The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  The flickering flame from the lamp cast misleading shadows across the old man’s emaciated body with its withered, yellowish skin which tightened, greasily glinting, across his knees, hips and shoulder-blades. His bald skull swayed above his sunken chest, its round and repulsive shadow slipping to and fro across the lime-washed wall, as if in uncertain and anguished pursuit of something.

  With a shiver he went across to the stove, and lifted down a glazed earthenware pot, unfastening its rustling shroud as he did so. Its rancid contents released an unpleasant odour. A year ago today he had blended them together: mandrake root, henbane, wax, spermaceti and - he shuddered in disgust - a child’s corpse, rendered down into a soup. The woman employed to lay out the dead had sold it to him.

  He dipped his fingers hesitantly in the fat and began to smear it over his body, rubbing it into the back of his knees and his armpits. Then he wiped his hands on his chest and pulled on an old, faded and yellowed garment, his ‘Heritage Shirt’, worn exclusively for magical operations, and replaced the rest of his clothes. The hour was at hand!

  A rapid prayer. He reached for the bundle of objects. Just don’t forget anything, lest evil gain the power to transform the Treasure at the last moment, when daylight strikes it - Oh, there have been such cases!

  Now, wait a moment- copper plate, charcoal dish, tinder for lighting!

  Baldrian felt his way unsteadily down the stairs.

  In former times the building had been a monastery: now he lived there quite alone, and the local washerwoman brought him whatever he needed every day.

  Creaking and groaning, a heavy iron door swung open to reveal a ruinous space. Cellar-stink and thick cobwebs everywhere, rubble piled in the corners, along with the shards of mouldy flowerpots.

  A few handfuls of earth carried to the centre of the room - so! (for the feet of the exorcist must stand on soil) - an old chest to sit on, the parchment circle prepared. The name Tetragrammaton on the north side: otherwise the most awful misfortune! Now to light the tinder and charcoal!

  What was that?

  Rats squeaking, that’s all.

  Now to cast the plants into the glowing coals - gorse, nightshade, thorn-apple. Listen how they crackle and smoke!

  The old man extinguished his lantern, bent over the bowl and breathed in the venomous smoke; he could scarcely keep his balance, so powerful was its narcotic effect.

  And all the time such a frightful roaring in his ears!

  With the black wand he prodded at the lumps of wax as they slowly melted on the copper plate, and gathering all his failing forces began in a faltering voice to recite the conjurations of the grimoire:

  ‘ ... true Bread of Heaven and food of the Angels ... who art the terror of devils ... though I may be full of foul sinfulness ... worthy to overcome the ravening wolves and the stinking demons of Hell ... armour ... ye hesitate longer in vain ... Aimaymon Astaroth ... no longer resist this charm ... Astaroth ... I conjure you ... Eheye ... Eshereheye.’

  He is compelled to sit down, the fear of death is upon him, indefinable, suffocating fear, forcing itself up through the floor, slipping through cracks in the walls, drifting down from above: horrific terror, signalling the approach of the inhabitants of Darkness, consumed with hatred.

  The rats are squeaking; but no, no, it is not rats, it is a shrill squeal, fit to split the skull. And then there is the roaring in his ears! It is the sound of the blood in his veins. Or is it not rather the swishing of great wings? The glow of the charcoal fades.

  There! Ha! Shadows on the wall. The old man stares, with glazed eyes: just patches of mould, peeling plaster...

  But then they start to move ... a death’s head, with teeth ... horns ... black, empty sockets. Skeletal arms push silently out, a monster begins to emerge from the wall, squatting, filling the whole vault. The skeleton of a vast toad, with the skull of an ox, the bleached bones shining almost visibly from out of the darkness. It is the Demon, Astaroth!

  The old man has abandoned his magic circle, and fled into a corner, cowering against the cold stone of the wall, his tongue paralysed, unable to pronounce the saving command. The hideous, black eye-sockets turn to pursue him, their gaze fixed on his mouth. They it is that have lamed his tongue, he can now only croak in his awful fear.

  Slowly, steadily, the spectre creeps forward (he thinks he can hear the scraping of its ribs against the stones) and lifts its toad-claw, groping towards him.

  Silver rings, mounted with dull, dusty topaz click against the bony fingers, each linked by a rotting web of skin that wafts at him a terrible odour of decaying flesh.

  Now ... it reaches out to grasp him. Icy shivers seize his heart... He tries ... tries ... but his senses fail him and he falls forward on his face.

  The coals are quenched, a narcotic smoke hangs in the air, billowing slowly across the vault. Through the tiny, barred cellar window the moonlight strikes down, angling into the corner where the old man lies unconscious.

  Baldrian is dreaming that he can fly. A violent wind whips at his body. A night-black goat hurtles through the air ahead of him - he can feel its hairy legs right in front of his eyes, its galloping hooves close enough to strike him in the face.

  And far, far below him is the earth. Then he feels himself falling, as if through a black satin funnel, down and down, until he finds himself hovering over a landscape spread out below. He knows it well: there is the mossy gravestone, and on the earthy hillock the bare maple with its rigid leafless branches supplicating heaven like fleshless arms. An autumnal frost edges the black swamp-grass.

  Shallow pools spread across the waterlogged ground and gleam through the fog like great blind eyes.

  Are they not hooded figures, there assembling in the shadow of the gravestone, revealing the glint of weapons, the sparkle of metal buttons and clasps? They gather round for a spectral conference.

  A thought flashes across the old man’s soul. The Treasure! These are the phantasmal Shades of the Dead, guarding a buried Treasure. And his heart misses a beat in its greed.

  He spies down from his hiding place: the earth comes nearer, he is able to grasp the twigs of the tree, gently, gently ...

  There. A withered branch bends and creaks. The dead look up, and see him: he can no longer hold his balance, and he falls, falls into their midst.

  His head strikes the gravestone with a thud.

  He wakes to the sight of the mildewed patch on the wall, staggers gasping to the door and clambers up the steps, his knees failing under him. He throws himself on the bed, his toothless gums chattering through fear and the cold.

  His red felt blanket wraps itself around him, suffocating him, smothering his mouth and hiding his eyes. He tries to turn but cannot, a horrible woollen beast has come to squat on his chest, the

  winged bat of febrile sleep with huge purple pinions, holding him down, asphyxiating him with its massy weight, forcing him back into the dirty, stuffy pillow.

  The old man lay for the whole long winter under the effect of this night, slowly sinking into oblivion. From his sickbed he gazed across to the little window, where the snowflakes fled past in an impatient dance, or up at the white ceiling of his room, where a few flies aimlessly paraded.

  And when the old tiled stove seemed to give off a smell of scorched juniper berries (oh, what a lung-rending cough he had!) he pictured to himself how in the Spring he would go to uncover the Treasure, out where the old heathen grave was that he had dreamed of, fearing only that the money might yet change and vanish, for the invocation of As-taroth had not quite run to plan.

  He had drawn a map of the place on a cover torn from a book: the isolated maple tree, the little moorland pool, and there, X, the Treasure, right next to the worn old gravestone, that every child was familiar with.

  The book-cover was now in the hands of the town council, and Hamil-car Baldrian lay outside in the cemetery.

  ‘The old man found a million, but it was too heavy for him to lift out,' went the rumour, and t
hey envied his nephew, a writer and the only heir.

  Excavations began: the spot was clearly marked on the plan. A few spadefuls more of earth and - look there - hurrah, hurrah, a rusty iron chest!

  In triumph it was borne away to the council chamber. Reports were sent to the capital to notify the heir of the discovery and to request the presence of a committee of enquiry, etc.etc.

  The tiny railway station swarmed with people - uniformed officials, reporters, detectives, amateur photographers - even the imposing figure of the director of the regional museum appeared, having come down to inspect this interesting plot of land.

  They all went off to the heath to gaze for hours into the freshly dug hole, watched over by officers of the Moorland Rangers.

  The lush grass of the moor was beaten flat by the mass of patterned rubber soles, but the bright green osiers in their fresh and vivid spring coats winked at one another slyly with their silky catkins, and with each breath of wind quaked in sudden silent laughter, bending their heads to brush the surface of the water. But why?

  The toad queen too, plump in her red-spotted coat, sat on her veranda of Ranunculus and Sagittaria drinking in the mild May air. Usually so dignified (she was after all 100003 years old) she was today doubled up with laughter, gaping so wide that her eyes quite disappeared, and waving her left hand wildly in the air. She almost lost a silver topaz ring from her finger.

  Meanwhile, the Committee had opened the chest. Such a foul stench greeted their nostrils that for a moment they started back. What strange contents!

  An elastic mass, black and yellow, and glutinously shiny. Suggestions were exchanged, and heads shaken.

  ‘An alchemical preparation, evidently’ said the museum director at last. ‘Alchemical - alchemical1 - the murmur spread. ‘Allchemical? How do you spell that? With three Ps? demanded a reporter.

  ‘Ar, it be nobbut a pile o’ dung,’ says someone else under his breath.

  The chest was sealed again, and sent off to the Chemical and Physical Institute with the request for an analysis to be provided, written in ordinary layman’s language. All further excavations on the heath bore no fruit; nor did the half-effaced inscription on the gravestone offer further enlightenment: Willi Oberkneifer ftf Lieutenant (Ret.) with below, two carved crossed footprints, probably indicative of some unexplained event in the life of the deceased.

  The man had obviously died a hero’s death.

  The slender means of the inheritor, the author, had been quite depleted by the cost of all this, and the rest was accounted for by the scientific report, which emerged three months later.

  This consisted first of several pages devoted to accounts of

  unsuccessful experiments, followed by a summary of the properties of the mysterious substance, then finally the conclusion: that the mass could in no respect be related to any known material.

  So it was worthless! The whole chest not worth a bean! The same evening the poor author was evicted from his room at the inn. The affair of the Treasure seemed to be at an end.

  But one more excitement was in store for the town. The following morning the poet might have been seen running hatless and with flowing mane through the streets to the Council Offices. ‘I know it, I know it,’ he was shouting, over and over again. A crowd grew round him. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I spent the night on the heath,’ he gasped, breathless, ‘and a spectre appeared to me, and told me what it was. In the old days ... there were so many Honour Courts ... held out there, and ...’

  ‘Devil take it, what about the stuff?’ roared one of the bystanders. The poet continued:

  ‘Specific gravity 23, shiny surface, bicoloured, fragmented into the tiniest particles and yet as sticky as pitch, unusually flexible, penetrating ...’

  The crowd was losing patience: all that had been described in the scientific analysis.

  ‘Well, the spirit said to me it was a fossilized, solidified officer’s word of honour! And I have just written to the bank to convert this curiosity into cash.’

  Then they fell silent, laid hands on him, and saw that he was talking nonsense.

  But who knows if the poor fellow might not gradually have regained his sanity when the answer to his letter arrived:

  ‘Regretfully we have to inform you that we are unable to make any advance, nor offer you any cash equivalent for the article in question, since we are unable to describe it as an object of any value, even were it not fossilized or coagulated. We suggest that you make enquiry of a Waste Products Valuation Agency.

  Respectfully,

  A.B.C. Wucherstein & Co. Bankers’

  So he slit his throat.

  And now he rests alongside his uncle, Hamilcar Baldrian.

  The Secret of Hathaway Castle

  Ezekiel von Marx was the best somnambulist I have ever met.

  Quite often he would fall into a trance right in the middle of a conversation, and would then speak of events that were occurring in far away places or which would occur only days or weeks later, and all with an exactness that would have done honour to a Swedenborg.

  How would it be possible, then, to induce such a trance in Marx, deliberately, and just when you wanted it?

  Last time we had met, my six friends and I, we had tried every possible means: we had spent the whole evening trying experiments with hypnotic passes, laurel smoke etc., but nothing had succeeded in putting Ezekiel von Marx to sleep.

