Fisher And The Bears Page 10

It took suspiciously long to get the bears ready for action. It was not because they were uninterested, I had no problem finding a van full of bears who wanted to help on a case. I just had trouble getting them into the van. Or into their coats and shoes. They kept huddling up and whispering. I tried not to look interested as Tiger growled something and Ginger responded with folded arms: “Well it has love in the title and we all know it. That or When I'm Cleaning Windows.”

  The other bears mumbled something in agreement. Then they stood up abruptly and looked innocent.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, feeling tension in my scalp.

  “Nothing.” The bears chorused.

  “We should go.” I pointed at the van. They climbed in and I was surprised when they took every seat but the one beside me. They did their seatbelts up and looked at me sweetly.

  “Is Doreen coming?” They asked. I could feel here presence with us. She popped into being on the passenger seat riding shotgun. As we drove I tried to turn on the stereo. There was nothing. The screen remained blank.

  “Don't worry!” Ginger squeaked. “We can sing. Introduce Doreen to some love songs.”

  “Love songs?” I regretted asking.

  “Well, not exactly, they only know one song with love in the title.” Ted said.

  “One two three four!” Ginger shouted as they broke into a rousing acapella version of Tainted Love. Bears sung like they chanted, a complex swirling mix of vocals replacing every instrument in a band. It was like the rolling sea had been given a voice.

  “Er, these lyrics, they are a bit beyond the music hall aren't they?” Doreen whispered, fading away to be a presence. The bears did not notice, at the second chorus they forgot how the song ended and got stuck in a bit of a loop until at last we arrived at Thor Seat Priory.

  *

  Thor Seat Priory was a fine house on a hill that looked out over the town. From the heavy iron gates in the antique brick wall you could see the cliffs, the pier and much of the town. It was a squat but sprawling building whose heart was Tudor, but whose various wings and features had been added to for every period and style since. On the top of the tallest wing was a structure that looked like a huge copper and iron bird cage, the metal turned green and grey with age. There was a small gate keeper cottage clad in ivy.

  The bears stopped singing mid beat. They all fell into a nervous quiet and the atmosphere in the van changed.

  “Doreen?” I pulled the van to a halt and reversed back out of the grounds. As soon as the crunch of gravel was replaced with the solidity of tar mac Doreen formed herself from motes of light in the passenger seat. She looked at me, more confused than afraid.

  “That felt wrong.” She said.

  “Like a red hot shiver?” Ted asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did you remember something?” I tried gently.

  “No.” She shook her head. “But I think... I felt something familiar. Something drawing me. Like my bond to you was growing weaker and I should have gone to it. What ever it was it wanted to take me over the divide.”

  “You don't have to do this.” I said quietly. “You should go home.”

  She shook her head. “No. I have to do this. Because what ever wanted me, what ever called out to me, it was evil.”

  “And that is a reason to go looking for it?” I asked.

  “It is a reason to not want you to be alone in there.” She answered in a whisper. She steeled herself. “I am ready.”

  This time as we passed into the grounds of the priory she blanched white and her clothes changed. For a few moments she was in a set of old fashioned bed clothes, a long and thick white slip. Her hair turned matted and caked with dirt and sweat. There was a bloody stain between her breasts, blossoming like a flower.

  She screamed and faded. Popping right back, dressed in her normal impeccable mode. She blinked a few times. She gave me what she thought was a reassuring look. I drove on and we parked at the back door that would have been the servants entrance in years past.

  “Maybe you should wait in the van for now.” I said quietly once the bears had climbed out.

  “No.” Doreen looked at me. “Something is wrong here Fish. I can feel it. And I think that if I don't stop it I think, no, I know it is going to hurt a lot of people. I don't know how I know. But I do. I can feel it. Like something I should remember but I can't. I can't make it come back.” She clenched a fist. “I have to know.”

  “I can understand that.” I said. “Who can resist a mystery?”

  “I try.” Doreen said.

