Ancestral Vices (7 page)

A piece of moulding fell from the ceiling and crashed into his tooth-glass, a portrait of his grandfather detached itself from the wall and impaled itself on the back of a chair, but it was the stain of rusty brown liquid spreading across the ceiling which decided Lord Petrefact. That and the chandelier, which from bouncing had now taken to
gyrating in ever-increasing circles. If the damned thing came off there was no telling what might happen and he certainly wasn’t going to stay in bed to find out. With a vigour that was surprising for a man supposedly immobile, Lord Petrefact hurled himself from the bed and scrabbled for his wheelchair and the essential red button.

He was too late. The chandelier had reached the end of its tether. To be precise, the entire portion of ceiling to which it was attached had, and with an unappealing groan and a crescendo of clashing crystal it peeled away and dropped. As it came Lord Petrefact was conscious of only one thing. He had to reach that red button before he was crushed, splintered or drowned. A murky brown liquid was pouring from the hole in the ceiling and now a new hazard entered the arena. A chunk of plaster dissociating itself from the chandelier dropped onto the wheelchair and in particular onto the very buttons Lord Petrefact so desperately needed. Behind him the chandelier disintegrated against the wall and lay still. In front the wheelchair, activated by the plaster, shot forward, gathered speed and collided first with a large ornamental vase and then with an embroidered silk screen which had until then been camouflaging Lord Petrefact’s portable commode. Having demolished the screen and emptied the commode the chair recoiled, with apparent disgust and evident urgency, in the opposite direction. As the damned thing scuttled past him Lord Petrefact made a final attempt to stop it but the wheelchair was intent on
other things, this time a glass-fronted cabinet containing some extremely valuable jade pieces. With a horror that came in part from the knowledge that they were irreplaceable, and for all he knew underinsured, Lord Petrefact watched the wheelchair slam through the glass and spin round several times, shattering the treasures of half a dozen dynasties before heading straight towards him.

But Lord Petrefact was ready. He had no intention of being decapitated by his own wheelchair or of joining the contents of the commode in that corner of the room. He shot sideways under the bed and lay crouched in a corner staring lividly at the footrest of the wheelchair which had nudged itself under the side of the bed and was still trying to get at him. That was certainly the impression Lord Petrefact had, and having seen what the bloody machine was capable of doing when it did get at something, he wasn’t having it get at him. On the other hand he didn’t want to be drowned either, and what appeared to be a domestic waterfall was gushing through the ceiling and spreading across the floor. He was just debating whether to risk the wheelchair or shove it in some less lethal direction when the door opened and someone shouted, ‘Lord Petrefact, Lord Petrefact, where are you?’

Under the bed the great magnate tried to make his whereabouts known, but the infernal din upstairs, now joined by screams and the splash of falling water, drowned his reply. Having no dentures didn’t help. Gnashing his gums he crawled towards the wheelchair
while keeping an eye on the feet of the resuscitation team who had gathered in the doorway and were surveying the shambles.

‘Where the hell can the old sod have got to?’ one of them asked.

‘Looks as though he’s blown his top with a vengeance,’ said someone else. ‘I always knew the old bugger was as mad as a March hare but this takes the biscuit.’

Under the bed the old bugger wished he had a better view of the speaker. He’d show him what really happened when he blew his top. With a final effort to escape he reached out and shoved the footrest of the wheelchair to one side. For a moment the thing seemed to hesitate while its wheels spun in the murky fluid, a process that involved gathering the end of Lord Petrefact’s pyjama cord round its axle. And then it was off. Behind it, now convinced he was suffering from a terminal strangulated hernia, came Lord Petrefact. But it was the wheelchair that held the attention of the resuscitation team. They had seen many weird sights in their professional lives but an empty wheelchair gone berserk was not one of them. As it smashed its way through the remnants of the silk screen, as it ploughed across the commode, as it ricocheted off the wall and demolished yet another glass cabinet, this time containing a collection of Meissen figurines, the group stood transfixed in the doorway.

