaintances thought of him as a handsome fellow, with an eye for a horse or a pretty woman and an infinite capacity for vintage port, but with very little brain—an illusion
which he still did his utmost to maintain—so the directorship had been offered him solely on account of his social connections. To the surprise of those concerned he had taken to business like a duck to water.

Other directorships had followed. By 1914 he was already a power in the City. After the war he had refused a peerage on the grounds that there had been a Gwaine-Cust at Gwaine Meads for so many centuries that if he changed his name his tenants would think he had sold the place. Foresight had enabled him to bring his companies through the slump of the thirties and he emerged from it immensely rich.

Although his name was hardly known to the general public, it had long been respected in Government circles. To his great mansion in Carlton House Terrace, Ambassadors, Generals and Cabinet Ministers often came to consult him privately on their problems, and they rarely left without having drawn new strength from his boundless vitality and shrewd common sense.

Gregory had just finished giving an account of events at Sassen since Erika had been forced to leave him there and of his final battle of wills with Malacou. Sir Pellinore towered over him, still grasping the neck of the magnum with a hand the size of a small leg of mutton. As he dropped the bottle back into the ice-bucket he boomed:

‘Well, I'll be jiggered! So you forced the Malacoo feller to recant, eh? Made him swallow his own hell-broth. Shows how mistaken one can be. You're the last man I'd ever have expected to play the part of a sky-pilot. It's clear you've missed your vocation.'

‘Thanks,' Gregory laughed, ‘but I don't think I'd fancy myself in a dog-collar.'

‘Perhaps you're right. Might spoil your sport with the gals, eh?'

‘You're thinking of yourself,' Gregory twitted him. ‘Erika's the only woman in my life and—'

‘And I'm the Grand Cham of Tartary,' Sir Pellinore cut in. ‘How about that Hungarian wench you brought back with you from your last trip? The Baroness Tuposo—no, Trombolo or some such outlandish name. By Jove, what a smasher she
was!' The elderly Baronet's bright blue eyes glittered at the memory. ‘If I'd been ten years younger I'd have taken her off you and smacked her bottom myself.'

‘I've no doubt you would. But Sabine was the last flutter of my murky past and the less said about her the better, because Erika should be here shortly.'

‘You telephoned her from the R.A.F. station then. That's good. Seein' the mucker I made by bringing her down hotfoot from Gwaine Meads last time you got home, I didn't like to risk it. Thought you might bring back one of those blonde bombshells they export from Sweden.'

‘That was considerate of you. God knows I was stuck there long enough to have acquired a harem.'

‘Yes. Sorry about that. But I gather from General Gubbie it's always the same with these S.O.E. jobs. When they want one of their cloak-and-dagger Johnnies to thrust a spanner in the Nazi works they can get him sent out overnight; but when he's singed what there is of the house-painter feller's moustache, they leave their chap sittin' on his backside till Doomsday.'

‘It was all to the good, really. Naturally, I wanted to get home; but the people at our Embassy could not have been kinder and I benefited a lot from being under Dr. Zetterberg for the best part of a month. It was far from pleasant having to lie on my back again for most of the time with a damn' great weight attached to my foot, but there wasn't the temptation to kick over the traces that there would have been here.'

‘How is your leg?'

‘Far better than I could ever have expected. Thanks to your having tempted Zetterberg with that staggering fee to risk his neck by going into Germany, I'll not have to spend the rest of my life as an unwieldy cripple. I only wish there were some way in which I could repay your princely generosity.'

‘Nonsense,' Sir Pellinore responded gruffly. ‘Seein' you here on your two feet does that. The money was a bagatelle. You must know that I'm lousy with the stuff. But tell me more about this Maluku feller. If Erika hadn't vouched for it I'd never have believed in such goin's on. It's straight out of the Dark Ages.'

Gregory sighed. ‘Neither would I if I hadn't come up against
it myself. But one can't laugh at the fact that I was struck down on a day that he predicted would, in connection with Stefan, hold the maximum danger for me.'

‘That might have been coincidence.'

‘Not if you take into consideration all the lucky breaks we had on the days he said would be favourable to us; and Hauff's death. It was that which finally convinced me that he really was in league with the Devil.'

‘Umph! Erika told me about that. Rollin' his own daughter in the hay. What a thing to do! Takes a lot to shock me, but there are limits. Can't see much fun in having a woman on a stone slab, either. Still, that's beside the point. If it wasn't that Erika swears she saw the two of them having an upsy-daisy I'd put the whole thing down to your having been round the bend for a while owin' to the pain you were suffering.'

‘You can count that out. I was cooped up with him in that ruin for over four months and for most of that time I was as sane as you are. What is more, although we are now separated by hundreds of miles of land and sea, I still get his vibrations and know what is happening to him.'

‘God bless my soul!' Sir Pellinore gulped down a great draught of champagne. ‘You can't really mean that?'

‘I do. His killing of Hauff led to Khurrem's committing suicide, and that has landed him in one hell of a mess. I always thought it a bit odd that on Ulrich von Altern's death the Sassen estate did not pass to his brother Willi. It probably did but, as Willi was a nut, the odds are that he wouldn't have realised it; and Malacou managed to fix things so that the von Altern lawyers would agree to Khurrem running the place for him. Anyhow, now Khurrem is dead her papa is up against it. The family have muscled in and a distant cousin named Gottlob is creating trouble. He is next in line to Willi and, on the plea that Willi is not all there, he is trying to get a court order that will make him Willi's guardian and enable him to take over Sassen. As the family has never had much time for their Turkish relations by marriage, it means that if Gottlob wins his case Malacou will be out on his ear.'

‘Devil take me! You can't possibly know all that through thought transference.'

Gregory smiled. ‘I wouldn't call on the Devil if I were you. It looks to me as though this is his pay-off to Malacou for my having made him rat on his Infernal Master. But I am certain that is what is going on.'

‘Bosh, my boy! Bosh! You must be loony. You dreamed it.'

‘In a way, perhaps. But they are waking dreams. I get them at odd times every day and I feel as though I were talking to Malacou just as I am to you.'

Sir Pellinore's slightly protuberant blue eyes took on a thoughtful look. Brushing up his white moustache, he said, ‘For God's sake forget this nonsense. It was understandable while you were being hypnotised by this Malodo blackguard. But not now. What are your plans?'

‘My limp is no bar to my returning to duty, but I reckon I've earned a spot of leave; so I mean to go back to Gwaine Meads with Erika for a month or so. After that I take it there will be no difficulty about my again resuming my old job in the Cabinet War Room?'

‘None whatever. It was agreed it should be a permanent appointment and a stand-in employed whenever I wanted you seconded for special service.'

‘That's O.K., then. And we won't be wanting any more stand-ins. Odd though it may seem, I've seen quite enough of the Nazis at close quarters. I'd rather remain here sticking pins in maps till the end of the war.'

Sir Pellinore bellowed with laughter. ‘Got cold feet at last, eh? But you're making a big mistake, my boy. You'd be safer in Berlin than London once the house-painter feller gets going with his secret weapon.'