The Fire Worm, page 13
The old steward advised buying the monster off by filling the great trough in the courtyard brimful of sweet fresh milk. Well, the worm drained the trough dry, and retreated satisfied. Yet it returned and returned. Still it wreaked havoc in the neighbourhood, particularly if there wasn’t quite enough milk for it.
Many brave knights traveled to Lambton to try to put paid to the notorious worm. Even though they were armoured from head to foot, it easily crushed them in its coils. It crushed their horses likewise. Suppose some powerful, lucky sword blow managed to sever part of its body, the pieces just flowed back together again; so the knight was doomed.
John eventually returned from the Crusade, to discover this appalling situation; whereupon he realized thathe had brought this ghastly curse upon his home. He was willing to sacrifice himself, but there was no point in simply tossing away his life — he must kill the creature, destroy it.
So he nerved himself to visit a fearful hag who lived alone in the woods. She was an awful witch and necromancer, with tangled hair and wild eyes. Her breath stank of the pit, and her voice was shrill and vicious. To start with, she lambasted young Lambton for causing so much death and misery. He accepted all her harsh words. So then she looked right into him, and saw that he was sincere.
“Youcan get rid of the worm,” she told him, “but there’ll be a price to pay for victory. You must vow to Heaven that when you succeed you’ll kill the first living creature that greets you on your return to Lambton. If you break the promise, nine successive lords of Lambton will die agonizingly, by accident or in battle.”
John immediately saw how to fulfill this vow without dire consequences; so he agreed.
“You must visit the castle armourer,” the hag explained, “and have him stud your metal suit with razor-sharp spearheads till it looks like a hedgehog.”
John did as she recommended. Also, he warned everyone he could think of not to come near him after the fight. He would blow a victory blast on his horn if he won. Hearing this, his father should release John’s favourite hound. The dog would run to John; and John would kill it.
When the worm was next sighted rolling hungrily through the meadows toward Lambton, John was already kitted out in his hedgehog armour. He rushed to intercept the worm on the river bank.
The golden worm seized John — it wrapped itself around him. As soon as it started to crush him, the spears pierced it in a hundred places. In rage the worm writhed around him, tightening its grip vigorously. The blades sliced through its body, cutting it into lots of separate pieces. These flopped into the river. Before they could rejoin, they were washed away — away downstream, never to be seen again.
John hurried home through the woods and blew the victory signal as he came in sight of the castle. But his father was too full of joy to remember the warning. Instead of loosing the hound, the old man himself ran out to meet John. Horror gripped young Lambton’s heart.
“How can I possibly kill the poor old man?” he asked himself. “Yet if I don’t … nine generations of ghastly death? Well then, so be it! I cannot stab my father.”
John embraced his dad — then slew the hound anyway. Thus John brought about the second curse of the Lambtons; which perhaps even reached its finger as far as John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, who died broken-hearted after such a fine beginning.
“Harry, are you telling me it was the Lambton Worm — or what’s left of it — that was skulking in Jingling Geordie’s Hole?”
“Aa felt the worm risin’ in me, there in the coo shed, so Aa screamed at Jane to get away. Aa pulled oot me jacky-legs, snapped it open, and stabbed the blade into me hand — to gee us somethin’ else to think aboot! It was the worm aal reet!”
“Pause!”
Harry Bell had met a creature which had given rise to a legend centuries before? A creature which could live in solid stone like some sort of encapsulated toad? An ectoplasmic creature which grabbed people mentally — and could drag them inside the rock with it?
And Gavin Percy had met the very same “worm” in the 1950s? A worm which could still be lurking in its hole in Tynemouth — accompanied by Ted Appleby?
“Tommy-rot, tommy-rot,” I said to myself with a shake of the head.
And Jack jeered at me, “What if it isn’t, old son? What if it’s all bloody true?”
“Shut up, will you!” Jack had never interrupted one of my therapy sessions before. I didn’t usually let him out until the evening. He was taking advantage.
Chapter Seventeen
The story of Harry Bell and Jane wasn’t yet complete. I had to range to and fro, a while longer …
Within months of commencing mesmerism, Harriet was perfectly well; while thanks to Miss Martineau’s mesmerism of Jane, the girl’s eyes were pure and clear. Jane’s heart was also calm — for a while.
By January of 1845 Harriet was hiking through the Lake District hunting for a new home. The Wordsworths consulted her about the possible value of mesmerism to help their mortally ill daughter-in-law. Harriet lodged for six months at the head of Lake Windermere near to the Wordsworths, and by June 1845 she was having a house built for herself at Ambleside. By the end of the following year, she would be off on a working holiday to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, researching a book on the origin of the Egyptian, Hebrew, Christian, and Mohammedan faiths.
This ambitious project echoed her early essay triumphs. However, she now approached the topic from a secular viewpoint. In her view, the world’s major faiths were allnecessary — at a certain stage of historical evolution. Yet Christianity or Islam were no more (and no less) necessary than fetishism had been “necessary” in early primitive times. The witch doctor was grandfather to the bishop or the mullah; and they were grandfathers to the positive, logical scientist.
Back home in Ambleside she became even better acquainted with the Wordsworths. William had been the idol of her youth. Now on his winter walks (in cloak, Scotch bonnet, and green goggles) he was pursued by cottagers’ children till he cut ash switches from the hedges for them. In summer he was pursued by invading tourists, anxious that he should pronounce his opinions. Alas, these were often those of an old half-witted sheep who
… indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep.
To Harriet, William would confide hisextremely valooable thoughts. This was hard on her hearing when his false teeth were out. Harriet rather preferred Mrs. Wordsworth, shrunken with sorrow as she was by her daughter’s death. William boomed and bleated out this sorrow, unaware that a grief was shared.
However, prior to all this Harriet would feel obliged to write an account of her own successful mesmerism, and Jane’s. She wrote it for no payment, only for the public good; and thus was treated like John George Lambton. TheAtheneum gladly rushed her free, and fascinating, contribution into print in several installments; then the same journal devoted months to utterly insulting editorials blackguarding all mesmerists and branding Harriet Martineau and her familiar, Jane, as lying rogues.
Oh yes, the shit hit the fan; and Shanky Elwes enjoyed himself hugely and profitably.
For it was he who spearheaded the slander that “Jane of Tynemouth” was actually a girl of notorious loose character, all too well known amongst the officers of the garrison. Elwes neatly hybridized Mrs. Halliday’s niece with a different Jane — who had indeed been seduced at sixteen, but who was now a repentant Methodist. It was true that Harriet had also mesmerized this other Jane for epilepsy, upon express request and only after discreetly searching enquiries into her present moral character.
Harry (Tony) moaned and beat his fists together.
“Be calm,” I told him. “You are feeling calm. Calm, do you hear me? Calm. Now carry on, calmly.”
It was Elwes who fed theJournal with these slanderous titbits. It was he who stirred up the Shields physician, Dr. Forbes — a man easily enraged against mesmerism — to denounce Jane in newsworthy style.
Not only that, but Forbes and two medical colleagues and several gentlemen of the Press even called at Mrs. Halliday’s to demand that Jane should sign a paper confessing that she was guilty of imposture. If she refused to sign, these worthies promised that she would be sent to gaol as a perjurer. What’s more, they would ensure that her aunt never housed another lodger ever again to eke out her widowhood.
“The bloody bastard!” cried Tony. “Aa could ring his neck. Aa could rive his tripes oot!”
“You arecalm , do you hear me? Calm. You will be calm.”
“Yes … ”
By now, of course, Captain and Mrs. Bell pretty much concurred with the bad opinion of Jane. Hadn’t the young hag bewitched — perhapsmesmerized — their boy, and sent him mad? Harry must have been mesmerized, to pay attention to her!
Thanks to all the vile publicity, Jane’s health had relapsed disastrously. It was an almost blind girl whom Forbes and company threatened with incarceration. Yet Jane resisted her persecutors in brave silence.
At this juncture, an Ambleside friend of Harriet’s visited number Fifty-seven, Front Street, and discovered the depths of Jane’s suffering. Immediately arrangements were made for a friendly South Shields druggist and mesmerist to hurry over to Tynemouth. When he arrived Mrs. Halliday refused him admission. He had to mesmerize Jane at the bottom of the back garden.
“Beside the coo shed!” Tony was shaking and shivering, though his voice was calmer, as I had instructed.
After this outdoor séance Jane began to see light again. Her appetite revived. Harriet wrote to Mrs. Halliday from her Ambleside lodgings offering to take over full responsibility for the girl, if only she could be made fit enough to travel to the Lakes. Out of self-interest, and a pinch of benevolence, the aunt agreed.
So finally Jane arrived at Harriet’s door — in tears, a bundle of nerves, half-blind, exhausted, and in rags. Mrs. Halliday had let the girl’s garments degenerate shamefully during the time Jane was too blind to sew. Since the coach bound from Keswick had been full, in her anxiety Jane had walked the sixteen miles to Ambleside.
“She would have been in worse rags an’ tears if Aa’d taken hor to the cave!”
“Easy, Harry. It doesn’t distress you now.”
“No … ”
Some years previously, Harriet had nearly become the adoptive mother — of a black American slave child. On her visit to New Orleans, Harriet had been introduced to a grieving Irish widower who lived there. The Irishman’s wife had recently died, leaving beautiful little Ailsie as an embarrassing co-occupant of the house.
Harriet wrote about the man’s moral dilemma in her American travel book. As a result, the Irishman wrote in turn offering to send Ailsie to England, into Harriet’s care. Harriet conceived a plan to train Ailsie as her own little maid, until she could decide on a future for her.
All was agreed; yet Ailsie never arrived. Finally a heartbroken letter came from the honest Irishman, explaining that Ailsie originally had been a wedding gift from his dead wife’s mother. Now that the girl’s beauty had blossomed, the mother-in-law — who still technically owned Ailsie — demanded that the girl be returned to the plantation. As a sexual resource, she was too valuable to give away.
That was before Harriet’s illness. Now that the illness had come and gone, Harriet was faced with a different “adoptive daughter” — in the person of Jane.
Thanks to renewed mesmerism, Jane flourished. She became Harriet’s maid and served her diligently for seven years. At the end of that time …
“Wey, thank God — !”
… Jane emigrated to Australia, where she became for the rest of her life family cook to the High Sheriff of Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Harry slid from bad to worse.
Not for him an eventual captaincy and even ownership, his father’s dream, and maybe a home in tree-shaded Dockwray Square with its well-clipped grass, its tall, dignified, grey-stone houses, their windows immaculately painted, their steps scrubbed daily, brass-knockers polished every morning, and smart carriages waiting outside.
“Aa did have occasional jobs in the valley o’ smoke alang the riverbank. In the brewhoose at the Low Lights, in Richardson’s tannery, a chain manufactory, the clay pipe factory at the bottom o’ Wooden Bridge Bank, in one o’ them roperies as stretched oot as lang an’ narrow as their ropes, interruptin’ easy traffic.
“Aa also carted entrails an’ blood from Bakers the Pork and Beef Purveyor in Prudhoe Street to the Chirton an’ Preston farms to feed the barley as made the malt as brewed the beer. Wey man, Aastank —”
But he lost every job. He mingled with riff-raff — there was still plenty of riff-raff in Shields to mingle with. Not for nothing had the lads of Shields been known as the rudest in all of England, what with their vicious drunken gang battles along the dockside, rolling empty tar barrels ablaze with chips and pine knots at each other along the dark, tortuous lanes, and down the precipices of stairs.
Police had been established to put a stop to such capers; and the constables were always carefully paraded both before and after duty to check that they were sober. Yet the lodging houses along the riverside remained dens of thieves, filled with rogues supplying filched goods to certain bent chandlers, and equipped with escape trapdoors.
“Aa was mostly a petty thief, when Aa wasn’t drunk an’ disorderly. Aa’d steal the brass taps off rain tubs, the screws off water cocks, pigeons from someone’s back garden. Once Aa stole the muzzle off a dog —”
The North Shields and Tynemouth Association for Prosecuting Felons was eager to post reward and punish such as he.
“Aa saw the inside of aal four lock-ups, in Clive Street, Duke Street, Liddell Street, an’ at the Bull Ring. Aa inhabited the Correction Hoose over from Tanner’s Bank, next to the laundry —”
In the end he became a despised daft beggar.
“Pause.”
This tidied up the life of Harry Bell, but it answered nothing fundamental. Obviously thesource of Tony’s neurosis wasn’t located in his “past life” as Harry. To uncover that source I would need to send Tony back to some even earlier “life” — peeling away the psychic layer symbolized by Harry, in search of some ultimate bedrock beneath.
And be damned to the Lambton Worm.
Chapter Eighteen
“You won’t forget about tonight?” said Brenda. “The Star of Bengal?” Her lipstick was the brightest yet. Maybe I was more conscious of it.
“I’m looking forward,” I said heartily, without specifying what I was looking forward to.
“I booked a table, to be on the safe side.”
“Wise move.”
Jack was licking his lips at the prospect of a King Prawn Madras. To date he hadn’t even thought about any revision ofThe Gaze . There was too much Tony Smith on his plate, and Jack was clamouring that his wonderful material just had to beused , not locked away in my filing cabinet. I was refusing staunchly.
Already, he had had me delving a bit into the nineteenth century in the Central Library and down at the Lit and Phil Library too. Just checking up, he assured me. But in fact he was fleshing out and supplementing the story of Harry Bell and Jane and Harriet Martineau on his own account in a way which struck me as illegitimate.
Now there were two parallel accounts: the raw material from Tony’s lips, which he could have read about when he was a kid in something like those “Lore and Legend” books which Gavin Percy said he’d had at home — and Jack’s improved version. I was sometimes on the verge of getting the two confused, and I feared that Jack might surface during one of my mesmeric séances —no, damn it, one of my therapy sessions — and might somehow start revising Tony, transforming him, programming him with fresh material.
On Jack’s behalf I’d managed to locate the probable originals of those books of Gavin’s, at the Lit and Phil. Correct title:The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend, published annually in 1887, 1888, and 1889 on behalf of the proprietors of Miss Martineau’s favourite local newspaper, theChronicle, by Walter Scott of Newcastle upon Tyne and Paternoster Row, London.
Had Tony once read pages of those books on boring rainy days long ago? Or during boring holiday visits to aging relatives? He didn’t recall. Tony was one of those people so irksome to Jack who’ll sometimes tell you, “I read a fascinating book last year.” “What was it called?” you’ll ask. “I can’t remember.” “Who wrote it?” “Sorry.”
Of course, if hedid recall that he’d looked through those volumes once upon a time twenty years ago, why then, there was the source of his “past life” — dramatized by the imagination. And so much for my therapy. I couldn’t press the matter too strenuously.
A new patient, a Terence Adams who was an estate agent, was due at two-thirty.
Scarcely had Brenda returned to her office — it was just ten-past two — than I heard a door bang open, voices raised, and Tony came barging into my consulting room. He was brandishing a folded newspaper, which he thrust at me.
It was theJournal. Open at a photo of a dark-haired man with black moustache and dark-framed glasses, with a smaller picture inset of the cover ofThe Nail. That was the photo of Jack which Sally had snapped in the House of Mr. Chan. Headline: LOCAL HORROR AUTHOR HAMMERS OUT NEW ONE.
“Well?” demanded Tony. “That’s you, isn’t it? It says here thatJack Cannon lives on Tyneside somewhere. Lots of authors write under pen names, don’t they? And you were looking at the horror books in Fenwick’s. Specially this one.” He pulled a copy ofThe Goblin out of his jacket pocket. “Soon as I saw the paper, I went to the book department and bought this. There were still a couple of copies left. It’s the book you were interested in, isn’t it? It’s by Jack Cannon. I remember the cover.” Not the title, but the cover.
“All those horror covers look the same, Tony.”
“How do you know?”
“And that photo isn’tme . Can’t you see that? Do I have a moustache? Do I wear glasses?”
He laughed. “Old photo, taken when you were younger. It’syour face. I’ve stared at it enough. And in Fenwick’s you were looking at this book by Jack Cannon.”
