Cursed Inheritance (16 page)

Wesley handed the email back to Pam. ‘Sounds as if he’s enjoying himself.’

‘Glad someone is.’

Wesley took a gulp of wine, wondering if he was going to spend all his life feeling guilty. Had Gerry Heffernan felt like this when his wife, Kathy was alive? Had she given him those reproachful looks when he arrived home? Had she made him feel bad about the hours he put in at work? Perhaps when the time was right, he’d ask him.

At nine o’clock the next morning, Emma Oldchester entered the regression room. It was a small chamber with midnight-blue walls and thick red velvet drapes at the windows; warm and dark, like a womb. And Emma was afraid. More than afraid. She was terrified.

Jeremy Elsham was sitting in the big leather armchair. He wore a black polo neck sweater instead of his customary quasi-clinical jacket. He stood up when Emma entered, stepped towards her and took her hand.

‘You’re sure about this, are you, Emma?’ he asked, his eyes studying her face intently.

Emma nodded. She wanted to get it over with.

‘Lie back. Make yourself comfortable. Put everything out of your mind.’ He spoke smoothly, hypnotically. She

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lay on the chaise longue, trying to forget her feelings of terror, forcing herself to relax, clenching and unclenching her hands. It was working. She closed her eyes and tried to tell herself she was in bed, ready to drop off to sleep.

‘You’re on a beach. The sun is warm on your body and all you can hear is the sound of waves and sea gulls. You’re safe and happy. There’s nothing to worry about and you feel calm. ‘

Emma could feel the tension leaving her body as Elsham’s honeyed tones droned on in her ear. His voice had become deep and muffled, like a sound heard through a wall. She was on her tropical beach, her body relaxed, listening to the gentle rhythm of the waves.

She didn’t know how, but suddenly she was at Barry’s side. She was wearing her wedding dress. They were getting married. She didn’t feel particularly happy, just safe and secure. Her father, Joe, and her mum, Linda, were standing there beside her, posing for a photograph. They were smiling. Perhaps with relief.

, Then Barry disappeared and she was with her parents in their back garden. She was about eleven years old and she was holding Flopsy, her rabbit, and Dad was taking a photograph, a happy family snap. It was a sunny day and she was laughing. They had just come back from a holiday in a caravan and a neighbour had been feeding Flopsy. The rabbit had put on weight while they’d been away and Dad said that she might be having babies. The prospect of having lots of little rabbits around made her happy. She was laughing.

But then suddenly everything went dark and she heard herself screaming.

She wasn’t in the garden any more. ‘she was younger still - about seven years old - and she was sitting on the floor rocking to and fro while Mum and Dad watched her from the door, their faces anxious, frightened. Mum took a step forward and held out her arms. Only she wasn’t Mum. She was Aunty Linda. And Dad was Uncle Joe. Emma didn’t want to be there. She wanted her mum. Her real mum.

Then she experienced a terror that paralysed her limbs.

“

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She felt sick. And she didn’t dare cry in case he heard her. She’d been going upstairs to see the big doll’s house in the old nursery. She wasn’t supposed to be there but she’d slipped out of bed while her mother was working in the kitchen. She’d hidden behind the big oak chair in the hall and watched as he climbed the staircase, taking the stairs two by two, carrying the gun. She’d heard the bangs from upstairs and stayed there for what seemed like hours, frozen with terror. Then she had run out into the hall and seen a thing without a face. It was covered in blood and so was she. She ran past it though the dining room to her mother. She wanted her mother.

She began to sob, pleading with her mother to wake up, to stop playing. But she didn’t move. She was slumped, open-eyed, over the kitchen table, surrounded by uncooked cheese straws and vol-au-vent cases. Then Emma heard footsteps and she knew she had to hide. She crouched in the pantry, surrounded by bottles and tins, and peeped through the grille in the door. As she watched, holding her breath, a dark figure wiped the gun on a tea towel and placed it in her mother’s dead hand, carefully, almost lovingly, arranging the scene. Emma could feel hot tears were rolling down her cheeks and any moment she feared that she would let out a sobbing cry that would bring the figure to the pantry. She prayed. ‘Please, God, let me be quiet. Let Mum be all right.’

