The Taint and Other Novellas (36 page)

A third voice, deep and gruff, chuckled obscenely. “Oh, he’ll do well enough, Master. Another forty or fifty years for you here.”

“Be quiet!” Carstairs immediately snarled, his dark eyes bulging in anger. “You are never to mention that again, neither here nor anywhere else!”

“Master,” the man’s voice was now a gasp. “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize—”

Carstairs snorted his contempt. “None of you ever realizes,” he said.

“What of his sign, Master?” asked the fourth and final figure, in a voice as thickly glutinous as mud. “Is it auspicious?”

“Indeed it is. He is a Saggitarian, as am I. And his numbers are…most propitious.” Carstairs’ voice was now a purr. “Not only does his name have nine letters, but in the orthodox system his birth number is twenty-seven—a triple nine. Totaled individually, however, his date gives an even better result, for the sum is eighteen!”

“The triple six!” The other’s gasp was involuntary.

“Indeed,” said Carstairs.

“Well, he seems tall and strong enough, Master,” said the voice of the one already chastised. “A fitting receptacle, it would seem.”

“Damn you!” Carstairs rounded on him at once. “Fool! How many times must I repeat—” and for a moment, consumed with rage, his hissing voice broke. Then, “Out! Out! There’s work for you fools, and for the others. But hear me now: He is The One, I assure you—and he came of his own free will, which is as it must always be.”

Three of the figures melted away into darkness but Carstairs stayed. He looked down at Crow one last time, and in a low, even whisper said, “It was a dream. Anything you may remember of this was only a dream. It is not worth remembering, Mr. Crow. Not worth it at all. Only a dream…a dream…a dream…” Then he stepped back and closed the curtains, shutting out the moonbeams and leaving the alcove in darkness. But for a long time it seemed to the sleeping man in the bed that Carstairs’ eyes hung over him in the night like the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice.

Except that they were malign beyond mortal measure….

III

In the morning, with weak, grime-filtered January sunlight giving the library a dull, time-worn appearance more in keeping with late afternoon than morning, Crow awakened, stretched and yawned. He had not slept well and had a splitting headache, which itself caused him to remember his vow of the previous night: to treat his employer’s wine with more respect in future. He remembered, too, something of his dream—something vaguely frightening—but it had been only a dream and not worth remembering. Not worth it at all…

Nevertheless, still lying abed, he struggled for a little while to force memories to the surface of his mind. They were there, he was sure, deep down in his subconscious. But they would not come. That the dream had concerned Carstairs and a number of other, unknown men, he was sure, but its details…(he shrugged the thing from his mind) were not worth remembering.

Yet still he could not rid himself of the feeling that he should remember, if only for his own peace of mind. There was that frustrating feeling of having a word on the tip of one’s tongue, only to find it slipping away before it can be voiced. After the dream there had been something else—a continuation, perhaps—but this was far less vague and shadowy. It had seemed to Crow that he had heard droning chants or liturgies of some sort or other echoing up from the very bowels of the house. From the cellars? Well, possibly that had been a mental hangover from Carstairs’ statement that the cellars were out of bounds. Perhaps, subconsciously, he had read something overly sinister into the man’s warning in that respect.

But talking—or rather thinking—of hangovers, the one he had was developing into something of a beauty! Carstairs’ wine? Potent?…Indeed!

He got up, put on his dressing gown, went in search of the bathroom and from there, ten minutes later and greatly refreshed, to the dining room. There he found a brief note, signed by Carstairs, telling him that his employer would be away all day and urging an early start on his work. Crow shrugged, breakfasted, cleared up after himself and prepared to return to the library. But as he was putting away his dishes he came upon a packet of Aspros, placed conspicuously to hand. And now he had to smile at Carstairs’ perception. Why, the man had known he would suffer from last night’s overindulgence, and these pills were to ensure Crow’s clearheadedness as he commenced his work!

His amusement quickly evaporated, however, as he moved from kitchen to library and paused to ponder the best way to set about the job. For the more he looked at and handled these old books, the more the feeling grew within him that Carstairs’ passion lay not in the ownership of such volumes but in their use. And if that were the case, then yesterday’s caution—however instinctive, involuntary—might yet prove to have stood him in good stead. He thought back to Carstairs’ question about his date of birth, and of the man’s alleged interest—his “consuming” interest—in astrology. Strange, then, that there was hardly a single volume on that subject to be found among all of these books.

Not so strange, though, that in answer to Carstairs’ question he had lied. For as a numerologist Crow had learned something of the importance of names, numbers, and dates—especially to an occultist! No magician in all the long, macabre history of mankind would ever have let the date of his birth be known to an enemy, nor even his name, if that were at all avoidable. For who could tell what use the other might make of such knowledge, these principal factors affecting a man’s destiny?

In just such recesses of the strange and mystical mind were born such phrases of common, everyday modern usage as: “That bullet had his number on it,” and “His number is up!” And where names were concerned, from Man’s primal beginnings the name was the identity, the very spirit, and any wizard who knew a man’s name might use it against him. The Holy Bible was full of references to the secrecy and sanctity of names, such as the third and “secret” name of the rider of the Horse of Revelations, or that of the angel visiting Samson’s father, who asked: “Why asketh thou then after my name, seeing it is secret?” And the Bible was modern fare compared with certain Egyptian legends concerning the use of names in inimical magic. Well, too late to worry about that now; but in any case, while Carstairs had Crow’s name, at least he did not have his number.

And what had been that feeling, Crow wondered, come over him when the occultist had asked about his interests, his hobbies? At that moment he would have been willing to swear that the man had almost succeeded in hypnotizing him. And again, for some reason he had been prompted to lie; or if not to lie, to tell only half the truth. Had that, too, been some mainly subconscious desire to protect his identity? If so, why? What possible harm could Carstairs wish to work upon him? The idea was quite preposterous.

As for archaeology and paleontology: Crow’s interest was quite genuine and his knowledge extensive, but so too (apparently) was Carstairs’. What had the man meant by suggesting that the Oriental Institute’s expedition might have had more success digging in Galilee?

On impulse Crow took down a huge, dusty atlas of the world—by no means a recent edition—and turned its thick, well-thumbed pages to the Middle East, Palestine and the Sea of Galilee. Here, in the margin, someone had long ago written in reddish, faded ink the date 1602; and on the map itself, in the same sepia, three tiny crosses had been marked along the north shore of Galilee. Beside the center cross was the word
Chorazin.

Now, this was a name Crow recognized at once. He went back to the shelves and after some searching found a good copy of John Kitto’s
Illustrated Family Bible
in two volumes, carrying the bulky second volume back to his table. In Matthew and in Luke he quickly located the verses he sought, going from them to the notes at the end of Chapter 10 of Luke. There, in respect of Verse 13, he found the following note:

Chorazin—This place is nowhere mentioned but in this and the parallel texts, and in these only by way of reference. It would seem to have been a town of some note, on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and near Capernaum, along with which and Bethsaide its name occurs. The answer of the natives to Dr. Richardson, when he inquired concerning Capernaum (see the note on iv, 31) connected Chorazin in the same manner with that city….

Crow checked the specified note and found a further reference to Chorazin, called by present-day natives Chorasi and lying in extensive and ancient ruins. Pursing his lips, Crow now returned to the atlas and frowned again at the map of Galilee with its three crosses. If the central one was Chorazin, or the place now occupied by its ruins, then the other two probably identified Bethsaide and Capernaum, all cursed and their destruction foretold by Jesus. As Carstairs had observed: the sands of time had indeed buried many interesting towns and cities on the shores of Galilee.

And so much for John Kitto, D.D., F. S.A. A massive and scholarly work to be sure, his great Bible—but he might have looked a little deeper into the question of Chorazin. For to Crow’s knowledge this was one of the birthplaces of “the Antichrist”—whose birth, in its most recent manifestation, had supposedly taken place about the year 1602…

• • •

Titus Crow would have dearly loved to research Carstairs’ background, discover his origins and fathom the man’s nature and occult directions; so much so that he had to forcefully remind himself that he was not here as a spy but an employee, and that as such he had work to do. Nor was he loath to employ himself on Carstairs’ books, for the occultist’s collection was in a word, marvelous.

With all of his own esoteric interest, Crow had never come across so fantastic an assemblage of books in his life, not even in the less public archives of such authoritative establishments as the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale. In fact, had anyone previously suggested that such a private collection existed, Crow might well have laughed. Quite apart from the expense necessarily incurred in building such a collection, where could a man possibly find the time required and the dedication in a single lifetime? But it was another, and to Crow far more astonishing, aspect of the library which gave him his greatest cause to ponder: namely the incredible carelessness or sheer ignorance of anyone who could allow such a collection to fall into such disorder, disuse, and decay.

For certainly decay was beginning to show; there were signs of it all about, some of them of the worst sort. Even as midday arrived and he put aside his first rough notes and left the library for the kitchen, just such a sign made itself apparent. It was a worm—a bookworm, Crow supposed, though he had no previous experience of them—which he spotted crawling on the carpeted floor just within the library door. Picking the thing up, he discovered it to be fat, pinkish, vaguely morbid in its smell and cold to the touch. He would have expected a bookworm to be smaller, drier, more insectlike. This thing was more like a maggot! Quickly he turned back into the room, crossed the floor, opened a small window through the vertical bars and dropped the offensive creature into the dark shrubbery. And before making himself a light lunch he very scrupulously washed and dried his hands.

• • •

The rest of the day passed quickly and without incident, and Crow forswore dinner until around 9:00 P.M. when he began to feel hungry and not a little weary. In the interim he had made his preliminary notes, decided upon categories, and toward the last he had begun to move books around and clear a shelf upon which to commence the massive job of work before him.

For a meal this time he heated the contents of a small flat tin of excellent sliced beef, boiled a few potatoes and brewed up a jug of coffee; and last but not least, he placed upon the great and otherwise empty table a single glass and one of Carstairs’ obscure but potent bottles. On this occasion, however, he drank only one glass, and then not filled to the brim. And later, retiring to his alcove with a book—E.L. de Marigny’s entertaining
The Tarot: A Treatise
—he congratulated himself upon his restraint. He felt warm and pleasantly drowsy, but in no way as intoxicated as he had felt on the previous night. About 10:30, when he caught himself nodding, he went to bed and slept soundly and dreamlessly all through the night.

• • •

Friday went by very quietly, without Crow once meeting, seeing or hearing Carstairs, so that he could not even be sure that the man was at home. This suited him perfectly well, for he still entertained certain misgivings with regard to the occultist’s motives. As Carstairs had promised, however, he was there to see Crow off that evening, standing thin and gaunt on the drive, with a wraith of ground mist about his ankles as the younger man drove away.

• • •

At his flat in London Crow quickly became bored. He did not sleep well that Friday night, nor on Saturday night, and Sunday was one long misery of boredom and depression, sensations he was seldom if ever given to experience. On two occasions he found himself feeling unaccountably dry and licking his lips, and more than once he wished he had brought a bottle of Carstairs’ wine home with him. Almost without conscious volition, about 7:30 on Sunday evening, he began to pack a few things ready for the return journey. It had completely escaped his usually pinpoint but now strangely confused memory that he was not supposed to return until Monday morning.

About 10:00 P.M. he parked his car in the small garage in the grounds of The Barrows, and walked with his suitcase past three other cars parked on the drive. Now, approaching the house, he began to feel a little foolish; for Carstairs was obviously entertaining friends, and of course he would not be expecting him. If the door should prove to be unlocked, however, he might just be able to enter without being heard and without disturbing his employer.

The door was unlocked; Crow entered and went quietly to the library, and there, on a table beside his open notebook, he discovered a bottle of wine and this note:

Dear Mr. Crow,