  I looked at the bears trying to play Shave And A Haircut on the doorbell and I smiled.

  “Find me when you are ready.” I told her. “I got go stop the bears breaking anything.”

  She smiled, but it was not quite convincing. It took me quite a while to drag myself away. She had to shoo me off. Eventually I approached the house and the Whites let me in. They showed me and the bears through the house to the library, a vast room clad in oak and filled not with book shelves but with display cases. Each was tall, glass and illuminated from within. They were lined with artefacts. That was the only word I could think of to describe them. They were statues, from all over the world, or more accurately from every corner of the ancient world. Stone axes from the dawn of time, Egyptian statues of almost every god and all other subjects. There were tokens from south America, Europe, India, a multitude of different faiths.

  Still stacked in the corner of the room were the cardboard shipping crates and protective packing in which they had been transported. The bears walked around making ooh and ah noises. I glanced at the different shelves and cases.

  “So can anybody see a statue that might look a bit like a person with the head of a cat?” I said. “A demon, a totem, a spirit? Anything?”

  This was like opening a fresh page in the Eye Spot Book Of Mythological Creatures. The bears formed small groups and spread out. The Whites watched us from the doorway. Albert and Falstaff they had said, when I asked their first names. They seemed to be delighted by the fascination their inherited collection had on the bears. I heard the creak of a glass door being opened.

  “Ginger. Do not tease MaryBeth with that snake deity.” I said with out looking around. Ginger coughed and put the artefact back. “So these hauntings began when the collection was delivered?”

  “Yes.” Falstaff nodded. “Dear old Uncle passed away and lord knows that was sad, but as soon as these arrived, well...”

  “It is easier to show you.” Albert nodded for me to follow him. The central passageway of the house was covered in photos in frames. All of them antiques. All of them in ornate frames. All of them behind old glass that had cracked. There was a a mirror. It was old and in thick oak frame. That was cracked too. The mirror in the bathroom was cracked. The mirror at the top of the stairs was cracked. The glass covers for the photos in the hall at the top of the stairs, all cracked.

  I should have looked closer at the photographs. But I was being shown the rooms at lightning pace. Mirrors. Photos. Glass or behind glass. All cracked.

  “Is somebody a Christie fan?” I muttered under my breath. Albert chortled.

  “It walks around at night. It smashes all of these any time we replace them with a slap of the palm. When it turns to look at us we can not bare to be in the line of its gaze. It makes us feel cold dread here.” Falstaff pointed at the pit of his stomach. “And we just know it means us ill. From the low wordless growl.”

  “It is more shadow and fog than man.” Albert added, as he dug his hands deep in his pocket. “Hard to see. If you look too close it bleeds away into the darkness and you are never sure it was there. But you can hear it. You can feel it moving through the house.”

  “Any idea what it is?” Falstaff asked.

  “I'm working on it.” I said. I could feel no obvious presence. “Any particular object that turned up when you started to notice this?” The words froze in my throat. It felt like frost had formed on my tonsils. I was sta
ring past them to one of the cracked photos. A background detail had caught my eyes. A haze in the middle distance, a column of midges or a spectral figure. The yellow-buff of the image stained by the mournful figure. I had seen it before.

  I walked out of the room to the hallway and looked at another of the pictures. The same haze. And another. And another. Families smiling at the camera had the figure over their shoulder. The carnival parading down the high street had the figure in their number. Children dressed for Christmas were watched by the figure. Decades of photographs. From the eighteen eighties to the early sixties. All of them in the same monochrome style. All of them taken on the same plates. All of them from the same camera. All of them had Doreen in.

  “These are all family photographs?” I asked.

  “From my deceased Uncle.” Falstaff said. “And my Grand Father before him. Maybe a generation before that. I have no idea. They all used the same camera but it was gone long before I had any interest. More a Single Lens Reflex man myself. Digital now of course. For holiday snaps and what.”

