The Matrix (26 page)

That was not all I remembered. My first thought, when asked how I had met Duncan Mylne, had been of our brushes at the meetings of the Fraternity. But we had only met properly that day at the pub, when he had come to my table as though by appointment. And I now remembered who had arranged for me to be there. Ramsey McLean.

The doorbell rang. I sighed with relief. Harriet must have forgotten her keys. I could not have sat there much longer, a prey to every fear that decided to take hold of me.

I got up and went to the door. Harriet and I had to talk. I was starting to let things get out of proportion. Perhaps I was growing paranoid, finding everyone around me somehow sinister, part of a plot.

I opened the door. Ramsey McLean was standing on the step.

‘Good evening, Andrew. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘No, I . . . I was just watching television.’

‘Do you mind if I come in?’

‘No, I . . . Of course not.’

He stepped forward into the hall. As he did so, there was a soft movement behind him. A second figure stepped forward, moving into the light.

‘Hello, Andrew.’ It was Duncan Mylne. He had not changed. It’s time we had a little chat.’

At first, there was only silence. And if I opened my eyes, there was darkness; it did not alter, however long I stared. I thought I had gone blind. Perhaps McLean’s medicine had done this to me, turned me blind and deaf. I could remember nothing clearly. I did recall the doctor’s arrival at the door, then Mylne’s appearance, and being forced back into the house; but after that my memory was a blank. I had no idea where I was, or how I had come to be there.

The blackness and the silence just went on and on, as though locked inside my head. I shut my eyes and clasped my arms round my body. I could feel, at least, and I could tell that I was bitterly cold. I do not know how long I sat huddled like that, shivering, blind, conscious of nothing but the cold air and the discomfort of the stone on which I sat.

As my head cleared, so I became gradually more aware of my surroundings. I could hear sounds, ugly sounds that I wanted to shut out again the moment I heard them. Things slithering. Things bumping. Things sucking.

I opened my eyes. It was still pitch-dark. But I guessed now where I had been taken.

Voices nearby, whispering, then fading again. The sound of footsteps advancing, then receding. In their absence, the other sounds returned, louder than ever. A sound like bone scraping across a stone floor. The slithering again. And that obscene flapping sound I had heard so often before. I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. It did little good. I knew they were there.

‘Andrew, how are you feeling now?’

It was McLean, his voice solicitous, as though he had come to visit an ailing patient. I opened my eyes and blinked hard. He was standing next to me holding a lantern of some kind.

‘I’m sorry if you have been uncomfortable, Andrew, but you must understand that it is for the best. I think you must have taken rather too large a dose of my medicine. But the effects will wear off soon.

‘Angus is upstairs. Duncan, if you prefer. He’ll be ready to start as soon as the preparations are completed and you are feeling more yourself. You mustn’t worry, he doesn’t intend to let anything unpleasant happen to you. Quite the contrary. If you cooperate, you’ll find him most appreciative. He has a great affection for you, and profound admiration. Believe me, he would not see you suffer for anything.

‘But you must also realize that he is impatient. He has waited over a century for this moment. And your recent ingratitude has not pleased him. If you remain uncooperative, he could well grow angry. I advise you to avoid that at all costs. He’ll take you through the ritual until you’ve got it right. You’re already familiar with most of it, the rest can be read directly from the
Matrix.
The main thing is to be relaxed. I’ll give you something just before you begin, something to calm your nerves.’

To my surprise, I found that I could speak. I had feared that the power of speech might have been snatched from me.

‘What if I don’t do what he wants?’

‘That would be extremely foolhardy. Don’t even think of it. If you make him happy, your father will experience a full recovery. Otherwise, his condition will deteriorate. It really is that simple. The pain can be extended almost indefinitely. Your mother is not immune. If you won’t have pity on yourself, at least think of them. What is he asking, after all?’

‘Catriona is not his wife.’

‘Do you think that matters to a man like him? He wants her. He deserves to have her.’

‘She won’t want him.’

‘Do you imagine he hasn’t thought of that? You are really being very naïve. If he can bring her back from the dead, don’t you think he can influence her affections at the same time?’

‘Then why does he need me? Why can’t he do it himself?’

‘Tell me, Andrew – would you like him to try? Without your presence and your participation, the whole thing may go wrong again.’

He hesitated, as though reaching a difficult decision.

‘Andrew, there is something I think you should see.’

Bending down, he took my arm and helped me to my feet. I felt giddy, my limbs were stiff with cold. Standing, I could see more clearly, though mercifully the low light of the lantern left much in shadow.

We were in a low-ceilinged crypt, in a long stone-walled room lined with coffins. McLean urged me forward. As I walked, I saw them on all sides, nearly two centuries of decay lined against the walls, or crammed into niches. Heavy cobwebs hung down in tattered sheets, draping enormous studded boxes and narrow wooden chests, piled higgledy-piggledy on top of one another.

Here and there, a stack had fallen, the weight of succeeding generations too great for those who lay underneath. Lids had cracked open, sides had collapsed, entire coffins had split, spilling their contents onto the crypt floor. Great spiders, almost as large as mice, scuttled between the cracks.

But it was not the sight of so much decay that troubled me most. It was the sounds that came from the closed boxes as we passed. He had been coming here for years, practising, honing his necromantic skills, making his mistakes. And the mistakes were still here.

Something was banging and scraping against its coffin lid. I hurried past.

‘They can hear us,’ said McLean. Even in the unnatural light I could tell that his ordinarily ruddy face was white. ‘We disturb them. We remind them.’

We crossed through some vaulting and came into a separate room, much smaller than the one we had just left. The smell of decay was, curiously, stronger here, yet masked in part by another, darker smell.

In a niche set in the rear wall stood a large Victorian coffin with a bowed lid. The doctor half steered, half pushed me towards it. Close by, the dark smell was overpowering. McLean set down the lantern on a low shelf and let go of my arm. I did not think of running. I had nowhere to run to. With both hands, he pushed the heavy lid aside far enough to allow me to see inside. I saw him avert his own face as he brought the lamp closer and pushed me forward. The smell that rose up from inside was almost more than I could bear. I thought I would pass out again.

I looked down. How I wish now I had instead taken my chances and fled. The memory of that one, fractured glance will not leave me, I have it in me at all times, it will remain there until I die. Perhaps it will not leave me even then. For there is no paradise, I know there is not, I knew it at that moment.

The thing in the coffin wore a long Victorian dress. I remembered where I had seen the dress before – in the photograph of Angus Mylne and his wife, Constance. And I remembered the second time I had seen it – on the thing I had seen on the snowy meadow at Penshiel House, crawling and stumbling through the moonlight, as though blind.

I gasped and turned my head away. But not before I had seen one last, abominable detail. The thing that had once been Constance Mylne had neither nose nor mouth, nor even jaw, but it was still breathing.

McLean closed the coffin. We staggered out of the fetid little chamber. The warning could not have been clearer. I thought of Catriona, and I thought of what I had just seen in the coffin; Angus Mylne had given me no choice.

We walked back to where we had started. Things moved in the shadows. I tried not to look.

‘I’ll leave you now,’ said McLean. ‘For a little while. To think things over.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave me down here in the dark.’

‘You’ll find the dark is preferable to light, Andrew. There are things here it is better not to see. I won’t leave you for long, I promise.’

He turned and walked away, and moments later I was in the pitch-dark again. But this time I knew exactly where I was and what surrounded me. They did not stop their rustling and scraping. And I did not dare put my hands over my ears for fear they came too close.

I cannot be sure how much time passed. Minutes? Hours? It really does not matter. Time was not important down there. A minute could seem like an eternity. All that counted was not being there.

There was a movement in the shadows to my right, then a light. Startled, I looked round. An old man came shuffling towards me, supported by McLean. The doctor held a lantern as before, and the other man a candle in a holder. It was impossible to tell how old he was. His face and body were skeletal, as though he had been brought up from one of the coffins underneath. He wore a long black gown of pure silk, and leaned on a tall staff. Scraps of white hair clung to an otherwise naked skull. Had it not been for two bright eyes in the sockets, I would have thought him dead.

