Read The Magdalena Curse Online
Authors: F.G. Cottam
The Magdalena Curse (15 page)
Adam came next. He hurtled down the slope, taking moguls straight on as jumps, skiing on the edge of control, almost achieving with strength and athleticism the speed his sister had reached with her pure and effortless talent.
Lastly, Lillian came down. Even in her ski clothes, Elizabeth could see that she was slender. She wore her hair long. It switched against her shoulders in a light-brown ponytail when she executed her turns on the steep slope. Like her daughter, she skied very gracefully. Adam made a crack to his father about how slow she was and Mark chuckled and the camera trembled slightly in his hand but it did not shift from its subject or lose focus. She was not slow at all; she was rhythmic until she checked at the bottom of the slope and planted her poles. The rhythm stopped and she bowed her head and regained her breath after the effort of the long descent. She said something. She made a joke about how unfit she was. She had the cut-glass enunciation of a
privileged English birth and upbringing. She shed her gloves, took off her hair tie and shook out her ponytail. She lifted her head and slipped her mask up to her forehead and unwound the scarf concealing the lower half of her face. She looked into the camera lens, grinned and shaped a kiss, and Elizabeth found herself staring back into her own laughing eyes as they looked out at her from the Hunters’ plasma television screen.
privileged English birth and upbringing. She shed her gloves, took off her hair tie and shook out her ponytail. She lifted her head and slipped her mask up to her forehead and unwound the scarf concealing the lower half of her face. She looked into the camera lens, grinned and shaped a kiss, and Elizabeth found herself staring back into her own laughing eyes as they looked out at her from the Hunters’ plasma television screen.
She had been eating the remnants of Adam’s popcorn. She only became aware of that now as the bowl fumbled through her fingers on to the rug.
‘Jesus. Jesus Christ.’
There was a cry from upstairs. Elizabeth stood and turned off the DVD player and went to see what the matter was with Adam. No wonder, she thought, he had felt entitled to a goodnight kiss.
Hunter suspected that the food was delicious. Dying, he thought that Miss Hall probably lived very well. There was, no doubt, an excellent chef somewhere in the depths of her house above the lake every bit as much in thrall to his mistress as was the Comte. But he could not taste anything as the wine was served, as the bread was torn, as the courses came and went. His hostess ate prodigiously. But her rate of consumption of food was nowhere equal to the hunger of the thing eating her from within. She did not have long. It was the only certainty, Hunter felt. And it gave him no comfort.
‘You have the skill of scrutinising without appearing to do so, Colonel. Your training, I suppose. Eat something. You will need the nourishment to sustain you.’
‘In Bolivia, how did you know our names?’
She sipped wine and grimaced, as though the question was unworthy of reply.
‘How could we surprise you if you knew our names?’
‘I was wholly preoccupied with my struggle with Mrs Mallory. I had only that moment achieved victory in the encounter when your dashing Major blundered in and complicated things. Ordinarily, your approach would have been something to which both of us would have been alert long before you breached the perimeter fence. But we were engaged with one another. It distracted us.’
‘How old was Mrs Mallory?’
‘It is of no importance.’
‘Indulge me.’
‘She was young when the century was young.’
‘She claimed she comforted the poet Rupert Brooke.’
Miss Hall sawed at the meat on her plate. It was very rare and glistened under the yellow electric light. ‘Not that century, you fool. She was young when the French dragoons trampled her father’s harvest and looted his harvested crops on their route through her family’s land on their way to Moscow. They laughed, under their plumes, in their bright, braided tunics from their saddles. They were not laughing when the winter came and inflicted the long agony of their retreat.’
‘She cursed them?’
Miss Hall rested her knife and fork to either side of her plate. ‘Russia cursed them. The weather gods cursed them. Perhaps Mrs Mallory cursed them too. She was not Mrs Mallory then, of course, that conceit came much later. And whatever comfort she offered Brooke would have been cold indeed. Consolation is not among her skills.’
Hunter nodded.
‘Or instincts.’ Miss Hall shuddered. ‘But you are making me digress. What is important is that your intervention with the gun enabled her escape from the fate I had planned for her. She had gambled against me and lost and had accepted the consequence. She is nothing, if not a woman of her word.
So she was reconciled. Then you released her. That’s history, though. What matters is what she intends to do now her power is almost restored to her.’
So she was reconciled. Then you released her. That’s history, though. What matters is what she intends to do now her power is almost restored to her.’
‘What will she do?’
‘Listen to your son. He will tell you. Before he loses his mind and perishes, he will indulge the affliction of prophesy. She will brag through him, her instrument. That is your curse.’
Hunter shifted in his chair. The chair was wooden and ornate and the high carved back painful against his bruised spine and shoulders. He was being asked to believe in the spite of a sorceress who had witnessed the marauding arrival of the horsemen of Napoleon’s invading army as a young girl. He had put two bullets squarely into a woman’s brain and was being told that a decade on she lived unscathed, gaining power. He had heard the voices emanate from his son’s mouth while the boy slept. He could feel the throb of impact still, under the blood congealing in his hair from when the dying creature opposite had earlier toyed with him. And he remembered what had happened in Bolivia. He had spent the better part of twelve years attempting to forget it. But he had brought it all back in his lakeside hotel room and he knew he would never now forget the oppression of the canvas labyrinth or the smell of the Major’s mutilation or the sight of his wife’s features worn on the face of the witch in Magdalena. He sighed. In the chamber where he sat, the wooden walls were furtive with movement. Behind him, the Comte waited, silent and obsequious. Across the table, Miss Hall ate methodically, the scrabble of silver cutlery on the bone china of her plate like dancing insect limbs.
‘Why was she so angry? It seems to me that the intervention of the Major was her reprieve. How did he incur this wrath? Why did she punish him in so vile and brutal a manner?’
Miss Hall smiled. ‘How well did you know the Major?’
‘He was brave and intelligent. He was learned. I had known him only for a few hours. I knew him hardly at all.’
‘He was a devout Catholic. He was one of three brothers. There was the Franciscan, the Jesuit and the soldier. It was our misfortune, and his, to encounter the soldier. He approached us with his carbine trained on us and a rosary wound around the barrel of the weapon. He was incanting some prayer to his Catholic God. It was this that enraged Mrs Mallory.’
‘How do I stop her, Miss Hall? Do I burn her at the stake? Put a pointed wooden stake through her heart? Do I buy some silver bullets for my gun?’
‘Sarcasm is not helpful.’
‘It is when it’s all I’ve got.’
‘First, you must find her. I cannot even help you in that. I do not have the time left for the pursuit.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Whether you are or you are not is immaterial. You are here because I am more good than bad, despite what you might think evidential to the contrary. Even if I had the time to help you find Mrs Mallory, I am too debilitated by illness to confront her as I once did. And she is cunning and a quick learner, so I doubt I would have the wit to trick her again. You must find a way. I will tell you what I know. You must track her like prey and then like prey you must kill her. I will tell you everything I know about your quarry. I can furnish one address where you might learn something.’
Hunter sat forward, alert.
‘No, Colonel. I do not think you will find her there. But you will find her spoor. You will pick up her scent.’ Miss Hall hesitated over her next words. ‘Mrs Mallory likes to live. And that might yet be her downfall.’
‘What do you mean, she likes to live?’
Miss Hall exposed her teeth in a decaying smile. ‘In life, to use the current idiom, Mrs Mallory likes to party.’
It was very late when the Comte drove Hunter the steep route back down to his hotel. Or it was very early, because it was now Tuesday morning. Despite his nap on the Monday afternoon, he felt tired the way that combat left you feeling, bone weary, his stomach and the back of his throat sour with spent adrenaline. This low feeling usually followed a combat high. On this occasion there had been no high, only the low and the listlessness and inability to think with urgent clarity.
His expedition had been open-ended in the sense that he had not told Elizabeth Bancroft exactly when he would return. He had figured on anything from one night away to a week. The address Miss Hall had given him was a lodge, high and remote in the Austrian Tyrol. It did not sound like the home address of someone who liked to party. Hunter thought something like a Venice palazzo or a Manhattan loft apartment much more likely bets on that score. He had met Mrs Mallory in Magdalena. In life, in the brief time she had revealed her true face to him, she had been nothing if not glamorous. But Miss Hall had been adamant that he would not find his adversary at the lodge perched at the top of the mountain. Perhaps it was a place where she had stored things. If so, he hoped the things she had stored were not trophies.