  “Ah, that is too much of a coincidence.” I looked at them and tried not to look as though I was ready to drop a breeze block in my tighties. “We should check on the bears. Before they do anything too...er... Ursine.” I darted downstairs, checking each of the photos. All of them featured Doreen, which on the one hand made my heart flutter at the thought of the woman I considered to be beautiful. On the other it made me tremble with fear knowing that there was something too big and too dangerous to be seen here.

  My mind raced with the mysterious packages that had caused so much woe and with the prospect of a dangerous foe lurking somewhere too close to hand. There had been a presence in the shadows plucking strings and making trouble too long. Every string it plucked had brought misery, chaos and danger. I recognised the tune. I could feel it close by.

  In the library the bears were mostly well behaved. True there were a few marmalade paw prints I hoped the Whites would not notice and there was a bear locked inside one of the display cases, but pretty much everything rare or expensive was in one piece. Doreen was there. She was deaf to me, staring at the photographs.

  I ran to the packing crates and looked at the writing. I tore off one of the labels, but I was sure, so sure, it matched the package I had found in my fathers office. I stared at it as though it was some foul demon itself.

  “Mister White, Mister White, please leave this building as quickly as possible. You are both in the most terrible danger.” I said quietly.

  “I am sorry my dear boy,” Falstaff said, “but that is out of the question. We have spent our entire lives having to run from those who detest us, I made a promise to myself I would never run again.”

  “Your uncle passed away.” Tiger said thoughtfully. “So who arranged this?”

  “A Solicitor we have not heard of before. A Mister Mandrake.” Albert explained. “Why?”

  “Because that is the same hand writing from a mysterious parcel that contained a cursed chainsaw.” Tiger said.

  “And another that contained a cursed Camera.” Ginger added.

  “And both of those ended with people being hurt. Somebody died.” Ted sighed. “So as you have a haunting and the same handwriting I think it is very probable somebody wants to hurt you.”

  “Jacob Mandrake.” Doreen hissed the word. She scratched at her head. “That name. I remember that name.”

  “My Uncle's camera?” Falstaff said.

  “Yes.” I confirmed. “Your uncles camera was sent to a woman and was used like a tracking device to target a very, very, very nasty ghost. I am now very worried that the same thing is happening to you.”

  “The danger from Jacob Mandrake is not in this room.” Doreen snapped. “I have to see the Thunder Cage.”

  “I would not.” Albert advised. “It is unstable. Dangerous. I would not like to see anybody hurt.”

  “Then you need to let me see it.” Doreen came as close to shouting as she could with out raising her voice. “Now.”

  “Doreen.”

  “What will it do?” She said. “Kill me?” She faded out.

  “Where did she go?” Albert whimpered.

  “The Thunder Cage?” I asked.

  “She is the ghost in all my photos isn't she?” Falstaff said.

  I nodded.

  “Follow me.” Albert picked up a big bunch of keys and pointed me towards a door. I followed him through the maze of corridors to the top of the oldest part of the house. To the bird cage shaped structure of copper, glass and iron. There were lightning rods on huge mechanical worms that raised them high over the hill. There was gust enough glass to keep the middle of the cage, where there was an altar and a the controls, dry in the worst of storms. The floor was tiled, the metal work was exposed. There was mesh fencing around it.

  Doreen stood in the middle, looking at the strange antique machine directly under the lightning rod. Glass phials that looked like fuses connected to cables. One was filled with mercury. The other stained with who knows what, that had blackened with age. Doreen was in that bloodied nightdress. She looked at me imploring.

  “Stay there.” She warned me. “I don't know if it will happen again.”

  The Whites and the bears were close behind me. Crowding in the doorway.

  “I can make it safe.” I said. “This is a Promethean Device Doreen. A very dangerous piece of Alchemical Equipment. But I can make it safe. I promise.” I walked into the Thunder Cage, into air that brimmed with the fizz of magic, and I pulled out the glass fuses. I put them carefully on the floor. Then I walked to tiled altar. It was topped with what looked like a brass playing board for a strange game, with interlocking circles etched into it. I could move the pieces but not lift them away from the surface, some strange power clasped them there. I moved them all to the null position.

