A Coven of Vampires (33 page)

In this present matter, however, any decision of the authorities was pre-empted by persons unknown—possibly the inhabitants of nearby Penicuik, from which town several children had disappeared—and Chorazos’s order had been wiped out
en masse
one night and the temple reduced to ruins and shattered quartz stumps.

Quite obviously, the site of the temple had been here, and the place had been remembered by locals down the centuries, so that when the McGilchrist house was built in the mid-eighteenth century, it automatically acquired the name of Temple House. The name had been retained…but what else had lingered over from those earlier times, and what
exactly
was the nature of the McGilchrist Curse?

I yawned and stretched. It was after eight and the sinking sun had turned the crests of the hills to bronze. A movement, seen in the corner of my eye through the window, attracted my attention. Carl was making his way to the rim of the pool. He paused with his hands on his hips to stand between two of the broken columns, staring out over the silent water. Then he laid back his head and breathed deeply. There was a tired but self-satisfied air about him that set me wondering.

I threw the window wide and leaned out, calling down through air which was still warm and cloying: “Hey, Carl—you look like the cat who got the cream!”

He turned and waved. “Maybe I am. It’s that painting of mine. I think I’ve got it beat. Not finished yet…but coming along.”

“Is it good?” I asked.

He shrugged, but it was a shrug of affirmation, not indifference. “Are you busy? Come down and see for yourself. I only came out to clear my head, so that I can view it in fresh perspective. Yours will be a second opinion.”

I went downstairs to find him back in his studio. Since the light was poor now, he switched on all of the electric lights and led the way to his easel. I had last looked at the painting some three or four days previously, at a time when it had still been very insubstantial. Now—

Nothing insubstantial about it now. The grass was green, long and wild, rising to nighted hills of grey and purple, silvered a little by a gibbous moon. The temple was almost luminous, its columns shining with an eerie light. Gone the wraithlike dancers; they capered in cassocks now, solid, wild and weird with leering faces. I started as I stared at those faces—yellow, black and white faces, a half-dozen different races—but I started worse at the sight of the
thing
rising over the pool within the circle of glowing columns. Still vague, that horror—that leprous-grey, tentacled, mushroom-domed monstrosity—and as yet mainly amorphous; but formed enough to show that it was nothing of this good, sane Earth.

“What the hell is it?” I half-gasped, half-whispered.

“Hmm?” Carl turned to me and smiled with pleased surprise at the look of shock on my blanched face. “I’m damned if I know—but I think it’s pretty good! It will be when it’s finished. I’m going to call it
The Familiar
….”

7. The Face

For a long while I simply stood there taking in the contents of that hideous canvas and feeling the heat of the near-tropical night beating in through the open windows. It was all there: the foreign monks making their weird music, the temple glowing in the darkness, the dam, the pool and the hills as I had always known them; the
Thing
rising up in bloated loathsomeness from dark water, and a sense of realness I had never seen before and probably never again will see in any artist’s work.

My first impulse when the shock wore off a little was to turn on Carl in anger. This was too monstrous a joke. But no, his face bore only a look of astonishment now—astonishment at my reaction, which must be quite obvious to him. “Christ!” he said, “is it that good?”

“That—
thing
—has nothing to do with Christ!” I finally managed to force the words out of a dry throat. And again I felt myself on the verge of demanding an explanation. Had he been reading my uncle’s notes? Had he been secretly following my own line of research? But how could he, secretly or otherwise? The idea was preposterous.

“You really do
feel
it, don’t you?” he said, excitedly taking my arm. “I can see it in your face.”

“I…I feel it, yes,” I answered. “It’s a very…powerful piece of work.” Then, to fill the gap, I added: “Where did you dream it up?”

“Right first time,” he answered. “A dream—I think. Something left over from a nightmare. I haven’t been sleeping too well. The heat, I guess.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s too damned hot. Will you be doing any more tonight?”

He shook his head, his eyes still on the painting. “Not in this light. I don’t want to foul it up. No, I’m for bed. Besides, I have a headache.” 

