Haggopian and Other Stories (20 page)

Recognition

By January 1977 my military career had moved on somewhat. Into my last four years, I had become the Initial Training Sergeant-Major—the DI—at the Royal Military Police HQ in Chichester, Sussex; an establishment which has only recently relocated all these years later. While my work didn’t leave me a great deal of spare time, still I managed to write a few stories in the evenings.
Recognition
was one of them, and four years later it saw print in W. Paul Ganley’s
Weirdbook 15
. In the next half decade Paul would become the most regular of my very few literary outlets; for by then my agent in the US, Kirby McCauley, was more or less obliged to concentrate his efforts on a guy called Stephen King. Perhaps it’s a good job I was in the Army and didn’t have to support my family with my writing! The narrator of this story could easily be mistaken for a psychic investigator similar to Titus Crow; in fact I almost made it a Crow story. But no, that wasn’t to be, for Crow’s nature was far more bold, daring and…
inquisitive
? I’m sure that you’ll understand my meaning at the story’s very end.

I

As to why I asked you all to join me here, and why I’m making it worth your while by paying each of you five hundred pounds for your time and trouble, the answer is simple. The place appears to be haunted, and I want rid of the ghost.”

The speaker was young, his voice cultured, his features fine and aristocratic. He was Lord David Marriot, and the place of which he spoke was a Marriot property: a large, ungainly, mongrel architecture of dim and doubtful origins, standing gaunt and gloomily atmospheric in an acre of brooding oaks. The wood itself stood central in nine acres of otherwise barren moors borderland.

Lord Marriot’s audience numbered four: the sprightly octogenarian Lawrence Danford, a retired man of the cloth; by contrast the so-called “mediums” Jonathan Turnbull and Jason Lavery, each a “specialist” in his own right; and myself, an old friend of the family whose name does not really matter since I had no special part to play. I was simply there as an observer—an adviser, if you like—in a matter for which, from the beginning, I had no great liking.

Waiting on the arrival of the others, I had been with David Marriot at the old house all afternoon. I had long known something of the history of the place…and a little of its legend. There I now sat, comfortable and warm as our host addressed the other three, with an excellent sherry in my hand while logs crackled away in the massive fireplace. And yet suddenly, as he spoke, I felt chill and uneasy.

“You two gentlemen,” David smiled at the mediums, “will employ your special talents to discover and define the malignancy, if indeed such an element exists; and you, sir,” he spoke to the elderly cleric, “will attempt to exorcise the unhappy—creature?—once we know who or what it is.” Attracted by my involuntary agitation, frowning, he paused and turned to me. “Is something troubling you, my friend…?”

“I”m sorry to have to stop you almost before you’ve started, David,” I apologised, “but I’ve given it some thought and—well, this plan of yours
worries me.”

Lord Marriot’s guests looked at me in some surprise, seeming to notice me for the first time, although of course we had been introduced; for after all they were the experts while I was merely an observer. Nevertheless, and while I was never endowed with any special psychic talent that I know of (and while certainly, if ever I had been, I never would have dabbled), I did know a little of my subject and had always been interested in such things.

And who knows?—perhaps I do have some sort of sixth sense, for as I have said, I was suddenly and quite inexplicably chilled with a sensation of foreboding that I knew had nothing at all to do with the temperature of the library. The others, for all their much-vaunted special talents, apparently felt nothing.

“My plan worries you?” Lord Marriot finally repeated. “You didn’t mention this before.”

“I didn’t know before just how you meant to go about it. Oh, I agree that the house requires some sort of exorcism, that something is quite definitely wrong with the place, but I’m not at all sure that you should concern yourself with finding out exactly what it is you’re exorcising.”

“Hmm, yes, I think I might agree,” Old Danford nodded his grey head. “Surely the essence of the,
harumph,
matter, is to be rid of the thing—whatever it is. Er, not,” he hastily added, “that I would want to do these two gentlemen out of a job—however much I disagree with,
harumph
, spiritualism and its trappings.” He turned to Turnbull and Lavery.

“Not at all, sir,” Lavery assured him, smiling thinly. “We’ve been paid in advance, as you yourself have been paid, regardless of results. We will therefore—
perform
—as Lord Marriot sees fit. We are not, however, spiritualists. But in any case, should our services no longer be required…” He shrugged.

“No, no question of that,” the owner of the house spoke up at once. “The advice of my good friend here has been greatly valued by my family for many years, in all manner of problems, but he would be the first to admit that he’s no expert in matters such as these. I, however, am even less of an authority, and my time is extremely short; I never have enough time for anything! That is why I commissioned him to find out all he could about the history of the house, in order to be able to offer you gentlemen something of an insight into its background.

“And I assure you that it’s not just idle curiosity than prompts me to seek out the source of the trouble here. I wish to dispose of the property, and prospective buyers just will not stay in it long enough to appreciate its many good features! And so, if we are to lay something to rest here, something which ought perhaps to have been laid to rest long ago, then I want to know what it is. Damn me, the thing’s caused me enough trouble!

“So let’s please have no more talk about likes and dislikes or what should or should not be done. It will be the way I’ve planned it.” He turned again to me. “Now, if you’ll be so good as to simply outline the results of your research…?”

“Very well,” I shrugged in acquiescence. “As long as I’ve made my feelings in the matter plain…” Knowing David the way I did, further argument would be quite fruitless: his mind was made up. I riffled through the notes lying in my lap, took a long pull on my pipe, and commenced: “Oddly enough, the house as it now stands is comparatively modern, no more than two hundred and fifty years old, but it was built upon the shell of a far older structure, one whose origin is extremely difficult to trace. There are local legends, however, and there have always been chroniclers of tales of strange old houses. The original house is given brief mention in texts dating back almost to Roman times, but the actual site had known habitation—possibly a Druidic order or some such—much earlier. Later it became part of some sort of fortification, perhaps a small castle, and the remnants of earthworks in the shape of mounds, banks and ditches can be found even today in the surrounding countryside.

