The Taint and Other Novellas (45 page)

I had also offered to let Asquith see the contents, only to have him wave my offer aside. It was a private thing, he said, for my eyes only. Then he had asked me what I intended to do now, and I had answered that I would go to Temple House and take up temporary residence there. He then produced the keys, assured me of the firm’s interest in my business—its complete confidentiality and its readiness to provide assistance should I need it—and bade me good day.

I found Carl Earlman leaning on the esplanade wall and gazing out over the city. Directly below his position the castle rock fell away for hundreds of feet to a busy road that wound round and down and into the maze of streets and junctions forming the city centre. He started when I took hold of his arm.

“What—? Oh, it’s you, John! I was lost in thought. This fantastic view; I’ve already stored away a dozen sketches in my head. Great!” Then he saw my face and frowned. “Is anything wrong? You don’t quite look yourself.”

As we made our way down from that high place I told him of my meeting with Asquith and all that had passed between us, so that by the time we found a cab (a “taxi”) and had ourselves driven to an automobile rental depot, I had managed to bring him fully up to date. Then it was simply a matter of hiring a car and driving out to Temple House…

• • •

We headed south-west out of Edinburgh with Carl driving our Range Rover at a leisurely pace, and within three-quarters of an hour turned right off the main road onto a narrow strip whose half-metalled surface climbed straight as an arrow toward the looming Pentlands. Bald and majestic, those grey domes rose from a scree of gorse-grown shale to cast their sooty, mid-afternoon shadows over lesser mounds, fields and streamlets alike. Over our vehicle, too, as it grew tiny in the frowning presence of the hills.

I was following a small-scale map of the area purchased from a filling station (a “garage”), for of course the district was completely strange to me. A lad of five on leaving Scotland—and protected by my mother’s exaggerated fears at that, which hardly ever let me out of her sight—I had never been allowed to stray very far from Temple House.

Temple House…and again the name conjured strange phantoms, stirred vague memories I had thought long dead.

Now the road narrowed more yet, swinging sharply to the right before passing round a rocky spur. The ground rose up beyond the spur and formed a shallow ridge, and my map told me that the gully or re-entry which guarded Temple House lay on the far side of this final rise. I knew that when we reached the crest the house would come into view, and I found myself holding my breath as the Range Rover’s wheels bit into the cinder surface of the track.

“There she is!” cried Carl as first the eaves of the place became visible, then its oak-beamed gables and greystone walls, and finally the entire frontage where it projected from behind the sheer rise of the gully’s wall. And now, as we accelerated down the slight decline and turned right to follow a course running parallel to the stream, the whole house came into view where it stood half in shadow. That strange old house in the silent gully, where no birds ever flew and not even a rabbit had been seen to sport in the long wild grass.

“Hey!” Carl cried, his voice full of enthusiasm. “And your uncle wanted this place pulled down? What in hell for? It’s beautiful—and it must be worth a fortune!”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I answered. “It might look all right from here, but wait till you get inside. Its foundations were waterlogged twenty years ago. There were always six inches of water in the cellar, and the panels of the lower rooms were mouldy even then. God only knows what it must be like now!”

“Does it look the way you remember it?” he asked.

“Not quite,” I frowned. “Seen through the eyes of an adult, there are differences.”

For one thing, the pool was different. The level of the water was lower, so that the wide, grass-grown wall of the dam seemed somehow taller. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the dam, without which the pool could not exist, or at best would be the merest pebble-bottomed pool and not the small lake which it now was. For the first time it dawned on me that the pool was artificial, not natural as I had always thought of it, and that Temple House had been built on top of the dam’s curving mound where it extended to the steep shale cliff of the defile itself.

With a skidding of loose chippings, Carl took the Range Rover up the ramp that formed the drive to the house, and a moment later we drew to a halt before the high-arched porch. We dismounted and entered, and now Carl went clattering away—almost irreverently, I thought—into cool rooms, dark stairwells and huge cupboards, his voice echoing back to me where I stood with mixed emotions, savouring the atmosphere of the old place, just inside the doorway to the house proper.