It was a great mistake. The wheelchair had evidently imbibed some of the malevolent characteristics of its previous occupant, now merely an appendage and an
unrecognizable one at that, and by some mechanical telepathy knew its enemies. It hurtled at the door and as the group of doctors tried to escape, ploughed into them. There was a brief moment of respite for Lord Petrefact as the machine bucketed about in the doorway and then it was off down the corridor carrying all before it. The resuscitation team it discarded, leaving them lying limply on the carpet, but the green baize door proved only a slight obstacle and one that allowed Lord Petrefact to collide with the rear of the wheelchair. After that the thing was away again bouncing from one wall of the corridor to another in its wild career.

Behind it Lord Petrefact, now convinced that he was past the terminal stage of strangulated hernia and well into its after-effects, knew only one thing. If, and the conditional seemed hopelessly optimistic, if he survived this appalling ordeal somebody was going to pay for it with their jobs, their future, and, if he could arrange it, with their lives. Not that he was in any state to catalogue those responsible, though the inventor of the wheelchair came high on the list with the distributors of the portable and supposedly unspillable commode not far behind. And Croxley, God, just let him lay hands on Croxley . . .

But these were subliminal thoughts and even they vanished as the wheelchair hurtled frenetically out of the corridor into the great marble entrance hall. For a moment Lord Petrefact glimpsed a blurred face peering over the balcony as he slithered across the marble floor and then the wheelchair skidded sideways, banged into a
large oak table, slamming Lord Petrefact against the wall in the process, and with a last dash for freedom lurched at the front door. For one terrible moment Lord Petrefact had a vision of himself being dragged down the steps and across the gravel drive towards the lake, but his fears were not fulfilled. Misjudging the door by a foot the chair smashed into a marble column. There was a crash as the footrest crumpled, a faint whirr before the motor stopped and Lord Petrefact caught up with the machine and, colliding with the back wheels, lay still.

From the balcony Croxley watched the final demise of the wheelchair, and with it presumably that of his employer, with a mixture of dismay and satisfaction. He had already risked life and limb by rescuing the egregious Yapp from what amounted to a combination of super-heated sauna and a rollercoaster bath, and had finally persuaded the distraught and buffeted professor that a deliberate attempt had not been made on his life. Yapp hadn’t been easily persuaded.

‘How the hell was I to know the bloody thing hadn’t been used for sixty years?’ he had squawked as Croxley dragged him from the wreckage.

‘I did warn you that it was like living in a museum.’

‘You didn’t say anything about the Chamber of Horrors and that fucking bath being an instrument of capital punishment. There ought to be a law against installing bathroom facilities with lethal tendencies. I might have been scalded to death.’

‘Yes,’ said Croxley wistfully. Walden Yapp hadn’t been a pleasant sight with his clothes on, but naked, pink, bruised and exuding a sense of outrage, he was the personification of his political opinions. Or so it seemed to Croxley. He left him with the deftly timed remark
that he hoped Lord Petrefact wouldn’t take him to the cleaners for wrecking a very valuable piece of domestic Victoriana and, by the look of things through the hole in the floor, the entire room below.

But by the time he reached the balcony the look of things had changed. It was doubtful if Lord Petrefact would live to sue another day and if anyone needed taking to the cleaners the object that slithered out in the wake of the wheelchair was clearly that person. For one horrible second Croxley had supposed it to be a pair of pyjamas that had somehow escaped from a septic tank and was doing its damnedest to catch the wheelchair. It was only after the revolting bundle had hit the wall and the wheelchair had crunched into the marble column that Croxley recognized his employer. With a sense of duty that overcame his personal feelings he bounded down the stairs and knelt beside the corpse and tried diffidently to find its pulse. It didn’t seem to have one. And where the hell had the resuscitation team disappeared to? If ever their services had been needed it was now. But after he had yelled ‘Help’ several times and no one had appeared Croxley was forced to take that action for which he had conscientiously prepared himself and which he had prayed he would be spared. Lifting Lord Petrefact’s bleeding head, and the fact that it was bleeding seemed to argue the old swine wasn’t quite dead, he shut his eyes and applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was only after his third puff that he opened his eyes and found his left one staring into the demonic eye of
Lord Petrefact. Croxley dropped the head at once. He had seen that eye looking murderous before but never at such close quarters.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked and immediately regretted it. The question galvanized the old man. It had been awful enough to be chased and then dragged by a demented wheelchair through God alone knew what filth, but to regain consciousness to find himself being kissed by his own confidential secretary of fifty years’ standing, and a man moreover whose perverse sense of humour had constructed a sucking pig out of the extremities of a fucking wild boar, was beyond belief awful.

‘All right?’ he yelled. ‘All right? You stand there and have the gall to ask me if I’m all right. And what the hell were you kissing me for?’

‘Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,’ muttered Croxley, feeling that it would only exacerbate matters if he pointed out that he was actually kneeling and not standing. But Lord Petrefact was wrestling with his pyjama cord. Whatever Croxley had been doing could wait until he had undone the infernal knot that was threatening his bowels with gas gangrene or worse. The thing was more a tourniquet than a pyjama cord.

‘Here, let me help you,’ said Croxley, suddenly realizing what was the matter, but Lord Petrefact had had enough of his secretary’s oral attentions.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ he screamed and gave a terrible spasmodic lurch. The wheelchair rolled backwards and ended his attempt to free himself from its ghastly attachment.
With a sob Lord Petrefact lay still and was about to order Croxley to fetch a knife when the resuscitation team arrived on the scene.

‘He’s caught up in the—’ Croxley began before being swept aside by the medical experts who thought they knew best. While one of them undid the oxygen mask, another unclipped the electrodes of the heart stimulator. Within seconds Lord Petrefact was silenced by the mask and was learning what it felt like to have electric shocks applied to a relatively healthy heart.

‘And get rid of that damned wheelchair,’ ordered the head of the team. ‘We can’t possibly work with that thing in the way and the patient needs room to breathe.’

Inside the oxygen mask Lord Petrefact disagreed, but he was in no position to voice his opinions. As the electric shocks pulsed through his chest and oxygen was pumped into his lungs and, finally, as another member of the team tried to drag the wheelchair away, Lord Petrefact knew that he was dying. For once he didn’t care. Hell itself would be blissful by comparison with what these swine were doing to him.

‘You fucking murderers,’ he yelled into the mask, only to be jolted by another shock and the prick of a hypodermic in his arm. As he lapsed into unconsciousness he was vaguely aware that Croxley was bending over him with something that looked ominously like a carving knife. For a moment Lord Petrefact remembered the expurgated pig and felt for it. The next he was happily unconscious and Croxley was trying to get at the pyjama cord. It was
a move calculated to mislead the doctors. The insane events of the morning had been caused by someone, and, being scientists, they were disinclined to blame the wheelchair. Nor did they know that what had caused the destruction of the bedroom had been something as mechanical as the Synchronized Ablution Bath. They had lived long enough in close proximity to Lord Petrefact to understand the strain he imposed on his secretary. It seemed abundantly clear to them that the man had been goaded beyond the limits of sanity and was bent on disembowelling his master. As Croxley grabbed the pyjama cord they threw themselves on him and pinned him to the ground before wresting the carving knife from his hand.

It was this scene that greeted Yapp as he emerged from the King Albert suite with his Intourist bag, determined to get the hell out of Fawcett House as quickly as possible. It was also the scene that met the horrified eyes of Mrs Billington-Wall when she arrived to open the house to visitors. Now wearing a tweed suit in place of her twin-set she was more formidable than ever. One glance at the mêlée of doctors and Croxley on the floor, another at Yapp hesitating on the staircase, and a final disgusted look at Lord Petrefact, and she took command of the situation.

‘What the devil do you think you’re doing down there?’ she demanded.

‘He was trying to kill Lord Petrefact,’ muttered one of the medical team.

‘I wasn’t,’ squeaked Croxley, trying to recover his breath, ‘I was merely going to cut the cord that . . .’ He ran out of breath.

‘Yes, well we’ve all heard that one before,’ said one of the doctors. ‘A classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Cutting umbilical cords . . .’

But Mrs Billington-Wall had already sized at least a portion of the situation up. ‘He’s got a point,’ she said, looking with a professional eye on Lord Petrefact’s purpling toes. ‘Something is definitely obstructing his circulation.’ And with a deft practicality she undid the pyjama cord and watched the toes begin to resume their normal pallor. The doctors got to their feet rather awkwardly.