Gothic, page 19
Tyson could strangle the man. Why the hell is he grilling her? Good lord, can’t we have one meal where it’s not layered with all this fucking drama?
“You know,” Tyson says loudly, sucking at his own wine and smiling too broadly at the rest of them. “This is a celebration. My book sale?”
“Ah, that,” Billy says. “I’d forgotten all about it, I’m afraid.”
Tyson frowns but Billy laughs and raises his glass. “Of course, mate, apologies. To your fabulous sale. Good to see you back on top.”
They all clink glasses and the mood lightens. The conversation turns to talk of a trip abroad for the family, perhaps using some of the advance money for a cottage rental on a Greek island somewhere.
Tyson is just starting to have fun again when a loud buzzer squawks from the front door. They all stop talking at the same time.
Someone is at the gate.
****
She looks like the damned Exorcist.
That is Tyson’s first thought when he sees the tall, well-dressed woman waiting on the sidewalk. She wears a wide-brimmed hat (despite it being well into evening) that shadows her face from the glow of the 1920’s-era lights dotting the street. A heavy bag hangs from one clenched hand, dangles at her thigh.
“Mr. Parks?”
“How did you get this address?” he says curtly, assuming it’s another nutcase fan that can’t differentiate between reality and fiction. The crazy bitch probably figured she’d put on her Halloween outfit and head over to the old horror writer’s house for a late-night séance or some bullshit.
“As strange as this may sound,” she says, sounding saner than he expected, “I’m here to talk about your recent birthday gift. I’m sorry if it’s intrusive, but we must speak immediately. You see, that desk is the property of my grandfather and was sold illegally. It belongs to him. You might call it a family heirloom, one that was stolen from us.”
“The desk,” he says flatly, frowning.
She takes a step toward him, and now her face does catch the light, igniting the shadows there. By God, she’s a knockout, he thinks, ensnared by the dark pools of her eyes, now brushed with gold stars, reflections of the porchlight’s glow.
Tyson finds himself torn between shutting the door in her face and, intrigued, letting the woman into his home. How does she know about the desk? Why would she lie?
Because people are liars, THAT’S why! The voice inside his head is loud, determined, and wholly not his own.
“I’m sorry, I have guests. You can talk to my agent if you need something…”
“Do this in remembrance of me,” she says softly. “Does that ring a bell, Mr. Parks?”
Frozen, he stares at her, open-mouthed.
“Like I said, it belongs to my grandfather.”
She steps through the front gate, her shining black eyes never leaving his.
She is so very beautiful, and those eyes…
“And I’m afraid he’d like it back.”
Forty-one
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Billy says delightedly. “And I love every word of it!”
In the end, Tyson invited the woman inside for reasons he can’t piece together. He even poured her a glass of wine, although he could barely recollect having done so. Once seated at the table, wine in hand, she proceeded to introduce herself as Diana Montresor, granddaughter to a Count Jean Montresor (admitting the title has less to do with wealth than his family line, which stems from nobility), who currently resides in an estate in the old-town section of Boulogne-sur-Mer, along the northern coast of France.
“That… desk, as you know it, has been in my family for generations,” she told them, eyes blazing with age-old fury, her voice almost musical with the rise and lilt of an untraceable accent. “It was stolen at the turn of the 18th century during a particularly bad time for heretics—the inquisition was spreading across Europe like a plague, and many of the people in the count’s serfdom were frightened by him. Thought him evil, a brother of the devil. They literally called him Fra Diavalo. Combine that with Naples and France heatedly engaged in a constant state of conflict, and it was only a matter of time before personal vendettas were calculated as military strategy. Easy enough to sell to the peasants, anyway. The attack by peasantry—paid as mercenaries—and the theft itself were calculated by the same person. A vicious, conniving le salaud… Signor Federico Croce.”