“But this is
it!”
he cried from somewhere. “This is for me! My studio, and no question. Come and look, John—look at the windows letting in all this good light. You’re right about the damp, I can feel it—but that aside, it’s perfect!”

I found him in what had once been the main living-room, standing in golden clouds of dust he had stirred up, motes illumined by the sun’s rays where they struck into the room through huge, leaded windows. “You”ll need to give the place a good dusting and sweeping out,” I told him.

“Oh, sure,” he answered, “but there’s a lot wants doing before that. Do you know where the master switch is?”

“Umm? Switch ?”

“For the electric light,” he frowned impatiently at me. “And surely there’s an icebox in the kitchen.”

“A refrigerator?” I answered. “Oh, yes, I’m sure there is…Look, you run around and explore the place and do whatever makes you happy. Me, I’m just going to potter about and try to waken a few old dreams.”

During the next hour or two—while I quite literally “pottered about” and familiarized myself once again with this old house so full of memories—Carl fixed himself up with a bed in his “studio,” found the main switch and got the electricity flowing, examined the refrigerator and satisfied himself that it was in working order, then searched me out where I sat in the mahogany-panelled study upstairs to tell me that he was driving into Penicuik to stock up with food.

From my window I watched him go, until the cloud of dust thrown up by his wheels disappeared over the rise to the south, then stirred myself into positive action. There were things to be done—things I must do for myself, others for my uncle—and the sooner I started the better. Not that there was any lack of time; I had three whole months to carry out Gavin McGilchrist’s instructions, or to fail to carry them out. And yet somehow…yes, there was this feeling of urgency in me.

And so I switched on the light against gathering shadows, took out the envelope left for me by my uncle—that envelope whose contents, a letter and a notebook, were for my eyes only—sat down at the great desk used by so many generations of McGilchrists, and began to read…

4. The Curse

“My dear, dear nephew,” the letter in my uncle’s uneven script began, “—so much I would like to say to you, and so little time in which to say it. And all these years grown in between since last I saw you.

“When first you left Scotland with your mother I would have written to you through her, but she forbade it. In early 1970 I learned of her death, so that even my condolences would have been six months too late; well, you have them now. She was a wonderful woman, and of course she was quite right to take you away out of it all. If I’m right in what I now suspect, her woman’s intuition will yet prove to have been nearer the mark than anyone ever could have guessed, and—

“But there I go, miles off the point and rambling as usual; and such a lot to say. Except—I’m damned if I know where to begin! I suppose the plain fact of the matter is quite simply stated—namely, that for you to be reading this is for me to be gone forever from the world of men. But gone…
where?
And how to explain?

“The fact is, I cannot tell it all, not and make it believable. Not the way I have come to believe it. Instead you will have to be satisfied with the barest essentials. The rest you can discover for yourself. There are books in the old library that tell it all—if a man has the patience to look. And if he’s capable of putting aside all matters of common knowledge, all laws of science and logic; capable of unlearning all that life has ever taught him of truth and beauty.

“Four hundred years ago we weren’t such a race of damned sceptics. They were burning witches in these parts then, and if they had suspected of anyone what I have come to suspect of Temple House and its grounds…

“Your mother may not have mentioned the curse—the curse of the McGilchrists. Oh, she believed in it, certainly, but it’s possible she thought that to tell of it might be to invoke the thing. That is to say, by telling you she might bring the curse down on your head. Perhaps she was right, for unless my death is seen to be
entirely natural,
then certainly I shall have brought it down upon myself.

“And what of you, Nephew?

“You have three months. Longer than that I do not deem safe, and nothing is guaranteed. Even three months might be dangerously overlong, but I pray not. Of course you are at liberty, if you so desire, simply to get the thing over and done with. In my study, in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, you will find sufficient fuses and explosive materials to bring down the wall of the defile onto the house, and the house itself into the pool, which should satisfactorily put an end to the thing.