  ‘Waste of time,’ said Mr. Dowd Gallagher (a Scot) at last. ‘You can see it’s no good. I’ll tell you something instead, something so remarkable you’d spend day and night trying to work the riddle out, to explain the inexplicable.

  It’s almost a year now since I heard about it, and not a day has passed but I’ve wasted hours trying to construct an explanation that is halfway plausible. As a writer I staked my pride on finding a hypothesis at least, but it’s been all to no purpose, even though I know every key to both Western and Eastern occultism, you know I do! So, let’s see if you can find the solution to this story, if you can: it would impress me! Just listen to this,' and he cleared his throat:

  ‘From time immemorial, as far back as the family history of the Earls of Hathaway extends, the same dark fate overcomes the firstborn in every succeeding generation. A deathly frost casts a pall on the life of the eldest son on the very day he reaches his 2ist year, and it never leaves him again until his dying day.

  Withdrawn, taciturn, brooding in sorrow, out hunting alone all day, they pass their lives away at Hathaway Castle until their own eldest child, having now come of age, relieves them in accordance with the law and accepts the mantle of his lamentable inheritance. Formerly so full of joy the young Earls are changed at a stroke and, if they have not already managed to become engaged to be married, the task of bringing a wife home to their cheerless hearth becomes a near impossibility.

  Yet not one of them has ever attempted suicide: all this misery and depression, which has never deserted them, not for a single moment, has nevertheless been insufficient to sow the seed of self-destruction in even just one of them.

  I had a dream once, in which I found myself lying on an Island of the Dead - one of those Mohammedan burial places in the Red Sea, where the withered trees shine white in the sun as if drenched in milk-white froth - a froth consisting of millions of vultures, patiently waiting.

  I was lying on the sand, unable to move. An indescribable and frightful smell of warm decay wafted over me, drifiting out from the island’s interior. Night fell, and the ground came alive. Translucent crabs of an awesome size came scurrying across the sand out of the sea, grown hypertrophic on a diet of human corpses.

  And I dreamed that one came and sat on my neck, sucking out all the blood.

  I couldn’t see it - it was outside the range of my vision: there was just a dull bluish cast on my chest falling from my shoulder, where the moonlight shone through the transparent monster, which was so insubstantial that it scarcely threw a shadow at all.

  So
I prayed in my soul to the Master, that he should in his mercy extinguish my life’s flame.

  I started to calculate when my blood supply would run out, and clutched at the hope that the sun was bound to bring, along with the far distant morning. I think that the light of a faint hope must similarly glimmer for the Earls of Hathaway, just as in my dream, in the midst oftheir endless and miserable gloom.

  You see, I became personally acquainted with the present Lord Vivian when he was still Viscount Arundale. He spoke a great deal about this fate that was overhanging him, since his 22nd birthday was not far off, and added boldly with a laugh that the plague itself, if it were to confront him directly with its livid face and make a play for his very life, would not succeed in securing even one hour of his carefree youth.

  We were in Hathaway Castle at the time. The old Earl had gone hunting in the mountains, and had been away for weeks - I never met him. His wife, Lady Ethelwyn, Vivian’s mother, doleful and distraught, hardly spoke to us at all.

  One exception occurred when I was sitting alone with her on the veranda, and to cheer her up I was telling her about all the madcap antics and wild jokes of her Vivian, to show how they were the best proof of his almost indestructible cheerfulness and carefree spirit. She began to thaw a little, and started to tell me all sorts of things about the curse which she had read of in the family records or had seen and discovered for herself in the course of her long and lonely marriage.

  I spent the night after this quite unable either to sleep or to banish the strange and frightful images which her words had conjured up in my mind’s eye.

  In the castle there was, she said, a secret room, the hidden entrance to which was known only to the Earl and his Steward, a sinister and gloomy old man. The young heir was bound, at the vital moment, to step across its threshold. He would stay there for twelve hours and he would then emerge, a pale and broken figure.