“Of course the present house, while large enough by modern standards, is small in comparison with the original: it’s a mere wing of the old structure. An extensive cellar—a veritable maze of tunnels, rooms, and passages—was discovered during renovation some eighty years ago, when first the Marriots acquired the property, and then several clues were disclosed as to its earlier use.

“This wing would seem to have been a place of worship of sorts, for there was a crude altar-stone, a pair of ugly, font-like basins, a number of particularly repugnant carvings of gargoyles or ‘gods’, and other extremely ancient tools and bric-a-brac. Most of this incunabula was given into the care of the then curator of the antiquities section of the British Museum, but the carved figures were defaced and destroyed. The records do not say why…

“But let’s go back to the reign of James I.

“Then the place was the seat of a family of supposed nobility, though the line must have suffered a serious decline during the early years of the seventeenth century—or perhaps fallen foul of the authorities or the monarch himself—for its name simply cannot be discovered. It would seem that for some reason, most probably serious dishonour, the family name has been erased from all contemporary records and documents!

“Prior to the fire which razed the main building to the ground in 1618, there had been a certain intercourse and intrigue of a similarly undiscovered nature between the nameless inhabitants, the de la Poers of Exham Priory near Anchester, and an obscure esoteric sect of monks dwelling in and around the semi-ruined Falstone Castle in Northumberland. Of the latter sect: they were wiped out utterly by Northern raiders—a clan believed to have been outraged by the ‘heathen activities’ of the monks—and the ruins of the castle were pulled to pieces, stone by stone. Indeed, it was so well destroyed that today only a handful of historians could even show you where it stood!

“As for the de la Poers: well, whole cycles of ill-omened myth and legend revolve around that family, just as they do about their Anchester seat. Suffice it to say that in 1923 the Priory was blown up and the cliffs beneath it dynamited, until the deepest roots of its foundations were obliterated. Thus the Priory is no more, and the last of that line of the family is safely locked away in a refuge for the hopelessly insane.

“It can be seen then that the nameless family that lived here had the worst possible connections, at least by the standards of those days, and it is not at all improbable that they brought about their own decline and disappearance through just such traffic with degenerate or ill-advised cultists and demonologists as I have mentioned.

“Now then, add to all of this somewhat tenuously connected information the local rumours, which have circulated on and off in the villages of this area for some three hundred years—those mainly unspecified fears and old wives’ tales that have sufficed since time immemorial to keep children and adults alike away from this property, off the land and out of the woods—and you begin to understand something of the aura of the place. Perhaps you can feel that aura even now? I certainly can, and I’m by no means psychic…”

“Just what is it that the locals fear?” Turnbull asked. “Can’t you enlighten us at all?”

“Oh, strange shapes have been seen on the paths and roads; luminous nets have appeared strung between the trees like great webs, only to vanish in daylight; and, yes, in connection with the latter, perhaps I had better mention the bas-reliefs in the cellar.”

“Bas-reliefs?” queried Lavery.

“Yes, on the walls. It was writing of sorts, but in a language no one could understand—glyphs almost.”

“My great-grandfather had just bought the house,” David Marriot explained. “He was an extremely well-read man, knowledgeable in all sorts of peculiar subjects. When the cellar was opened and he saw the glyphs, he said they had to do with the worship of some strange deity from an obscure and almost unrecognized myth cycle. Afterwards he had the greater area of the cellar cemented in—said it made the house damp and the foundations unsafe.”

“Worship of some strange deity?” Old Danford spoke up. “What sort of deity? Some lustful thing that the Romans brought with them, d’you think?”

“No, older than that,” I answered for Lord Marriot. “Much older. A spider-thing.”

“A spider?” This was Lavery again, and he snorted the words out almost in contempt.

“Not quite the thing to sneer at,” I answered. “Three years ago an ageing but still active gentleman rented the house for a period of some six weeks. An anthropologist and the author of several books, he wanted the place for its solitude; and if he took to it he was going to buy it. In the fifth week he was taken away raving mad!”

“Eh?
Harumph!
Mad, you say?” Old Danford repeated after me.

I nodded. “Yes, quite insane. He lived for barely six months, all the while raving about a creature named Atlach-Nacha—a spider-god from the Cthulhu Cycle of myth—whose ghostly avatar, he claimed, still inhabited the house and its grounds.”

At this Turnbull spoke up. “Now really!” he spluttered. “I honestly fear that we’re rapidly going from the sublime to the ridiculous!”

“Gentlemen, please!” There was exasperation now in Lord Marriot’s voice. “What does it matter? You know as much now as there is to know of the history of the troubles here—more than enough to do what you’ve been paid to do. Now. then, Lawrence—” he turned to Danford. “Have you any objections?”

“
Harumph!
Well
,
if there’s a demon here—that is, something other than a creature of the Lord—then of course I’ll do my best to help you.
Harumph!
Certainly.”

“And you, Lavery?”

“Objections? No, a bargain is a bargain. I have your money, and you shall have your noises.”

Lord Marriot nodded, understanding Lavery’s meaning. For the medium’s talent was a supposed or alleged ability to speak in the tongue of the ghost, the possessing spirit. In the event of a non-human ghost, however, then his mouthings might well be other than speech as we understand the spoken word. They might simply be—noises.