Tyson listened patiently as she went on to explain that when her ancestral family was attacked, sometime between dinosaurs and Twitter, a fuckhead wizard and a group of peasants-playing-soldiers had apparently, and quite savagely, murdered anyone living there at the time—including women and children—before stealing certain artifacts that had been in possession of the Montresor line for nearly three hundred years.
Since the dark ages, she’d said.
Preposterous.
Now, it takes all his willpower to stay focused on her continuing stream of nonsense, but his head has begun pounding, and the way the woman speaks—the languid accent playing like a melody beneath her words—clouds his mind, confuses his thoughts. As far as he can follow the woman’s bizarre lineage, it appears this mysterious grandfather, this Count Jean, was the great-great-grandson of a woman named Julianne Montresor, who was the daughter of an 18th century count named Etienne Montresor, who, as this strange woman tells it, is the poor bastard whose family was murdered, his entire world ripped apart…
Most likely on a cold, stormy night, his French McMansion surrounded by armored men with torches, Tyson muses, wanting to laugh at the bizarre tale but finding himself unable to find the humor in it.
“It was my ancestor, Julianne, who was taken captive by Croce when she was only twelve years old. A little girl forced to watch her family murdered with a knife on her throat, her brother cut to pieces, her mother raped and stabbed to death. After they murdered Etienne, she became Croce’s concubine, and yes, it’s as disgusting as it sounds. She was repeatedly assaulted and beaten at will by him and his men, made to do unspeakable things which she, much later, painfully recounted. For years she survived this abuse, finally escaping his clutches and fleeing to distant cousins living in the north of France, where she told her tale to anyone who would listen. The French government, at that time, was less concerned about punishment for the murders and far more concerned about an artifact which Etienne had been harboring, now in the possession of Federico Croce.”
“As were the Italians,” Billy adds gleefully. “Good thing Hitler wasn’t around, he was a sucker for those occult artifacts. You could have had a world war on your hands.”
“Yes, but no one really knew, or fully understood, its power. They knew there was dark magic involved, necromancy of the highest order, but as far as using it against an army? I don’t think that was ever truly tested. And though you jest, there were rumors about Hitler and his men searching for it during World War II, but it was never found.”
“I’m sorry. What’s this artifact exactly? Sounds like we’re talking about something on the level of an Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail,” Sarah says. Tyson gives her a darting glance, surprised Sarah is so engaged with the woman’s story.
“Not quite,” Diana says, taking a sip of wine, grimacing slightly at its apparent subpar quality. She sets it down, folds her hands on her lap. “In any case, there is nothing holy about this item, you might even say it’s the opposite. A thing of pure evil. It was this object that Croce truly came for, all those years ago. A sacrificial altar that had been used for occult purposes for hundreds of years, and yes, including my ancestor, who was a warlock, if you’ll pardon the term. Trust me, it’s pretty damn sinister. Etienne was essentially an herbalist with a fascination for nature and old—mostly quite useless—spells. He was known more as a healer than any sort of magician. Regardless, he was lord of the castle and the surrounding environs during the 1700s.
“After Croce’s death, the altar was hidden away, no one knows where, or by whom. It was taken away from mankind and from anyone who could use it for misguided, or potentially evil, purposes. Over the years, it resurfaced here and there, more as legend than fact. Rumors swirled about a powerful object—sometimes called an altar, sometimes a table, often even a desk.” She gives Tyson a sidelong glance at this, but he chooses to ignore it. “Call it oral tradition or heretical gossip, but there are horror stories about men and women killing all manner of things upon it, from pigs, to virgins, to infants stolen in the night.” Violet winces and squirms in her seat, but Diana continues, undeterred. “When it finally resurfaced in the late 18th century—nearly a hundred years later—a blasphemous cult, one said to worship Satan, had an addition to the altar constructed using black magic of the worst order, to enchant it, bring it to life. Only this time, for the modern world.”
Tyson scoffs, but says nothing.
“Regardless, whether or not you believe the supernatural elements of what I’m telling you, please do believe me when I say that it’s an evil thing, a powerful thing, and, to my knowledge, practically indestructible.”
Violet interrupts. “If it’s so evil, why would you want it back?”
Diana shrugs one shoulder. “To bury it. Seal it away somewhere safe, the way you’d cage the Devil were he roaming the earth.”
“Wait a minute,” Tyson says, more to stall than anything. He laughs awkwardly, surveys the other faces at the table. Besides a small upward curl of Billy’s lips, no one else seems to find the woman’s story as amusing, as downright ridiculous, as he does. “Are you suggesting…”
His eyes shift, his gaze lingering on the darkened corridor which leads to the office. He imagines those long black tendrils slipping beneath the office door, clinging to the walls of the hallway like dead ivy, unseen, but aware—oh yes, very much aware—of what is currently being discussed in the kitchen over a bottle of wine and some absolutely batshit family history. Diana takes notice of where Tyson’s attention had been drawn, and she nods.
“Exactly right,” she says, breaking into Tyson’s thoughts. “That thing is in your home, Mr. Parks. Human beings were sacrificed, their blood drained, in the same place where your computer sits now. Babies were torn apart inches from where you keep your pencils.”
“Okay, that’s enough…”
“Because now it’s been transformed for a more practical purpose,” she continues, undaunted. “All the better to keep it circulating, finding new owners… new servants… to spread whatever evil it wishes to spread. In some ways, men like my great ancestor and Signor Croce are nothing more than tools for that creature’s bidding. Understand this, Mr. Parks, it’s not just the stone, it’s what lives beyond the stone. That is from where the true evil, the true power, pulls its strings. The strings attached to my ancestor, and to Signor Croce, and to you, Mr. Parks.” She glances above each of his shoulders, a small smile on her lips. “I can almost see them pulling.”
Tyson barks out a loud, harsh laugh. In the quiet of the kitchen, it’s an unsteady, worrying sound. The kind of sound a man in a madhouse might make upon seeing a demon hunched on his toilet, its giant red pecker leaking blood into the basin.
“What else?” Sarah asks, ignoring Tyson’s glare. “What else has it been? You know, before…”
“Its current form?” Diana says, eyes lifting in thought. “There are many rumors, of course, but I’ve heard of it being used in a variety of ways. Most recently, but still many years ago, it served as a rich man’s buffet table, if you can conceive of eating off such a thing. Fifty years prior to that it was in a church. Can you imagine? They served communion from it.” Diana sighs, as if the topic brings a weight with it, an emotional burden she has grown tired of shouldering. “Wherever it was, though, however it was utilized, rest assured it has always had one true owner. A man I’ve told you about already.”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah says, looking paler by the minute.
Diana lifts her wine glass with long, manicured fingers. She stares into the red liquid, then brings her black eyes up to meet Sarah’s. “This man is an extension of the great evil which lives beyond. Whether that place is hell, or something we can’t conceive of, I can’t say. The easiest way to put it, I suppose, is to say the desk is possessed… controlled by a raging spirit who refuses to relinquish its power, even in death.”
“Signor Croce…” Billy muses, his coy smile not so certain anymore. Then he brightens, patting his friend on the shoulder. “Can you believe it, Tyson? It’s like Christine… but wood!”
“That’s right, Mr. Tuck,” Diana says, and Tyson realizes he’d never mentioned Billy’s last name. Maybe she is just a crazy fan. Like that guy who chained himself to the fence a few years ago, stayed there until I agreed to write a sequel to Deep in the Night. Police had to use bolt cutters to get the bastard out of here.
“Mr. Parks, you and your loved ones have been forced into the throes of an epic battle between two very old, very powerful families.” She pauses, looks Tyson in the eye. “Both of them deadly, I assure you. You harbor something beyond your understanding, a gateway to something so evil you could not begin to imagine.”
“Hey,” Tyson says with a smirk, “don’t forget, lady. I’m a horror writer.”
Billy snorts at this, but Diana is not amused.
“Jest all you want, Mr. Parks.” She scrutinizes him a moment, lips pursed. “Perhaps you’ve discovered the power already?”
Tyson’s smile fades. He feels Sarah’s eyes boring into him from across the table.
“Yes, I think you have,” Diana says. “So, in that case, I will share something with you, and I hope you will take it to heart.”
“I’m all ears,” he says, sucking down the last of his wine.
Diana nods, leans toward him. “Then know this. Very soon that thing is going to stop feeding you,” she says, as if relaying a secret. “And you will begin feeding it.”
She leans back, frowning at her wine glass. “And when that happens, Tyson, you will be lost, body and soul. Forever.”
For a moment, no one speaks, each lost in their own thoughts.
“Okay, so why now?” Violet says finally, breaking the spell that had settled over the parlay at the dining room table. “Why are you here? Why didn’t you pick it up before, when it surfaced… wherever you said. How hard could it be to find a piece of furniture with the resources you obviously have?”
Diana smiles a little—a careworn thing that ages her beyond her 30-something years. “When Croce fled the inquisition, the Pope’s men colluded with the army to track down and kill men such as him and my ancestors. When he finally was hunted down—burned to death in an Italian chapel like a trapped rat—it was Julianne, her fortune and title fully restored, who had a hundred men sweep the Croce estate, searching for where the blind old bastard might have hidden the altar. She found nothing, of course. The altar was long gone.”
Blind… Tyson thinks, looking forlornly at his empty wine glass, wishing like hell it was full of scotch.
“Most believe it had been with Croce at the church where he burned, then taken away by a servant or a friend, sold to another master with the financial means and corrupt spirit to bargain for such a thing. To continue what Croce, what my own ancestor, in fact, had started. Regardless of how, the artifact vanished from the earth, constructed into some other form, another skin in which to hide.
“Across generations, the Montresor family searched for it, as I’ve said. Followed rumors, and rumors of rumors, to no avail. My grandfather once told me it was like chasing a ghost, or a phantom. Something you see out of the corner of your eye, melting into a wall just as you try to reach out and touch it.
“Since adulthood, my grandfather searched relentlessly, spending a fortune on detectives around the world to find clues of the mystical stone’s whereabouts. In the process, he procured many other fascinating, and useful, artifacts, some of them even more dangerous than the one I assume sits in your father’s office. When my parents died, he took me in, and I became an assistant of sorts in the hunt, in the harboring and study of the artifacts he’d found. We are keepers of what the world considers forbidden knowledge. You would not believe how much power lies buried beneath ignorance, young lady, beneath the fallacy of religion or the idiotic blindness of cultural prejudice.”
“You’re crazy,” Tyson says, his patience waning.
“Am I?” Diana examines Tyson carefully. “So, tell me Tyson, you haven’t noticed anything… strange? No bizarre occurrences? No…” she glares pointedly to Sarah, to the cast enwrapping her arm. “Accidents?”
“Why don’t you just tell us what you want,” Sarah says.
Tyson wants to kiss her. He doesn’t know, of course, that beneath the table she’s stroking the cast encasing her hand, thinking of the warehouse worker whose leg had been crushed, who later died. He doesn’t know she’s thinking of the way he’d screamed…
Diana, however, is unperturbed. “Simple. I want to buy it. After all this hocus pocus and tall tales of demonic powers and ancient families, it sounds almost trite, doesn’t it? Well, that’s the modern world for you.” She turns her attention to Tyson. “I’ll give you ten times what you paid for it. If my information is correct, that comes to approximately two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars, am I right?”
Violet’s eyes go wide, and even Tyson feels a greedy jolt hearing the number. That would get me close to a million-dollar day, he thinks. Talk about one for the diary.
“I will wire the money to an account of your choosing, direct from my overseas bank. The transaction will take a few minutes, and I can have men here to take the desk away in the next hour,” