Harry Keogh, page 11
“Out in the garden, a sudden stirring of wind. The hedgerow trembling and last year’s leaves blowing across my drive. And birds startled to flight, as if by the sudden presence of some one or thing I could not see. And the sudden gathering and rushing of spiraling winds, dust devils that sucked up leaves and grit and other bits of debris and shot them aloft. Dust devils, Henri, in March—in England—half a dozen of them that paraded all about Blowne House for the best part of thirty minutes! In any other circumstance, a marvelous, fascinating phenomenon.”
“But not for you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not then. I’ll tell you what they signified for me, Henri. They told me that just as I had recognized something, so I had been recognized! Do you understand?”
“Frankly, no,” and it was my turn to shake my head.
“Let it pass,” he said after a moment. “Suffice it to say that there were these strange spiraling winds, and that I took them as a sign that indeed my psychic sense had detected something unutterably dangerous and obscene in this man Sturm Magruser. And I was so frightened by my discovery that I at once set about to discover all I could of him, so that I should know what the threat was and how best to deal with it.”
“Can I stop you for a moment?” I requested.
“Eh? Oh, certainly.”
“Those dates you mentioned as being important, Magruser’s birth and death dates. In what way important?”
“Ah! We shall get to that, Henri.” He smiled. “You may or may not know it, but I’m also something of a numerologist.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “You mean like those fellows who measure the Great Pyramid and read in their findings the secrets of the universe?”
“Do not be flippant, de Marigny!” he answered at once, his smile disappearing in an instant. “I meant no such thing. And in any case, don’t be in too great a hurry to discredit the pyramidologists. Who are you to say what may or may not be? Until you have studied a thing for yourself, treat it with respect.”
“Oh!” was all I could say.
“As for birth and death dates, try these: 1889, 1945.”
I frowned, shrugged, said: “They mean nothing to me. Are they, too, important?”
“They belong to Adolf Hitler,” he told me, “and if you add the individual numbers together you’ll discover that they make five sets of nine. Nine is an important number in occultism, signifying death. Hitler’s number, 99999, shows him to have been a veritable Angel of Death, and no one could deny that! Incidentally, if you multiply five and nine you get forty-five, which are the last two numbers in 1945—the year he died. This is merely one example of an ancient science. Now, please, Henri, no more scoffing at numerology …”
Deflated, still I was beginning to see a glimmer of light in Crow’s reasoning. “Ah!” I said. “And Sturm Magruser, like Hitler, has dates which add up to forty-five? Am I right? Let me see: the 1st of the 4th 1921—that’s eighteen—and the 4th of the 3rd 1964. That’s forty-five!”
Crow nodded, smiling again. “You’re a clever man, Henri, yes—but you’ve missed the most important aspect of the thing. But never mind that for now, let me get back to my story …
“I have said that I set about to discover all I could of this fellow with the strange name, the camera-shy manner, the weight of a vast international concern behind him—and the power to frighten the living daylights out of me, which no other man ever had before. And don’t ask me how, but I knew I had to work fast. There wasn’t a great deal of time left before … before whatever was coming came.
“First, however, I contacted a friend of mine at the British Museum, the curator of the Rare Books Department, and asked him to search something out for me in the Necronomicon. I must introduce you one day, Henri. He’s a marvelous chap. Not quite all there, I fancy—he can’t be, to work in that place—but so free of vice and sin, so blindly naive and innocent, that the greatest possible evils would bounce right off him, I’m sure. Which is just as well, I suppose. Certainly I would never ask an inquiring or susceptible mind to lay itself open to the perils of Alhazred’s book.
“And at last I was able to concentrate on Magruser. This was about midday and my mind had been working frantically for several hours, so that already I was beginning to feel tired—mentally if not physically. I was also experiencing a singular emotion, a sort of morbid suspicion that I was being watched, and that the observer lurked somewhere in my garden!
“Putting this to the back of my mind, I began to make discreet telephone inquiries about Magruser, but no sooner had I voiced his name than the feeling came over me again, more strongly than before. It was as if a cloud of unutterable malignity, heavy with evil, had settled suddenly over the entire house. And starting back from the telephone, I saw once again the shadow of a nodding dust devil where it played with leaves and twigs in the center of my drive.”
III
“Now my fear turned to anger. Very well, if it was war … then I must now employ weapons of my own. Or if not weapons, defenses, certainly.
“I won’t go into details, Henri, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I have long possessed the necessary knowledge to create barriers of a sort against evil influences; no occultist or student of such things worth his salt would ever be without them. But it had recently been my good fortune to obtain a certain—shall we call it ‘charm?’—allegedly efficacious above all others.
“As to how this ‘charm’ happened my way:
“In December Thelred Gustau had arrived in London from Iceland, where he had been studying Surtsey’s volcanic eruption. During that eruption, Gustau had fished from the sea an item of extreme antiquity—indeed, a veritable time capsule from an age undreamed-of. When he contacted me in mid-December, he was still in a high fever of excitement. He needed my skills, he said, to help him unravel a mystery ‘predating the very dinosaurs.’ His words.
“I worked with him until mid-January, when he suddenly received an offer from America in respect of a lecture tour there. It was an offer he could not refuse—one which would finance his researches for several years to come—and so, off he went. By that time I had become so engrossed with the work I almost went with him. Fortunately I did not.” And here he paused to refill our glasses.
“Of course,” I took the opportunity to say, “I knew you were extremely busy with something. You were so hard to contact, and then always at Gustau’s Woolwich address. But what exactly were you working on?”
“Ah!” he answered. “That is something which Thelred Gustau himself will have to reveal—which I expect he’ll do shortly. Though who’ll take him seriously, heaven only knows. As to what I may tell you of it—I’ll have to have your word that it will be kept in the utmost secrecy.”
“You know you have it,” I answered.
“Very well … During the course of the eruption, Surtsey ejected a … a container, Henri, the ‘time capsule’ I have mentioned. Inside—fantastic!
“It was a record from a prehistoric world, Theem’hdra, a continent at the dawn of time, and it had been sent to us down all the ages by one of that continent’s greatest magicians, the wizard Teh Atht, descendant of the mighty Mylakhrion. Alas, it was in the unknown language of that primal land, in Teh Atht’s own hand, and Gustau had accidentally lost the means of its translation. But he did have a key, and he had his own great genius, and—”
“And he had you.” I smiled. “One of the country’s greatest paleographers.”
“Yes,” said Crow, matter-of-factly and without pride. “Second only to Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole. Anyway, I helped Gustau where I could, and during the work I came across a powerful spell against injurious magic and other supernatural menaces. Gustau allowed me to make a copy for myself, which is how I came to be in possession of a fragment of elder magic from an age undreamed-of. From what I could make of it, Theem’hdra had existed in an age of wizards, and Teh Atht himself had used this very charm or spell to ward off evil.
“Well, I had the thing, and now I decided to employ it. I set up the necessary paraphernalia and induced within myself the required mental state. This took until well into the afternoon, and with each passing minute the sensation of impending doom deepened about the house, until I was almost prepared to flee the place and let well alone. And, if I had not by now been certain that such flight would be a colossal dereliction of duty, I admit I would have done so.
“As it was—when I had willed myself to the correct mental condition, and upon the utterance of certain words—the effect was instantaneous!
“Daylight seemed to flood the whole house; the gloom fled in a moment; my spirits soared, and outside in the garden a certain ethereal watchdog collapsed in a tiny heap of rubbish and dusty leaves. Teh Atht’s rune had proved itself effective indeed …”
“And then you turned your attention to Sturm Magruser?” I prompted him after a moment or two.
“Not that night, no. I was exhausted, Henri. The day had taken so much out of me. No, I could do no more that night. Instead I slept, deeply and dreamlessly, right through the evening and night until the jangling of my telephone awakened me at nine o’clock on the following morning.”
“Your friend at the Rare Books Department?” I guessed.
“Yes, enlisting my aid in narrowing down his field of research. As you’ll appreciate, the Necronomicon is a large volume—compared to which Feery’s Notes is a pamphtet—and many of its sections appear to be almost repetitious in their content. The trouble was, I wasn’t even certain that it contained what I sought; only that I believed I had read it there. If not”—and he waved an expansive hand in the direction of his own more than appreciable occult library—“then the answer must be here somewhere—whose searching out would form an equally frustrating if not utterly impossible task. At least in the time allowed.”
“You keep hinting at this urgency.” I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘the time allowed?’”
“Why,” he answered, “the time in which Magruser must be disposed of, of course!”
“Disposed of?” I could hardly believe my ears.
Crow sighed and brought it right out in the open: “The time in which I must kill him!” he said.
I tried to remain calm, tried not to seem too flippant when I said, “So, you had resolved to do away with him. This was necessary?”
“Very. And once my inquiries began to produce results, why, then his death became more urgent by the minute! For over the next few days I turned up some very interesting and very frightening facts about our Mr. Magruser, not the least of them concerning his phenomenal rise from obscurity and the amount of power he controlled here and abroad. His company extended to no less than seven different countries, with a total of ten plants or factories engaged in the manufacture of weapons of war. Most of them conventional weapons—for the moment. Ah, yes! And those numbers too, Henri, are important.
“As for his current project—the completion of this ‘secret’ weapon or ‘defense system’—in this I was to discover the very root and nature of the evil, after which I was convinced in my decision that indeed Magruser must go!”
The time was now just after three in the morning and the fire had burned very low. While Crow took a break from talking and went to the kitchen to prepare a light snack, I threw logs on the fire and shivered, not merely because of the chill the night had brought. Such was Crow’s story and his method of delivery that I myself was now caught up in its cryptic strangeness, the slowly strangling threads of its skein. Thus I paced the floor and pondered all he had told me, not least his stated intention to—murder?—Sturm Magruser, who now apparently was dead.
Passing Crow’s desk I noticed an antique family Bible in two great volumes, the New Testament lying open, but I did not check book or chapter. Also littering his desk were several books on cryptology, numerology, even one on astrology, in which “science” Crow had never to my knowledge displayed a great deal of faith or interest. Much in evidence was a well-thumbed copy of Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions, also an open notebook of obscure jottings and diagrams. My friend had indeed been busy.
Over cheese and crackers we carried on, and Crow took up his tale once more by hinting of the awesome power of Magruser’s “secret” weapon.
“Henri,” he began, “there is a tiny island off the Orkneys which, until mid-1961, was green, lovely, and a sanctuary for seabirds. Too small and isolated to settle, and far too cold and open to the elements in winter, the place was never inhabited and only rarely visited. Magruser bought it, worked there, and by February’62—”
“Yes?”
“A dustbowl!”
“A dustbowl?” I repeated him. “Chemicals, you mean?”
Crow shrugged. “I don’t know how his weapon works exactly, only what it produces. Also that it needs vast amounts of energy to trigger it. From what I’ve been able to discover, he used the forces of nature to fuel his experiment in the Orkneys, the enormous energies of an electrical storm. Oh, yes, and one other thing: the weapon was not a defense system!”
“And of course you also know,” I took a stab at it, “what he intended to do with this weapon?”
“That too, yes.” He nodded. “He intended to destroy the world, reduce us to savagery, return us to the Dark Ages. In short, to deliver a blow from which the human race would never recover.”
“But—”
“No, let me go on. Magruser intended to turn the world into a desert, start a chain reaction that couldn’t be stopped. It may even have been worse than I suspected. He may have aimed at total destruction—no survivors at all!”
“You had proof?”