Then the kitchen door closed softly. The bringer of death had gone.

Emma waited a long time before she gathered the courage to push the pantry door open and run to her mother. ‘Wake up. Please, Mum, wake up.’ She slipped down to the floor, sobbing, and rocked to and fro on the hard stone floor. The fluorescent light above them had flickered and died and the kitchen was plunged into darkness. But she could see the moon through the window, a dim sphere peeping over the bare branches of the trees outside. The moon seemed red. As if it were stained with the blood seeping from her mother’s neck.

Emma threw her head back and screamed.

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The savages have a great reverence for the sun above all things. At the rising and setting of the same, they sit down, lifting up their hands and eyes. Then they make a circle on the ground with dried tobacco and pray, wagging their heads and hands.

Yesterday I walked with Penelope and she confided much to me. She told me of her parentage; that she is the bastard daughter of a great lord who did seduce her mother and abandon her in her trouble. She desires her rightful position above all things and it seems the want doth eat at her soul. She confided that her husband hath a great fortune but that she bears him no love as he is uncouth and most violent towards her. She showed me marks and bruises about her person then she let me kiss her but broke away for fear of discovery.

I desire her yet she is married woman and I must pray for strength, adultery being a grievous sin.

I think of my brother at Potwoolstan Hall, left to bear the burden of the sins of which my father stood accused. Penelope says that one day I shall return to Devon with great riches. I told her not to speak of such things.

Set down by Master Edmund Selbiwood, Gentleman, on the fifteenth day of August 1605 at Annetown, Virginia.

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Neil was having trouble with Chuck’s pick-up. It was automatic for a start. It was also more than twice as big as the Mini he was used to driving.

He drove slowly down the unfamiliar roads, past white colonial houses with large front porches and fluttering American flags, wondering if he was doing the right thing.

The green of the trees and gardens seemed more vivid than back in Devon. The air was warmer and even the birdsong sounded different somehow here, where those West Country men and women had settled all those centuries ago. The early settlers must have thought they’d hit paradise. But at the dig they’d found the bodies of two murdered men. For some, paradise had contained a rather large serpent.

Modem-day Annetown, some mile and a half from the site of the original settlement, was a small town of some thirty thousand souls and large signs welcomed visitors to ‘Historic Annetown’. Following Chuck’s detailed directions, Neil drove down wide avenues past the neo-classical fa~ade of the university and eventually arrived in the western suburbs. Here there were more flags and more white clapboard houses set in pristine green lawns. This was middle America, prosperous and proud and maybe, Neil thought, just a little smug.

As he drew up outside Max Selbiwood’s address he wondered why he felt so worried about meeting an old man - someone his grandmother had known - but he couldn’t come up with an answer. He stared at the house, set back behind its white picket fence and its manicured green lawn. It was a colonial house, gleaming white clapboard with windows set in the mansard roof and a swinging double seat hanging in the front porch. But there was no sign of anyone at home.

Neil’s grandmother had known nothing of Max Selbiwood’s life. He had been a student when she met him-or rather a student who was serving in the US Army, stationed in England during the Second World War. After

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he’d left, she had never heard from him again so his life after 1944 was a mystery to her. She didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead. Neil sat in the pick-up, biding his time. This wasn’t something he could just rush into. If he went about it the wrong way, he might give the old boy a heart attack. If indeed he had found the right Max Selbiwood.

He had the sudden, uncomfortable thought that in this community, one of the neighbours might mistake him for a wrongdoer and either call the local cops or come after him with a loaded firearm. It was probably unwise to sit there in Chuck’s scruffy pick-up like a burglar on a reconnaissance mission. He would have to face Max Selbiwood now or never.

He climbed out of the driver’s door and walked slowly up the neat path to the front porch. The seat was swinging gently in the breeze but there was no other sign of movement. Neil knocked on the door, a firm confident knock. He had always found that it was best to sound confident even if you were reduced to quivering jelly inside.

