A Coven of Vampires (Necroscope #6) - Page 14

1. The Summons

I suppose under the circumstances it is only natural that the police should require this belated written statement from me; and I further suppose it to be in recognition of my present highly nervous condition and my totally unwarranted confinement in this place that they are allowing me to draw the thing up without supervision. But while every kindness has been shown me, still I most strongly protest my continued detainment here. Knowing what I now know, I would voice the same protest in respect of detention in any prison or institute anywhere in Scotland . . . anywhere in the entire British Isles.

Before I begin, let me clearly make the point that, since no charges have been levelled against me, I make this statement of my own free will, fully knowing that in so doing I may well extend my stay in this detestable place. I can only hope that upon its reading, it will be seen that I had no alternative but to follow the action I describe.

You the reader must therefore judge. My actual sanity -if indeed I am still sane – my very being, may well depend upon your findings . . .

I was in New York when the letter from my uncle's solicitors reached me. Sent from an address in the Royal Mile, that great road which reaches steep and cobbled to the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle itself, the large, sealed manila envelope had all the hallmarks of officialdom, so that even before I opened it I feared the worst.

Not that I had been close to my uncle in recent years (my mother had brought me out of Scotland as a small child, on the death of my father, and I had never been back) but certainly I remembered Uncle Gavin. If anything I remembered him better than I did my father; for where Andrew McGilchrist had always been dry and introverted, Uncle Gavin had been just the opposite. Warm, outgoing and generous to a fault, he had spoilt me mercilessly.

Now, according to the letter, he was dead and I was named his sole heir and beneficiary; and the envelope contained a voucher which guaranteed me a flight to Edinburgh from anywhere in the world.

And then of course there was the letter itself, the contents of which further guaranteed my use of that voucher; for only a fool could possibly refuse my uncle's bequest, or fail to be interested in its attendant, though at present unspecified, conditions.

Quite simply, by presenting myself at the offices of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee in Edinburgh, I would already have fulfilled the first condition toward inheriting my uncle's considerable fortune, his estate of over three hundred acres and his great house where it stood in wild and splendid solitude at the foot of the Pentlands in Lothian. All of which seemed a very far cry from New York . . .

As to what I was doing in New York in the first place: Three months earlier, in mid-March of 1976 – when I was living alone in Philadelphia in the home where my mother had raised me – my fianc¨¦e of two years had given me back my ring, run off and married a banker from Baltimore. The novel I was writing had immediately metamorphosed from a light-hearted love story into a doom-laden tragedy, became meaningless somewhere in the transformation, and ended up in my waste-paper basket. That was that. I sold up and moved to New York, where an artist friend had been willing to share his apartment until I could find a decent place of my own.

I had left no forwarding address, however, which explained the delayed delivery of the letter from my uncle's solicitors; the letter itself was post-marked March 26th, and from the various marks, labels and redirections on the envelope, the US Mail had obviously gone to considerable trouble to find me. And they found me at a time when the lives of both myself and my artist friend, Carl Earlman, were at a very low ebb. I was not writing and Carl was not drawing, and despite the arrival of summer our spirits were on a rapid decline.

Which is probably why I jumped at the opportunity the letter presented, though, as I have said, certainly I would have been a fool to ignore or refuse the thing … Or so I thought at the time.

I invited Carl along if he so desired, and he too grasped at the chance with both hands. His funds were low and getting lower; he would soon be obliged to quit his apartment for something less ostentatious; and since he, too, had decided that he needed a change of locale – to put some life back into his artwork – the matter was soon decided and we packed our bags and headed for Edinburgh.

It was not until our journey was over, however – when we were settled in our hotel room in Princes Street – that I remembered my mother's warning, delivered to me deliriously but persistently from her deathbed, that I should never return to Scotland, certainly not to the old house. And as I vainly attempted to adjust to the jet-lag and the fact that it was late evening while all my instincts told me it should now be day, so my mind went back over what little I knew of my family roots, of the McGilchrist line itself, of that old and rambling house in the Pentlands where I had been born, and especially of the peculiar reticence of Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee, the Scottish solicitors.

Reticence, yes, because I could almost feel the hesitancy in their letter. It seemed to me that they would have preferred not to find me; and yet, if I were asked what it was that gave me this impression, then I would be at a loss for an answer. Something in the way it was phrased, perhaps – in the dry, professional idiom of solicitors -which too often seems to me to put aside all matters of emotion or sensibility; so that I felt like a small boy offered a candy . . . and warned simultaneously that it would ruin my teeth. Yes, it seemed to me that Messrs Macdonald, Asquith and Lee might actually be apprehensive about my acceptance of their conditions – or rather, of my uncle's conditions – as if they were offering a cigar to an addict suffering from cancer of the lungs.