“What?” I said, glad now that I had made no wild accusation. “You?—a strapping great Viking like you, with a headache?”

“Viking?” He frowned. “You’ve called me that before. My looks must be deceptive. No, my ancestors came out of Hungary—a place called Stregoicavar. And I can tell you they burned more witches there than you ever did in Scotland!”

• • •

There was little sleep for me that night, though toward morning I did finally drop off, slumped across the great desk, drowsing fitfully in the soft glow of my desk light.

Prior to that, however, in the silence of the night—driven on by a feeling of impending…something—I had delved deeper into the old books and documents amassed by my uncle, slowly but surely fitting together that great jigsaw whose pieces he had spent so many years collecting.

The work was more difficult now, his notes less coherent, his writing barely legible; but at least the material was or should be more familiar to me. Namely, I was studying the long line of McGilchrists gone before me, whose seat had been Temple House since its construction two hundred and forty years ago. And as I worked so my eyes would return again and again, almost involuntarily, to the dark pool with its ring of broken columns. Those stumps were white in the silver moonlight—as white as the columns in Carl’s picture—and so my thoughts returned to Carl.

By now he must be well asleep, but this new mystery filled my mind through the small hours. Carl Earlman…. It certainly sounded Hungarian, German at any rate, and I wondered what the old family name had been. Ehrlichman, perhaps? Arlmann? And not Carl but Karl.

And his family hailed from Stregoicavar. That was a name I remembered from a glance into von Junzt’s
Un speakable Cults
,
I was sure. Stregoicavar: it had stayed in my mind because of its meaning, which is “witch-town”. Certain of Chorazos’s order of pagan priests had been Hungarian. Was it possible that some dim ancestral mem ory lingered over in Carl’s mind, and that the pool with its quartz stumps had awakened that in his blood which harkened back to older times? And what of the gypsy music he had sworn to hearing on our first night in this old house? Young and strong he was certainly, but beneath an often brash exterior he had all the sensitivity of an artist born.

According to my uncle’s research my own great-grand father, Robert Allan McGilchrist, had been just such a man.

Sensitive, a dreamer, prone to hearing things in the dead of night which no one else could hear. Indeed, his wife had left him for his peculiar ways. She had taken her two sons with her; and so for many years the old man had lived here alone, writing and studying. He had been well known for his paper on the Lambton Worm legend of Northumberland: of a great worm or dragon that lived in a well and emerged at night to devour “bairns and beasties and foolhardy wan derers in the dark”. He had also published a pamphlet on the naiads of the lochs of Inverness; and his limited edition book,
Notes on Nessie—the Secrets of Loch Ness
had caused a minor sensation when first it saw print.

It was Robert Allan McGilchrist, too, who restored the old floodgate in the dam, so that the water level in the pool could be controlled; but that had been his last work. A shepherd had found him one morning slumped across the gate, one hand still grasping the wheel which controlled its elevation, his upper body floating facedown in the water. He must have slipped and fallen, and his heart had given out. But the look on his face had been a fearful thing; and since the embalmers had been unable to do anything with him, they had buried him immediately.

And as I studied this or that old record or consulted this or that musty book, so my eyes would return to the dam, the pool with its fanged columns, the old floodgate—rusted now and fixed firmly in place—and the growing sensation of an onrushing doom gnawed inside me until it became a knot of fear in my chest. If only the heat would let up, just for one day, and if only I could finish my research and solve the riddle once and for all.

It was then, as the first flush of dawn showed above the eastern hills, that I determined what I must do. The fact of the matter was that Temple House frightened me, as I suspected it had frightened many people before me. Well, I had neither the stamina nor the dedication of my uncle. He had resolved to track the thing down to the end, and something—sheer hard work, the “curse”, failing health, something—had killed him.