When he heard slow footsteps shuffling towards the front door he cleared his throat and stood up straight. The door opened slowly to reveal a tall, elderly man wearing a check shirt and pale slacks. His hair was snowy white above his long, deeply furrowed face and his intelligent blue eyes and thick white eyebrows gave him the look of a benevolent bird of prey. He regarded Neil suspiciously, waiting for him to state his business.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but are you Max Selbiwood?’

The man studied him, curious. ‘Say, are you English?’

Neil nodded eagerly.

‘I thought so from your accent.’ Selbiwood visibly relaxed.

Neil decided to come right to the point. ‘You were stationed in Somerset during the war?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t know if you remember a Jean Thomas … ‘

The old man smiled warily. ‘Sure I remember Jean.’

Neil shuffled his feet, suddenly nervous. ‘My name’s Neil

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Watson. I’m an archaeologist and I’m over here for a few weeks working on the Annetown settlement. I’m Jean’s grandson and she asked me to look you up while I was here.’

‘I’m glad you did. Come in, why don’t you? I remember your grandmother well. We sure had some good times back then.’ He sounded quite pleased that this woman from his distant past had remembered him. ‘So how is Jean after all these years?’

Neil ignored the question and didn’t move. He watched the old man’s face. ‘The thing is, Mr Selbiwood … This is a bit awkward. ‘ He paused and took a deep breath. It was best to get it over with. ‘She told me that you might be my grandfather. ‘

Jeremy Elsham sat in his office at Potwoolstan Hall. His hands were shaking as he lifted the coffee Pandora had brought him.

The words Pandora’s Box popped into Jeremy’s mind. He’d opened Pandora’s Box. Let out demons that should have been safely shut away. He had taken Emma Oldchester back to her childhood. At first it had been fine, the usual memories of family life; holidays and pet rabbits. Then things had gone horribly wrong. When Emma was seven she had witnessed something truly terrible, so horri-fying that she had curled up into a terrified snivelling ball. She had even wet herself during the session; an embarrassment to all concerned. Hardly good for the Hall’s image.

Jeremy had never met anything like this before. He usually took the Beings on a quick trip through infancy before getting on to the more sexy stuff; the past lives - the Egyptian princesses or the Tudor courtiers, with perhaps the occasional First World War soldier killed in the trenches thrown in for good measure. But he had never had the chance to reach back as far as Emma’s past existences. Her current one had been eventful enough.

When Emma had woken up distressed and wet he had done his best to stay calm. Then Pandora had taken her up to her room to shower and change and had reported half an

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hour later that Emma was feeling better but she wanted to stay in her room.

But Jeremy was worried about the demons he had unleashed. And whether Emma or her family would sue for any psychological damage the session had caused.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to include the regression therapy in the Hall’s menu of attractions. Many years ago he had studied the techniques of hypnotism and he even had a framed diploma to prove it, although he never put it on display. He had hypnotised people many times with no J mishaps. But now; for the first time, he feared that he was I out of his depth. He stared at the portrait of the two dark,!

Jacobean men that hung behind his desk. They seemed to - be smirking at him. Mocking him. Saying ‘We told you so.’

As he sipped his coffee, preparing to go out and be charming to the Beings over afternoon tea and vegetarian snacks, he felt an uncharacteristic reluctance to face a world that had suddenly turned sour. He would be glad when Emma Oldchester left. The sooner the better.

There was a soft knock on his office door and he shouted ‘Come’. He hoped that it wasn’t another problem. He wasn’t in the mood. The door opened slowly and Emma Oldchester stepped into the room. She looked around, her eyes large and fearful.

‘Can 1 talk to you?’

Jeremy assumed his best avuncular expression and glanced at his watch. ‘Of course. Please sit down.’

‘Look, I’m sorry about … ‘

‘Don’t worry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It happens from time to time .. , when Beings encounter overwhelming emotions during their regression.’ This was a lie, of course, but he supposed it would make Emma feel better that she wasn’t the only one whose bladder had given way in all the excitement. He noticed that she was looking around the room, nervous.

‘Was this … Did this use to be the drawing room?’