I fastened on that line of reasoning, seeing the conditions of the will as the root of the vague uneasiness which niggled at the back of my mind. The worst of it was that these conditions were not specified; other than to say that if I could not or would not meet them, still I would receive fifteen thousand pounds and my return ticket home, and that the residue of my uncle's fortune would then be used to carry out his will in respect of 'the property known as Temple House.'

Temple House, that rambling old seat of the McGilchrists where it stood locked in a steep re-entry; and the Pentland Hills a grey and green backdrop to its frowning, steep-gabled aspect; with something of the Gothic in its structure, something more of Renaissance Scotland, and an aura of antiquity all its own which, as a child, I could still remember loving dearly. But that had been almost twenty years ago and the place had been my home. A happy home, I had thought; at least until the death of my father, of which I could remember nothing at all.

But I did remember the pool – the deep, grey pool where it lapped at the raised, reinforced, east-facing garden wall -the pool and its ring of broken quartz pillars, the remains of the temple for which the house was named. Thinking back over the years to my infancy, I wondered if perhaps the pool had been the reason my mother had always hated the place. None of the McGilchrists had ever been swimmers, and yet water had always seemed to fascinate them. I would not have been the first of the line to be found floating face-down in that strange, pillar-encircled pool of deep and weedy water; and I had used to spend hours just sitting on the wall and staring across the breeze-rippled surface . . .

So my thoughts went, as tossing in my hotel bed late into the night, I turned matters over in my mind . . . And having retired late, so we rose late, Carl and I; and it was not until 2 p.m. that I presented myself at the office of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee on the Royal Mile.

2. The Will

Since Carl had climbed up to the esplanade to take in the view, I was alone when I reached my destination and entered M.A. and L.'s offices through a door of yellow-tinted bull's-eye panes, passing into the cool welcome of a dim and very Olde Worlde anteroom; and for all that this was the source of my enigmatic summons, still I found a reassuring air of charm and quiet sincerity about the place. A clerk led me into an inner chamber as much removed from my idea of a solicitor's office as is Edinburgh from New York, and having been introduced to the firm's Mr Asquith, I was offered a seat.

Asquith was tall, slender, high-browed and balding, with a mass of freckles which seemed oddly in contrast with his late middle years, and his handshake was firm and dry. While he busied himself getting various documents, I was given a minute or two to look about this large and bewilderingly cluttered room of shelves, filing cabinets, cupboards and three small desks. But for all that, the place seemed grossly disordered – still Mr Asquith quickly found what he was looking for and seated himself opposite me behind his desk. He was the only partner present and I the only client.

'Now, Mr McGilchrist,' he began. 'And so we managed to find you, did we? And doubtless you're wondering what it's all about, and you probably think there's something of a mystery here? Well, so there is, and for me and my partners no less than for yourself.'

'I don't quite follow,' I answered, searching his face for a clue.

'No, no of course you don't. Well now, perhaps this will explain it better. It's a copy of your uncle's will. As you'll see, he was rather short on words; hence the mystery. A more succinct document – which nevertheless hints at so much more – I've yet to see!'

'I, Gavin McGilchrist,' (the will began) 'of Temple House in Lothian, hereby revoke all Wills, Codicils or Testamentary Dispositions heretofore made by me, and I appoint my Nephew, John Hamish McGilchrist of Philadelphia in the United States of America, to be the Executor of this, my Last Will and direct that all my Debts, Testamentary and Funeral Expenses, shall be paid as soon as conveniently may be after my death.

'I give and bequeath unto the aforementioned John Hamish McGilchrist everything I possess, my Land and the Property standing thereon, with the following Condition: namely that he alone shall open and read the Deposition which shall accompany this Will into the hands of the Solicitors; and that furthermore he, being the Owner, shall destroy Temple House to its last stone within a Three-month of accepting this Condition. In the event that he shall refuse this undertaking, then shall my Solicitors. Macdo-nald, Asquith and Lee of Edinburgh, become sole Executors of my Estate, who shall follow to the letter the Instructions simultaneously deposited with them.'

The will was dated and signed in my uncle's scratchy scrawl.

I read it through a second time and looked up to find Mr Asquith's gaze fixed intently upon me.

'Well,' he said, 'and didn't I say it was a mystery? Almost as strange as his death . . .' He saw the immediate change in my expression, the frown and the question my lips were beginning to frame, and held up his hands in apology. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'so very sorry – for of course you know nothing of the circumstances of his death, do you? I had better explain:

'A year ago,' Asquith continued, 'your uncle was one of the most hale and hearty men you could wish to meet. He was a man of independent means, as you know, and for a good many years he had been collecting data for a book. Ah! I see you're surprised. Well, you shouldn't be. Your great-grandfather wrote Notes of Nessie: the Secrets of Loch Ness', and your grandmother, under a pseudonym, was a fairly successful romanticist around the turn of the century. You, too, I believe, have published several romances? Indeed,' and he smiled and nodded, 'it appears to be in the blood, you see?

'Like your great-grandfather, however, your Uncle Ga-vin McGilchrist had no romantic aspirations.

He was a researcher, you see, and couldn't abide a mystery to remain unsolved. And there he was at Temple House, a bachelor and time on his hands, and a marvellous family tree to explore and a great mystery to unravel.'

'Family tree?' I said. 'He was researching the biography of a family? But which fam-' And I paused.

Asquith smiled. 'You've guessed it, of course,' he said. 'Yes, he was planning a book on the McGilchrists, with special reference to the curse . . .' And his smile quickly vanished.

It was as if a cold draught, coming from nowhere, fanned my cheek. 'The curse? My family had … a curse?'

He nodded. 'Oh, yes. Not the classical sort of curse, by any means, but a curse nevertheless – or at least your uncle thought so. Perhaps he wasn't really serious about it at first, but towards the end-'

'I think I know what you mean,' I said. 'I remember now: the deaths by stroke, by drowning, by thrombosis. My mother mentioned them on her own deathbed. A curse on the McGilchrists, she said, on the old house.'

Again Asquith nodded, and finally he continued. 'Well, your uncle had been collecting material for many years, I suspect since the death of your father; from local archives, historical annals, various chronicles, church records, military museums, and so on. He had even enlisted our aid, on occasion, in finding this or that old document. Our firm was founded one hundred and sixty years ago, you see, and we've had many McGilchrists as clients.

'As I've said, up to a time roughly a year ago, he was as hale and hearty a man as you could wish to meet. Then he travelled abroad; Hungary, Romania, all the old countries of antique myth and legend. He brought back many books with him, and on his return he was a changed man. He had become, in a matter of weeks, the merest shadow of his former self. Finally, nine weeks ago on March 22nd, he left his will in our hands, an additional set of instructions for us to follow in the event you couldn't be found, and the sealed envelope which he mentions in his will. I shall give that to you in a moment. Two days later, when his gillie returned to Temple House from a short holiday-'

'He found my uncle dead,' I finished it for him. 'I see … And the strange circumstances?'

'For a man of his years to die of a heart attack …" Asquith shook his head. 'He wasn't old.

What? – an outdoors man, like him? And what of the shotgun, with both barrels discharged, and the spent cartridges lying at his feet just outside the porch? What had he fired at, eh, in the dead of night? And the look on his face – monstrous!'

'You saw him?'

'Oh, yes. That was part of our instructions; I was to see him. And not just myself but Mr Lee also. And the doctor, of course, who declared it could only have been a heart attack. But then there was the post-mortem. That was also part of your uncle's instructions . . .'

'And its findings?' I quietly asked.

'Why, that was the reason he wanted the autopsy, do you see? So that we should know he was in good health.'

'No heart attack?'

'No,' he shook his head, 'not him. But dead, certainly. And that look on his face, Mr McGilchrist – that terrible, pleading look in his wide, wide eyes . . .'

3. The House

Half an hour later I left Mr Asquith in his office and saw myself out through the anteroom and into the hot, cobbled road that climbed to the great grey castle. In the interim I had opened the envelope left for me by my uncle and had given its contents a cursory scrutiny, but I intended to study them minutely at my earliest convenience.

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. Ts 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 /' 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 . . . wher?, 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.

Tour 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 on to 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 / 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 wandering 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 Vnter-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 Cthdat 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 Clair-vaux. 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 Cthaat 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.

Then there would only be Carl and I, and the night. And the old house. As if in answer to unspoken thoughts, settling timbers groaned somewhere overhead. Through the window, down below in the sharp shadows of the house, the dull green glint of water caught my eye.

Carl and I, the night and the old house-

And the deep, dark pool.

5. The Music

It was almost completely dark by the time Carl returned, bu