“I had evidence. As for proof: he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“You did kill him, then?”
“Yes.”
After a little while I asked, “What evidence did you have?”
“Three types of evidence, really,” he answered, relaxing again in his chair. “One: the evidence of my own five senses—and possibly that sixth sense by which I had known him from the start. Two: the fact that he had carried out his experiments in other places, several of them, always with the same result. And three—
“Yes?”
“That too, was information I received through government channels. I worked for MOD as a very young man, Henri. Did you know that? It was the War Department in those days. During the war I cracked codes for them, and I advised them on Hitler’s occult interests.”
“No,” I said, “I never knew that.”
“Of course not,” he replied. “No man has my number, Henri,” and he smiled. “Did you know that there’s supposed to be a copy of the Necronomicon buried in a filled-in bunker just across the East German border in Berlin? And did you know that in his last hour Hitler was approached in his own bunker by a Jew—can you imagine that?—a Jew who whispered something to him before he took his life? I believe I know what that man whispered, Henri. I think he said these words: ‘I know you, Adolf Hitler!’”
“Titus,” I said, “there are so many loose ends here that I’m trying to tie together. You’ve given me so many clues, and yet—”
“It will all fit, Henri.” He calmed me. “It will fit. Let me go on …
“When I discovered that Magruser’s two-million-pound ‘order’ from the MOD was not an order at all but merely the use of two million pounds’ worth of equipment—and as soon as I knew what that equipment was—then I guessed what he was up to. To clinch matters there finally came that call from the British Museum, and at last I had all the information I needed. But that was not until after I had actually met the man face-to-face.
“First, the government ‘equipment’ Magruser had managed to lay his hands on: two million pounds’ worth of atomic bombs!”
IV
“What?” I was utterly astonished. “You’re joking!”
“No,” he answered, “I am not joking. They were to provide the power he needed to trigger his doomsday weapon, to start the chain reaction. A persuasive man, Magruser, and you may believe that there’s hell to pay right now in certain government circles. I have let it be known— anonymously, of course—just exactly what he was about and the holocaust the world so narrowly escaped. Seven countries, Henri, and seven atomic bombs. Seven simultaneous detonations powering his own far more dreadful weapon, forging the links in a chain reaction which would spread right across the world!”
“But … how … when was this to happen?” I stammered.
“Today,” he answered, “at ten o’clock in the morning, a little more than five hours from now. The bombs were already in position in his plants, waiting for the appointed time. By now of course they have been removed and the plants destroyed. And now too, Britain will have to answer to the heads of six foreign powers; and certain lesser heads will roll, you may be sure. But very quietly, and the world as a whole shall never know.”
“But what was his purpose?” I asked. “Was he a madman?”
He shook his head. “A madman? No. Though he was born of human flesh, he was not even a man, not completely. Or perhaps he was more than a man. A force? A power …
“A week ago I attended a party at the home of my friend in the MOD. Magruser was to be there, which was why I had to be there—and I may tell you that took a bit of arranging. And all very discreetly, mind you, for I could not let any other person know of my suspicions. Who would have believed me anyway?
“At the party, eventually I cornered Magruser—as strange a specimen as ever you saw—and to come face-to-face with him was to confirm my quarry’s identity. I now knew beyond any question of doubt that indeed he was the greatest peril the world has ever faced! If I sound melodramatic, Henri, it can’t be helped.
“And yet to look at him … any other man might have felt pity. As I have said, he was an albino, with hair white as snow and flesh to match, so that his only high points seemed to lie in pallid pulses beating in his throat and forehead. He was tall and spindly, and his head was large but not overly so; though his cranium did display a height and width which at one and the same time hinted of imbecility and genius. His eyes were large, close together, pink, and their pupils were scarlet. I have known women—a perverse group at best—who would call him attractive, and certain men who might envy him his money, power, and position. As for myself, I found him repulsive! But of course my prejudice was born of knowing the truth.