But his legacy to me had been a choice: continue his work or put an end to the puzzle for all time and blow Temple House to hell. So be it, that was what I would do. A day or two more—only a day or two, to let Carl finish his damnable painting—and then I would do what Gavin McGilchrist had ordered done. And with that resolution uppermost in my mind, relieved that at last I had made the decision, so I fell asleep where I sprawled at the desk.

The sound of splashing aroused me; that and my name called from below. The sun was just up and I felt dreadful, as if suffering from a hangover. For a long time I simply lay sprawled out. Then I stood up and eased my cramped limbs, and finally I turned to the open window. There was Carl, dressed only in his shorts, stretched out flat on a wide, thick plank, paddling out toward the middle of the pool!

“Carl!” I called down, my voice harsh with my own instinctive fear of the water. “Man, that’s dangerous—you can’t swim!”

He turned his head, craned his neck and grinned up at me. “Safe as houses,” he called, “so long as I hang on to the plank. And it’s cool, John, so wonderfully cool. This feels like the first time I’ve been cool in weeks!”

By now he had reached roughly the pool’s centre and there he stopped paddling and simply let his hands trail in green depths. The level of the water had gone down appreciably during the night and the streamlet which fed the pool was now quite dry. The plentiful weed of the pool, becoming concentrated as the water evaporated, seemed thicker than ever I remembered it. So void of life, that water, with never a fish or frog to cause a ripple on the morass-green of its surface.

And suddenly that tight knot of fear was back in my chest, making my voice a croak as I tried to call out: “Carl, get out of there!”

“What?” he faintly called back, but he didn’t turn his head. He was staring down into the water, staring intently at something he saw there. His hand brushed aside weed—

“Carl!” I found my voice. “For God’s sake get out of it!”

He started then, his head and limbs jerking as if scalded, setting the plank to rocking so that he half slid off it. Then—a scrambling back to safety and a frantic splashing and paddling; and galvanized into activity I sprang from the window and raced breakneck downstairs. And Carl laugh ing shakily as I stumbled knee-deep in hated water to drag him physically from the plank, both of us trembling despite the burning rays of the new-risen sun and the furnace heat of the air.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“I thought I saw something,” he answered. “In the pool. A reflection, that’s all, but it startled me.”

“What did you see?” I demanded, my back damp with cold sweat.

“Why, what would I see?” he answered, but his voice trembled for all that he tried to grin. “A face, of course—my own face framed by the weeds. But it didn’t look like me, that’s all….”

8. The Dweller

Looking back now in the light of what I already knew—certainly of what I should have guessed at that time—it must seem that I was guilty of an almost suicidal negligence in spending the rest of that day upstairs on my bed, tossing in nightmares brought on by the nervous exhaustion which beset me immediately after the incident at the pool. On the other hand, I had had no sleep the night before and Carl’s adventure had given me a terrific jolt; and so my failure to recognize the danger—how close it had drawn—may perhaps be forgiven.

In any event, I forced myself to wakefulness in the early evening, went downstairs and had coffee and a frugal meal of biscuits, and briefly visited Carl in his studio. He was busy—frantically busy, dripping with sweat and brushing away at his canvas—working on his loathsome painting, which he did not want me to see. That suited me perfectly for I had already seen more than enough of the thing. I did take time enough to tell him, though, that he should finish his work in the next two days; for on Friday or at the very latest Saturday morning I intended to blow the place sky high.

Then I went back upstairs, washed and shaved, and as the light began to fail so I returned to my uncle’s notebook. There were only three or four pages left unread, the first dated only days before his demise, but they were such a hodgepodge of scrambled and near-illegible miscellanea that I had the greatest difficulty making anything of them. Only that feeling of a burgeoning terror drove me on, though by now I had almost completely lost faith in making anything whatever of the puzzle.

As for my uncle’s notes: a basically orderly nature had kept me from leafing at random through his book, or perhaps I should have understood earlier. As it is, the notebook is lost forever, but as best I can, I shall copy down what I remember of those last few pages. After that—and after I relate the remaining facts of the occurrences of that fateful hideous night—the reader must rely upon his own judgement. The notes then, or what little I remember of them: