The Pendragon Legend (31 page)

She darted towards me, clung tightly to me and whispered in a voice of terror:

“Tell me, who is that man? Who is he? Whose house is this? Is it the old man’s?”

“The midni—I don’t know. I’ve no idea.”

“Are you quite sure it … it isn’t the Earl of Gwynedd, fifty years older?”

“Eileen,” I cried, “What has happened to the Earl? You were the last to see him … he went off in your car … what has
happened
to him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to him. I brought him here … where everything had been prepared. But then … I’ve no idea what happened to him after that. Are you quite sure that man isn’t the Earl of Gwynedd? … Oh, I’m so cold … Give me your hand. Is your blood warm? Yes, yes, it is. Please, sit beside me here, nice and close, and make me warm. I’m so cold, so very cold … ”

She certainly was shivering, though the room was rather warm.

“When I was a girl, at home in Connaught,” she jabbered, “it was as cold as this once … the rivers were frozen solid … sit closer, please … we had very little money at the time. There were ten of us siblings … what could a poor little girl do?” Her patter had become steadily more mechanical.

“… so I went to Father Considine to confess, and told him why I had needed the money … please, please, don’t pull away … I’m so cold … I didn’t steal the five pounds from the old man just because I wanted the money, but because it was so very cold … I can’t bear the cold … Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you believe me? All right, I did want the money. Even in those days I was after money. I never knew then how much I’d have one day. I’ve lots of money. Every minute I earn fifty pounds. And yet I’m so cold … Please, sit closer to me. How much do you want? Where’s my cheque book? Holy God, where is my cheque book … ?” And she started to sob.

Then she calmed down noticeably.

I think I must have started quizzing her again about what had happened to the Earl. She told me what she knew, and I
remember
very clearly what she said—her words, her tone of voice. This
part could not have been a dream. And yet … I also remember just as clearly what the gnome had said …

This is what she told me.

“As soon as we heard from Cynthia where he had gone, I went to see him. Now he couldn’t just send a message that I wasn’t welcome. He opened the door himself. I knew that once he saw me he would never have the strength to throw me out. It wasn’t difficult to
persuade
him to go with me. He believed everything I told him. That I’d broken off with Morvin, but I was afraid and needed his
protection
. He got in the Hispano and came like a lamb to the slaughter. Please, don’t draw back … I’m so cold … this whole night … never again while I live … Tell me, does the Devil really exist?”

I pressed her to continue.

“We came to this house, and imagine … in the very first room, Morvin. Just lying there. He should have been hiding. But he couldn’t. He was dead.”

She started to giggle.

“Why is that so funny?”

“I have to laugh when I think of him. Such an odd sight. His neck was twisted round; he was lying on his stomach and his head was facing upwards. I laughed then too. The Earl just stared at me, shocked by my response. He said I’d better be careful: it was how Maloney had died. But I was glad. I thought, now I’d be free of both of them. Now I’d have a bit more peace in my life. But that man … so much worse … oh, oh … You’re a doctor. Tell me: what makes the body turn cold as ice?”

“Please continue. Tell me what happened to the Earl,” I repeated, in my monomaniac refrain.

“Yes, yes, the Earl. I thought, this is no good; he can see Morvin’s here, he’ll start to get suspicious. He was sitting in a chair, with his head in his hands, like this … I took out my revolver, the tiny one I bought in Paris … it’s so pretty, with white enamel … I thought I’d stand behind him and shoot him in the head, at the nape of the neck, where the skull is soft … Do you know, I once saw a man whose head had been shattered into pieces by a bullet. It was in Morocco … how warm it was there … and those women with their veils … We’ll go to Morocco, won’t we? But how can we ever get away from here?”

Oh, the contradictions of feeling! To hold in your arms
someone
you yearn to embrace, whose body draws you like a magnet, and yet your trembling consciousness utterly abhors …

“What happened to the Earl?” I shouted at her.

“Don’t shout, please; please, don’t shout. I don’t know what happened to him … That man was standing there. He took my revolver away. I couldn’t move. He picked me up like a sack and threw me in a room … oh, such a room … I had no idea there were so many rooms in this little house, and so cold … Are you quite sure that man isn’t the Earl of Gwynedd?”

“I’m not sure of it. How can we be sure of anything anymore? He may well be the Earl of Gwynedd. There have been so many of them. Eighteen. It could be any one of them. But you … Why do you think it was him?”

“His face. It was the same face. And yet different. As if it had been turned inside out.”

She was seized by a renewed fit of ever more violent shivering and outbursts of sobbing. She was in a very bad way. To bring her round I had to rub her vigorously, as one does with people rescued from drowning. After that she fell asleep.

The bustle beyond the walls started up again, even noisier than before, and the smell of incense from the burner filled the room, covering everything like a fog. Outside the door, the door I couldn’t see, the one Eileen had come through … was someone standing there, watching us? My terror mounted. I was feverish again. She whimpered and snuggled closer to me. We were like two animals in mortal danger, cowering together. Rather this guilty, wicked woman, who was at least human, than that presence beyond the wall …

Again I fell asleep.

When I woke, she was awake too. Her cloak had fallen open. On the black bedcover her white body lay in all its surreal and terrible beauty.

“Eileen … ”

Her beauty enveloped me, like a cloud. The little seaport, at the end of the world …

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

I find the next bit difficult to relate. She was lying there in front of me. I threw myself on top of her and began to kiss her body, all
over, with growing ecstasy and a passion I had never known in all my coldly conventional life.

“Oh, how wonderfully warm, how wonderfully warm your mouth is,” she murmured. In the closeness of our embrace she was purring contentedly, like a kitten.

Had I nothing else to be thinking of? Was my ardour not chilled by my terror, the horrors I had lived through, or the danger
hovering
at the door? No. Nothing occupied me beyond the moment. I was at the end of the world, beyond my own life, just thirty seconds before everything imploded, light years away from all that was rational. Nothing remained but the desire of one body for another. In such a spiritual earthquake as this the deepest and most real layers of one’s being are hurled to the surface. Perhaps I was trying to make up for every second I had failed to devote to my body? As a lover I had always been as silent as a butterfly, but now I was shouting out and gasping for breath. In fact it was no longer ‘I’, but a stream of pure life, utterly impersonal, cut off from its source and racing into extinction.

Suddenly, as if in response to some command, we broke apart. We quickly wiped our hands over our necks and faces, and got up.

The unseen door opened and we proceeded out, with slow, ritual steps.

Everything I did subsequently was done as if under orders. I never hesitated for a moment. I understood everything, how
everything
was connected; it was as if someone had revealed
everything
to me by some unknown, purely internal process.

I knew that she would be the sacrifice, on the sacred site I had prepared myself.

I knew too that she had to die in this particular way, her body soiled by lustful kisses, in mortal sin, for the sacrifice to be pleasing to Satan.

The strange thing is that I was not in the least afraid. I stood above and beyond everything human. My feelings were numb: they no longer existed. I simply went about my business. Later, I was glad it had happened this way. Who knows what trauma, what terrible damage to the nervous system, the stress of such moments might otherwise have caused? 

We made our way through several empty rooms, all humming with some indefinable energy and life, as though a large furnace blazed nearby. And yet the rooms were empty, and nothing moved in them. There was dense smoke, and we went through a fog, as if over a nocturnal lake.

Then I stumbled on something, and glanced down. A man lay at my feet. He was dead, and his head was facing backwards. I knew it was James Morvin. I stepped over him and went on.

We arrived in the pentagonal room. Everything was just as I had arranged it, or appeared to have arranged it, in my dream: the concentric circles, the triangle containing the three smaller circles, the incense burner, the candlesticks, and the four symbolic objects—the bat, the cat, the goat’s head and the skull.

We stopped.

The wall opposite us opened and the apparition stepped through. He wore a black robe and a black fur hat, and carried a curiously-shaped sword in his hand. His face was as devoid of expression as a man’s could be.

Eileen continued towards him, her head bowed and her arms hanging by her sides. I leant against a column, incapable of
further
movement.

The gnome was once again leaping, flickering and sizzling before my eyes. At times his head was as high as the ceiling; at times he took the form of a dog. More and more his face came to resemble my own.

Someone had halted between the two black candelabra and spread her arms out wide: Eileen. Her hands touched the flames on either side, but she did not flinch. Could she not feel them?

The magus raised his curious-looking sword in the air. The gnome was trying, grotesquely and painfully, to balance himself over the incense-burner. Without a sound, the woman went down. The gnome scooped up the flowing blood in his hands and poured it, again and again, onto the marble slab.

The phantom stood above the slab … his arms wide, the sword in one hand …

The words of Satanic invocation … barbaric,
incomprehensible
words, as the sword drew figures in the air …

The smoke became ever more dense. I could barely make out
what was happening on the other side of the room. The words of conjuration reverberated in my ears, like the howling of wolves at prey.

Then a terrible scream, and the cry of a wounded animal beneath the pitiless stars.

The phantom flung the sword away and dashed out through the opening in the wall.

In that instant my nightmare, or vision—I have no idea what to call it—ended. I was suddenly as sober and sane as a person is often said to be when his life is on the brink.

It came to me in a flash that the Devil-conjuror must have seen some terrible sight that drained his courage, and made him throw down his sword and fly. He was fleeing from the horror he had called up within himself.

Now it was my turn to flee.

I darted out through the gap the apparition had used. In a trice I was in the open air, with the building behind me.

It was night. I was standing on the plateau that had been my last memory of the outer world. It was deserted. The rocks were so white it was as if the bones of the earth were protruding through its skin.

But I was free. I had made my escape.

I set off into the night, not minding which way I went. Nothing worse could happen to me now. I had escaped and would sooner or later be among human beings again.

Reaching the edge of the clearing I looked back, and saw the house on fire. I re-entered the woods, and made my way happily and steadily downhill.

After a while I lay down to sleep in a friendly meadow. When I woke, the sun was high in the sky, as in a children’s story. I got up and continued on my way. I was extremely hungry, but in
excellent
spirits. Soon I reached a farm. The farmer’s wife stared at me in astonishment. My clothes were crumpled, torn and filthy, and my face was disfigured by several days’ growth of stubble. But she was a kindly soul, and for the money I gave her fed me copiously
on cheese and milk. I was unspeakably happy to have pennies and shillings in my pocket, with cash again at the centre of things between man and man.

She pointed me the way to Abersych.

I must have been walking an hour or so, along a pleasant, sunlit road, when a large figure approached, waving his arms. As we neared I recognised John Griffith, whose medieval costume had so alarmed me that first night at Llanvygan.

“Thank heavens you’ve turned up, Doctor sir!” he boomed. “The entire staff and all the locals are out looking for you. There’s a ten-pound reward for whoever finds you. It’ll be mine, if you haven’t met anyone else yet.”

“No, Griffith, you’re the first. Congratulations on the ten pounds. But what’s happened to the Earl?”

“To the Earl, sir? Nothing, to the best of my knowledge. He’s at home in Llanvygan. But we must get back to Abersych. We’ll find Mr Osborne and the German lady there. They’re also looking for you, sir.”

And so it was. On arrival I shaved and sat down to lunch at the inn. But just as I was starting on the soup, Lene appeared and greeted me warmly. From her I gathered all the news.

By the time I set out on my strangely-ended journey, Osborne had already left by cart for Abersych, and from there he went on to the police station at Bala. The police of course knew
nothing
about Morvin or Eileen St Claire. Filled with desperation, Osborne had the sudden idea of telephoning Llanvygan. He was told the Earl had just that moment returned, safe and sound, but extremely nervous and upset, and had locked himself, as usual, in his rooms. Reassured, Osborne made his way back to Caerbryn and took Lene, Cynthia and the car home.

“We haven’t seen him since. The word is, he’s in bed with a fever. So of course nobody knows how his meeting with Mrs Roscoe went. We organised a search for you. The whole neighbourhood has been on the alert. For two days they’ve been scouring the mountains behind Caerbryn. But I haven’t told you the strangest thing of all. The Earl came back with the little boy who vanished so mysteriously, the one who was abducted by a horseman. But that’s all we know about it. The Earl sent the child back to his father
before anyone could speak to him. “But oh, if you knew how
hungry
I am again! Mind you, I’ve already had my lunch. It must be because I’m so happy you’ve turned up. What shall I have? Do you know, I’d like a bit of Welsh rarebit. It’s the best thing I’ve come across in this whole creepy province.”