He had not really been convinced by talk of her spoor. This was because he could not believe in the notion of her as prey. That would surely be a very dangerous conceit. He had no choice but to try to destroy her. What he had learned in the last hours from Miss Hall made her eradication the most important mission of his life. But he had tried before and apparently failed when her powers had been depleted. He did not underestimate the difficulty of the challenge. Even
the term adversary, with its implication of a somehow equal match, seemed arrogant. At the start of their evening, Miss Hall had teased and pawed him like a cat with a mouse. And she was weak. Miss Hall was dying.
the term adversary, with its implication of a somehow equal match, seemed arrogant. At the start of their evening, Miss Hall had teased and pawed him like a cat with a mouse. And she was weak. Miss Hall was dying.
He would sleep for a couple of hours and then call Elizabeth before her departure for her rounds and explain that he would return after two more nights away. With luck, he would be able to have a chat with Adam and gauge his son’s mood. Adam was as reticent with his father on the phone as most children of his age were, answering any question with a cheery monosyllable. But even his tone would tell Hunter what he needed to know, give him the reassurance that Miss Hall was keeping her word about holding the dreams, for the duration, at bay. He thought she would. He considered Miss Hall honourable in her way and honest too. But he did not think she felt such things as pity or compassion. And she would not feel compelled to act out of either urge. Compassion, when all was said and done, whether you regarded it as indulgence or attribute, was a very human impulse.
Someone had been in his room. He knew it straight away. Switzerland was a fastidious country, almost clinical in its neatness and precision. There was an odour in his room, a dead reek at odds with the taut cover on his immaculately made bed and the way that the blades of his window blind cast perfect horizontals of light from the sodium lamps outside on to his spotless carpet. He remembered the tattooed man at the airport. He thought there might be three hundred pounds of malevolence waiting, lurking in the bathroom. But he did not really think the stink strong enough. He remembered Private Gaul’s description of the smell. Like something dead left neglected to decay, Gaul had said. He had been very accurate. The smell was faint, hours old. But it was still corrupt enough to
gag on after the congealed richness of Miss Hall’s extravagant dinner.
gag on after the congealed richness of Miss Hall’s extravagant dinner.
Cautiously, Hunter opened his bathroom door. He flattened himself against the wall beside it. He waited and listened. Nothing that breathed lurked in the darkness there. This was Switzerland, so there were no drips from the shower head or taps. And from the bathroom, the taint on the air was even fainter, fought by some lemony disinfectant and apple-scented soap. His intruder had gone.
Hunter took a long shower. He washed the matted blood from his hair and sluiced warm water over his wounds. It wasn’t just his back. His whole body was a pattern of contusions and bruises on their painful blossoming from yellow to dark blue. It wasn’t just the consequence of the actual assault, he thought. It was as though his body had rebelled at the unnatural way in which the trauma had occurred. Hunter did not feel violated. But he did feel humiliated. And he had felt helpless. Lastly, draped in a towel, he went over to his window and looked out at the trees over the road outside and their gentle descent to the pebbly shore and the still inkiness of the night lake. There was starlight and it dabbed at the rough fur coats of the conifers. And he thought he saw the bald gleam of the scalp of someone watching him from among them. But this sentinel would not resolve itself into convincing shape and Hunter decided eventually that it was nothing more than a trick of the light preying on tired eyes. He could not remember having ever felt more tired.
He lay in his bed. It was quiet and dark and he was warm under the covers, and the steam from his shower had cleansed his room of the last hints of the earlier smell of corruption. Without knowing why, he was reminded of something. It seemed a random recollection and it came to him on the edge of the abyss of deep sleep.
The man with whom Lillian had wasted two years had
been an airline pilot. She had found a prescription for Famciclovir when looking for dental floss in his bathroom cabinet. Confronted, he confessed he had contracted genital herpes having unprotected sex with a Tokyo lap dancer during a one-night stand. Lillian had not been infected. But infection, even the risk of it, was not the point. Deception was the point and the lies it had necessitated. You only needed to lie to Lillian once. Her pilot had spun her a whole web of them.
been an airline pilot. She had found a prescription for Famciclovir when looking for dental floss in his bathroom cabinet. Confronted, he confessed he had contracted genital herpes having unprotected sex with a Tokyo lap dancer during a one-night stand. Lillian had not been infected. But infection, even the risk of it, was not the point. Deception was the point and the lies it had necessitated. You only needed to lie to Lillian once. Her pilot had spun her a whole web of them.
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