‘I have missed you, Andrew,’ he said. The voice was thin, barely recognizable. ‘You were an intelligent companion. You had promise. I could have made something of you, but you let yourself be distracted by sentiment. I promised you the mastery you sought, and you still betrayed me. It is a tremendous disappointment. I expected greater things from you.’

‘I didn’t betray you,’ I said. ‘You betrayed yourself years ago, you tried to have something no one has a right to.’

‘Eternal life? Is that what you mean? Don’t be so ridiculous. That’s hardly what this is all about. Eternal life on its own is grotesque. It has no greater value or attraction than life on its own. Ask anyone. Do they want bare life, mere existence? I don’t think so. What they all want is life together with those things that make it worthwhile: money, pleasure, good health, love, excitement, knowledge, contentment, success, power, children – the list is as variable as human nature. We can’t have everything, that’s something we learn early on, most of us. But we take what we can get, and we go on hoping that there may be something more, something we don’t have but can reasonably expect.

‘Continued life without these things would be merely a prolongation of misery. Given the vicissitudes of our physical existence, it would be unreasonable not to anticipate some setbacks: disease, disablement, a decline in one’s fortunes, the loss of dear ones . . . Under such circumstances, prolonged existence would quickly become intolerable. From seeking life, we would rush to welcome death.

‘No, Andrew, if there is to be life eternal, there must be the means to ensure that one remains protected from these vicissitudes. It pays to be circumspect. The same magic that can grant life can also bestow good fortune in the shape of power and wealth and physical well-being. Some have attained one, some the other; but it has only been granted to a small elite of men to achieve both together.’

He paused. While he had been speaking, I had seen that more than youth had been stripped away. All the politeness, all the bonhomie had gone. In their place I saw nothing but an iron will, the single-minded determination of a man who seeks only his own ends.

‘Dr McLean has shown you some of what we keep down here. You have had time to think about what is waiting if you are uncooperative. But before we go upstairs, there is something else I want you to see.’

McLean took my arm and urged me forward. We went through a low arch, then another, and came up against a wooden door with large rusted hinges. The doctor bent forward and turned a key in the lock. The door opened onto pitch-darkness.

We did not enter. McLean stood beside me and shone his light inside. I could see very little. Just the hard shapes of coffins, and a brightness of bones, and then, slow and confusing, crawling white forms, and the sound of sucking and nibbling. I remembered the woodcut in the book that lay open on the lid of the coffin. And I thought of the words at the end of Iain’s letter:
Destroy everything . . . They are swarming . . . Angus brought them back from Morocco . . .

I closed my eyes. Mylne’s voice came out of the darkness behind me, liquid and emotionless.

‘The Carthaginians called them Ibad-Tanit, the servants of Tanit. The Arabs simply called them
didan
, maggots. They were found in an underground chamber in Tangier. You have been there with the Comte d’Hervilly. The Carthaginians found it and called it Mikdash Tanit: the Temple of Tanit. She was their goddess of eternal life. But more than that, she granted power to those who worshipped her. And she continues to grant power.’

McLean withdrew the lamp. I could see only darkness now, but I could hear the servants of Tanit as they ate.

‘It’s time to finish what we came here for,’ said Mylne. McLean closed the door and locked it. Mylne took my arm and guided me to a flight of narrow stairs.

We climbed slowly and came out into the main body of the church. The old, dark church of my worst dreams. As before, the only light came from candles set on tall sconces in the aisles. I had thought there would be others waiting, but it was empty. There were to be just the three of us for this ceremony.

In the chancel, where the altar had once stood, a trestle held a coffin. At each corner stood a candlestick and a burning candle. The last time I had seen the coffin had been in the cemetery in Glasgow, when they lowered Catriona to what I had thought would be her final resting place. The lid had been prised off and replaced loosely on top.