  Doreen could sense it was safe.

  “They stabbed a syringe into my chest, aiming for my heart. It made me bleed. They dragged me from my bed and placed me here. Lay me there at the foot of the altar and placed a camera over here.” She pointed at another spot on the floor. “They chanted to the clouds to make it rain and the lightning flashed down those rods, through the glass, where it paused and built up into a glowing ball. Then I don't know how but Mister Jacob Mandrake directed the electricity. It jumped out of the glass and hit me. It burned everything away from me. For one moment, far less than a second yet eternally long, I could feel my flesh burning, my heart vaporising, my fat rendered from me. Then I was being sucked out of death and into the camera. What little was left of me after the pain had burned it all away was imprisoned there. But I remembered the face. I remembered the name.”

  “When did this happen?” Albert asked, fascinated.

  “December twenty fourth, eighteen eighty six.” Doreen said. “I forgot my name. I forgot my family except for glimpses. I forgot my birthday and my favourite colour, or the smell of the sea. But I remembered the cursed name of the man who had this done to me.”

  “The family did dabble in the occult when it was fashionable.” Falstaff said.

  “They took me out of my maids uniform, promised nobody would miss me, no trace of my employment would remain. I would vanish. They dressed me in finer clothes, to be a bride worthy of...” She gasped. “They came here in fancy dress and wooden masks to worship some fool demon they claimed lived beneath the house. They made me use a ouija board to commune with Amduscias. Arch Duke Of Hell and patron of their circle.”

  “No.” I span on my heels. “Everybody down stairs now. Ginger, I want padlocks on this door not even you could pick. Ted. I want you to make arrangements for the Whites to board with us tonight, and only tonight. They are not running away they are just not standing still and waiting to die. Get Dad in a taxi here, he can drive them and you home. I can't leave here until I have finished.”

  “Amuscias is not a fool demon.” Tiger whispered to Doreen. “He is the arch enemy of the Order of Azrael, a fallen angel who seeks a m
ortal host from which to rule the world.”

  “Is there any danger,” Albert said, “of your explaining any of this?”

  I did not want to waste time, but it seemed the quickest way to get anything done was to sit everybody down with a pot of tea, a plate of biscuits and the bad news.

  “What you called the Thunder Cage is a very dangerous piece of equipment. Real Mad Scientist kind of stuff. An engineer would recognise it as a Faraday cage. Lightning strikes it and is diverted around the outside, so whomever is in the cage is safe. But, and this is key, it has been modified so at any point the lightning can be drawn into the cage and fed through these.” I held up the glass cylinders. “One is mercury, an old favourite of the Alchemist, the other is filled with blood, or a reduction of a rotting body, or something just as nasty. The result is enough raw power to bend the rules of physics. It isn't a magic circle. It isn't a doorway between worlds. It is a bubble in which the rules of the universe are more pliable. Some of what you can achieve is the same. Summoning. Moving souls between bodies. Stuff like that. Some of it is far worse. And the altar is there for things that are far worse. Which would in and of itself be bad news. But there is the story about Amuscias living under the floorboards. That is very bad news I am afraid.”

  “I think I see.” Albert sat up. “Your friend was an experiment. They wanted to see if they could rip the soul from a body so that a Demon could infest it?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I was to be his bride. One of many. I believe they used the word to mean something less than matronly. I was no more than a demonstration of what He could achieve with the machine your ancestor built for him. A party trick to convince them of his knowledge. His power.”

  “Family legend has it that they tried black magic once. Then found it so distasteful they used their interest for a more noble cause.” Falstaff said. “The Dark Magician who first taught them their use of the elemental power was cast out from our home so he could never again return to try and contact his dark master.”

  “With that machine they would not need to donate a body to the demon. He could build one. If he were drawn up into the Thunder Cage.” I spoke slowly. “He would turn energy to matter, build himself a body from the stuff of dreams.”