“But…you had an enquiring mind as a child. If you look where I have looked and read what I have read, then you shall learn what I’ve learned and know that it is neither advanced senility nor madness but my own intelligence which leads me to the one, inescapable conclusion—that this House of the Temple, this Temple House of the McGilchrists, is accursed. Most terribly…

“I could flee this place, of course, but I doubt if that would save me. And if it did save me, still it would leave the final questions unanswered and the riddle unsolved. Also, I loved my brother, your father, and I saw his face when he was dead. If for nothing else, that look on your father’s dead face has been sufficient reason for me to pursue the thing thus far. I thought to seek it out, to know it, destroy it—but now…

“I have never been much of a religious man, Nephew, and so it comes doubly hard for me to say what I now say: that while your father is dead these twenty years and more, I now find myself wondering if he is truly at rest! And what will be the look on
my
face when the thing is over, one way or the other? Ask about that, Nephew, ask how I looked when they found me.

“Finally, as to your course of action from this point onward: do what you will, but in the last event be sure you bring about the utter dissolution of the seat of ancient evil known as Temple House. There are things hidden in the great deserts and mountains of the world, and others sunken under the deepest oceans, which never were meant to exist in any sane or ordered universe. Yes, and certain revenants of immemorial horror have even come among men. One such has anchored itself here in the Pentlands, and in a little while I may meet it face to face. If all goes well…But then you should not be reading this.

“And so the rest is up to you, John Hamish; and if indeed man has an immortal soul, I now place mine in your hands. Do what must be done and if you are a believer, then say a prayer for me…

Yr. Loving Uncle—

Gavin McGilchrist.”

I read the letter through a second time, then a third, and the shadows lengthened beyond the reach of the study’s electric lights. Finally, I turned to the notebook—a slim, ruled, board-covered book whose like might be purchased at any stationery store—and opened it to page upon page of scrawled and at first glance seemingly unconnected jottings, references, abbreviated notes and memoranda concerning…Concerning what? Black magic? Witchcraft? The “supernatural”? But what else would you call a curse if not supernatural?

Well, my uncle had mentioned a puzzle, a mystery, the McGilchrist curse, the thing he had tracked down almost to the finish. And here were all the pointers, the clues, the keys to his years of research. I stared at the great bookcases lining the walls, the leather spines of their contents dully agleam in the glow of the lights. Asquith had told me that my uncle brought many old books back with him from his wanderings abroad.

I stood up and felt momentarily dizzy, and was obliged to lean on the desk until the feeling passed. The mustiness of the deserted house, I supposed, the closeness of the room and the odour of old books. Books… yes, and I moved shakily across to the nearest bookcase and ran my fingers over titles rubbed and faded with age and wear. There were works here which seemed to stir faint memories—perhaps I had been allowed to play with those books as a child?—but others were almost tangibly strange to the place, whose titles alone would make aliens of them without ever a page being turned. These must be those volumes my uncle had discovered abroad. I frowned as I tried to make something of their less than commonplace names.

Here were such works as the German
Unter-Zee Kulten
and Feery’s
Notes on the Necronomicon
in a French edition; and here Gaston le Fe’s
Dwellers in the Depths
and a black-bound, iron-hasped copy of the
Cthäat Aquadingen,
its harsh title suggestive of both German and Latin roots. Here was Gantley’s
Hydrophinnae,
and here the
Liber Miraculorem
of the Monk and Chaplain Herbert of Clairvaux. Gothic letters proclaimed of one volume that it was Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis,
while another purported to be the suppressed and hideously disquieting
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of Von Junzt—titles which seemed to leap at me as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf in a sort of disbelieving stupefaction.

What possible connection could there be between these ancient, foreign volumes of elder madness and delirium and the solid, down-to-earth McGilchrist line of gentlemen, officers and scholars? There seemed only one way to find out. Choosing a book at random. I found it to be the
Cthäat Aquadingen
and returned with it to the desk. The light outside was failing now and the shadows of the hills were long and sooty. In less than an hour it would be dusk, and half an hour after that dark.