The uncanny, p.3
The Uncanny, page 3
Above the rising chatter, he heard the front door shut. He could feel it: she was gone. He sank slowly back into his chair.
Sophia Endering, he thought. He sat there with the book held slack on his thigh, his thumb holding the place for no good reason. Sophia Endering.
But what difference did it make? It didn’t matter now. He was not in love with her. He could not be in love with her. He could not be in love with anyone.
He sat there, silent, slumped, withdrawn again into his unhappy depths.
2
But why? thought Harper Albright. Why should he be so sad?
From her perch among the embroidered cushions of the window seat to Storm’s far left, she had seen everything. She had seen Storm rise to his feet with his first look at Sophia. She had seen the ache of passion animate his features, had watched as it drained away again, as his eyes became hollow again, and his expression once more grew distant with despair. It made her think of certain mud crabs who can “throw” their claws, actually detach their claws to break the grip of an enemy. It seemed to her that Storm—she supposed she had to call him by that ridiculous name if only out of respect for the American miracle of self-invention—it seemed to her that Storm had similarly “thrown” his heart, detached his heart to break the grip of life.
And she pondered on this, sitting there, her withered hands clasped over the carved wooden dragon’s head that topped her walking stick. She was a grim, peculiar-looking person, this Harper. Not an old woman particularly, sixty perhaps, but dilapidated nonetheless. With lifeless gray hair bobbed on a furrowed brow. Slack, sagging cheeks under deep, gray pouches. And spectacles thick as goggles, through which she blinked intently. A pipe with a meerschaum skull for a bowl was clamped between her yellowing teeth, yellowish smoke trailing out of it. She rested her round chin on the back of her hands. And she wondered:
Why shouldn’t Richard Storm love Sophia Endering? He was older than she was, certainly—forty at least. But he was youthful and handsome. Rangy, muscular. With a full head of short, sandy hair, and features as rugged as the great western land from which he came. More rugged, probably, seeing as he came from Los Angeles. And Harper knew him to be unmarried; that is, divorced. Humorous and easygoing, and gentle in a lady’s presence. She herself was aware of having developed some sentimental feelings for him since he had come to her. Possibly. Some. So why should he disengage himself? From Sophia. From everyone, really. Harper Albright turned the question over and over.
He was, she thought, for all his American amiability, a man of mystery to some extent, of hidden depths at least. A producer, a highly successful producer of Hollywood films, some good ones, some she’d seen, many that were in her line, having to do with horror and the supernatural, ghosts, werewolves, the occasional latex demon or two. And yet, a month ago, he had apparently left this lucrative career behind. He had turned up all unknown in London. He had arrived at her door without introduction and volunteered to serve as an unpaid intern on her little magazine, Bizarre! He was tired of making movies about the paranormal, he told her. He wanted to work with her, to get at “the real thing.” And that was pretty much all he told her. But uncomplaining—and, again, unpaid—he took to bounding after her like some great red setter, joining her journalistic investigations into claims of haunting, witchcraft, vampirism, alien abductions, and the like. And the question of what he was really after—and why it was he remained, in some way, set apart—had begun to worry at her.
Her reverie was interrupted, however, as Bolt reentered through the archway.
“Well,” he growled nastily at Storm. “It was well read anyway, I’ll give you that.”
This was what had started the incident. The ghost story. About half an hour before. Bolt had been holding forth, pronouncing upon ghost stories in general: Christmas and December gatherings and ghost stories and so on. Storm had said that he had always loved the English variety. Loved them, he’d said—that’s what had done it—all that Yankee enthusiasm. It wasn’t that Bolt disliked Storm in particular, or Americans in general. But there was some vivacious something about both of them that was an insult to his cherished pessimism. Suddenly, anyway, after that, Bolt had felt that he had to play the expert. He’d shifted up a notch from pronouncing to pontificating. And when Storm had said that he thought the Oxford collection was sensational—Absolutely sensational! he’d said—it had just been too much for poor Bolt.
“Well, I suppose,” the journalist had said. “If you don’t mind the fact that they left out ‘Thurnley Abbey.’ I mean, I don’t expect it to be complete, but, after all, it is The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, which I think entails certain responsibilities. I mean, they left out ‘Thurnley Abbey’!”
“Yeah, ‘Thurnley Abbey,’ that was a good one,” said Storm. “I think they put that in the Victorian collection.”
“Pff!” said Frederick Bolt.
And Storm, mildly, changed the subject. “Hey, have you ever read ‘Black Annie,’ by Robert Hughes?”
It was a soft answer, Harper Albright thought, meant to turn away wrath. But it had only made, things worse. Because it rapidly became clear that Bolt hadn’t read “Black Annie,” that he’d never even heard of it. Which meant it couldn’t possibly be worth considering. And he said so.
“Oh no, no, you’re wrong!” cried Storm. Rising from his chair, he went to the shelves. Strolled over, too familiarly, as if it were his flat instead of Bolt’s. He plucked out The Fourteenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. “It’s in here. You oughta read it, it really is good.”
He held the book out to Bolt. Bolt scowled at it. “Fourteenth! They must’ve been pretty thin on the ground by then.” But Storm continued to proffer it. And Bolt’s lips curled wickedly. “Why don’t you read it?” he sneered. “Go on—Christmas by the fireside—a gathering—a ghost story—give us a reading, Storm.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Harper Albright had muttered. Bolt could be intolerable.
Later, though, she wondered whether he hadn’t perhaps fallen into the American’s trap. Storm took the book back to his chair and began to read “Black Annie” aloud—and Harper was immediately reminded that his father had been an actor; he had told her that. He proceeded to deliver a witty and yet genuinely spooky rendition of the piece. And by the time Quentin and Neville were making their candlelit way down the ominous, sombre and melancholy corridors of Ravenswood Grange, most of Bolt’s party guests were here in the drawing room and most of them were spellbound. At the last sentence, there were one or two people who actually gasped.
And the lovely Sophia Endering had dropped her glass.
“It was well read, certainly,” Bolt conceded now again. “And not without interest. Without originality, or irony or invention—or literate prose. But no one could say it was without interest.”
Storm only spread his hands and spoke with such sincerity that Harper Albright thought it would kill Bolt on the spot. “Ah, well, you know. I first read it when I was maybe ten years old. And it just hit me, like: Pow! The English Ghost Story. It got me started in a way. The first film I ever made, twenty years ago, I was, I don’t know, twenty-two. Spectre, it was called. I’d never even been to England. I wrote it, directed it, shot the whole thing in California. But I set it here, you know, in this total ‘Black Annie’ world I made up from the story. It just—I don’t know—it always stuck with me in this …”
His voice trailed off. He shook his head. Well, he was American, Harper reminded herself, and had evolved beyond the need for complete sentences. But what he said—what he was trying to say—did set her thinking again. Chomping on her skull pipe, leaning on her dragon-headed cane, blinking through her goggly spectacles. He certainly did love the English Ghost Story, did young Storm, she thought.
And perhaps, she thought, that would ultimately explain everything.
3
Outside, meanwhile, in the bleak city of midwinter, Sophia Endering hurried up the slope of the narrow mews, her heels rapping the cobblestones. The bosom that Storm had so admired was thrumming with agitation. That story, Sophia thought. That idiotic American and that idiotic story.
She held her handbag pinned to her overcoat with one elbow. Her other arm was swinging freely, march-style. Her face was set resolutely forward. She felt the wind brush her cheeks; flecks of a faint, cool rain.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
It was an absurd coincidence, of course. That story, that repeated noise, that race down the corridor of the haunted house. Tick-tick. The way it echoed her memories almost perfectly. Her earliest memories. Her worst memories …
At the top of the mews, at the brink of the junction, she pulled up, had to breathe in the night chill to calm herself. Above her, a burly sea of clouds, backlit by the full moon, billowed swiftly overhead. It rolled over the impending tree wall, into the cryptic reaches of Holland Park.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
Irritated—more upset than she admitted—Sophia scanned the road for a cab. It was unusually quiet here. No cars at all. No people, no sound of footsteps, no sound but her own breathing. It must be late, she thought, after midnight. She checked her watch: in fact, it was after one. She could feel the deserted mews behind her. To her right, there was the unbroken hush, unnerving. She glanced to her left, down the street, down the hill, to the corner. A dreadlocked Jamaican kissed a poxy blonde in the glare of a streetlamp. Some cars rushed by. A group of boys swaggered past, jostling each other. Their laughter reached her and then they were gone and it faded away. She would go down there, to the avenue, she thought. Hail a taxi. She would be sure to find one. She was a woman cabs stopped for.
Tick-tick.
Sophia went rigid. It had almost sounded real that time. Had it been real? A ticking noise on the cobbles behind her? She braced herself. Looked over her shoulder. Brought her body half around and faced the mews.
The passage sloped away from her between old brick walls hung with dead ivy. No. It was empty. Most of the small houses were dark. Even the lighted windows here and there were heavily curtained. Sophia swallowed. This was becoming absurd. The story, her agitation. Dropping that stupid glass in front of everyone. The American with his dramatics …
She gave the mews one last look, then turned again. And cried out: “Oh!”
A man was standing directly before her. Close, standing too close, standing over her, his face pressing down on her out of the dark.
Her first instinct was to try to charge past him. Don’t talk. Don’t engage him. She lowered her head, stepped forward. The man put out his hand. Which made her heart catch. Which made her seriously consider screaming for help.
“Wait,” he said. “Miss Endering. Sophia. Don’t be afraid.”
That stopped her. The fact that he knew her name. His tone of voice. The perfect English, a German accent faint, refined. She pulled up. Examined him. An earnest young man, bundled in a pea jacket, the collar turned up around his cheeks. Very handsome, very young. Incredibly earnest. With wavy blond hair and a warm gaze she could see even in the dark. But a stranger, she was sure of it.
He smiled. “No, no, you don’t know me. I am the Resurrection.”
The first jolt of surprise was gone. Sophia was in command of herself again. Still nervous—with him so close, and the shadows so close around them, with him a head taller than she, towering over her, and so close that she felt the heat of him in the cool air. Two minutes ago she had been in the warmth and the light and the crowd of Bolt’s party. Surrounded by chattering, laughing people, the taste of wine on her lips. She missed all that pretty badly just now, alone with this man in the cold. The Resurrection.
But she knew she could trust her voice to sound collected, firm. “You’re standing too near. It’s threatening,” she said. “Step back if you want to speak to me.”
He did at once, but he didn’t seem glad of it. Seemed uncomfortable in the brighter light of the street. He looked in both directions quickly. When a taxi raced down past them towards the avenue, Sophia saw him tuck his chin into his collar to keep his face out of the beams of the headlamps.
“All right,” she said then. “Go on. What is it?”
The taxi was gone. The street behind him was quiet again. The moon was hidden in the clouds. The young man lifted his earnest gaze to her. Licked his lips nervously. A lock of his yellow hair stirred on his brow, a brow boyishly smooth. There was something just then so naked in his expression that Sophia felt herself soften, touched.
“I’m going to be murdered tonight,” the young man said to her all at once. He gave the breath of a laugh, as if embarrassed by the melodrama. “It is the man who buys The Magi who will kill me.”
Sophia’s mouth opened, but she only nodded, nodded cautiously. She pressed her hands awkwardly into her overcoat pockets, pressed her arms to her sides against the cold. Looked away from the young man, looked at nothing, trying to think.
“Miss Endering, you must—” the young man began.
“Let’s walk down to the avenue,” Sophia said. “We’ll find a coffee shop where we can have a civilized conversation.”
The German made a gesture of apology. “I’m sorry. I mustn’t be seen. You mustn’t be seen with me. It would be very dangerous. I am sorry—but I want to be out of the light.” He had edged over her again, out of the gray glow of the street. “I do not threaten you, so help me. I only want for you to understand quickly what I say so I can go.”
Sophia sighed, looked up at him, her heart beating rapidly, her expression composed. “All right,” she said. “Go on. What is it?”
“My name is Jon Bremer. You will remember that?”
“Jon Bremer. Yes?”
“And he will buy The Magi.”
“You really are serious, aren’t you?”
The young man put his hand on her arm. She could feel the urgency of his touch even through the woolen sleeve of her coat. “He is the Devil from Hell,” he blurted, lips trembling, like a child’s. “All the Resurrection Men are dead. The man who verified the panel: tortured—mutilated—murdered. The couple who found the shop in the east, the same. Tortured, killed. Even the shop owner—his body was pulled out of the Elbe three days after the panel was recovered. His eyes … horrible … That’s five people now—five people have had The Magi in their hands, Miss Endering. Four are dead. I am the last.”
Sophia murmured, “Good God.” She knew that it was true—and yet it made the conversation seem unreal to her, nightmarish. The two of them huddled together like this at the edge of the mews. The words smuggled between them, hurried, secretive, menaced. It was all too ridiculous. The Devil from Hell …
“Well, then, you must go to the police,” she said decisively.
“No!” The young man’s head went back, his eyes went wide, frightened. “His people are there as well. They are everywhere. You are the only one we can trust.” His grip on her tightened. She felt his thumb digging into her upper arm. It was painful, but it made her aware of his fear. It made her pity him. She pitied all of them. “It has to be you, Sophia,” he said. “It’s The Magi. You know all the players. You can be there, ask questions, without anyone suspecting. When you see who buys it, when you know—then—carefully—you can approach … the authorities … your friends in the press … someone …”
After a moment, she nodded again and he released her. His voice grew softer, the words came faster. “I have arranged for the piece to be auctioned on behalf of a charitable organization—an anonymous donation with good title, all arranged. It will be in Sotheby’s mid-January. I’ve arranged for it to remain in transit until then, so I think it will be safe. That is what I will tell them when …” She saw his Adam’s apple work between the collars of the jacket. “When they find me,” he finished. He went on more slowly. “He will buy it, he will pay anything for it. Do you see? At the auction, he will finally show himself. Do you see?”
The wind whirled. The clouds barreled by. An arc of the full moon shone above their ruffled fringes. The fingery branches of winter trees waved sable against the sky.
“No,” Sophia said, staring blankly up at them, frowning. “No, I don’t see. Why should he pay anything? Why should he kill for it? The thing isn’t worth more than twenty-five thousand pounds, fifty thousand possibly, if you find the other two panels. How can you be so sure this is what he’ll do? Your people—”
“Are all dead,” said the young man. The naked, urgent earnestness had come into his expression again. “They are all dead. And I am sure. I have come to know him, in a way. He is afraid of nothing; he will let no one else do it for him. He will be there.”
Now, at last, he stepped back from her. Sophia felt as if she had been released from a smothering embrace. The young man glanced up and down the street again. Peered at her from what already seemed a great distance. “I don’t know why he kills for it, or why he will pay,” he said. “But he has killed, and he will pay. He will pay anything, more than anyone. So the one who buys the painting, he is the man. The Devil from Hell. That is what you must remember. Whoever buys the painting …”
He seemed to be slipping from her, slipping away into the current of the night. She wanted to stop him, to stop the whole thing. “Look,” she said. “You really must go to the police. I can’t—”
“Remember,” he said—it came out hoarsely, but the word carried to her even as he moved across the street. “Whoever buys the painting has murdered me, has murdered all of us. Whoever buys The Magi …”
Sophia stood and watched him: stepping up onto the opposite pavement; moving into the shadows of the park wall; grasped by the shadows of branches and drawn into them.
“Whoever buys The Magi …”
But she could not have heard him whisper it again. He was already gone.
That night—it was a rotten night, if ever there was one. Some of the worst dreams she’d ever had, and she was given to bad dreams. Everything became all jumbled together in her sleeping mind. The cowled figure of Black Annie became the three cowled kings of the Rhinehart Magi. The haunted corridor of Ravenswood Grange became an endless labyrinth through Belham. She was wandering, feeling her way. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Remember, Sophia. Whoever buys The Magi … She kept waking up, afraid—really terrified—and then sinking back helplessly. Tick-tick, tick-tick. The dreams like quicksand, seizing her. The dread seizing her. Corridor after corridor, searching in the dark, and every picture on the walls was the Magi panel. Remember, Sophia …
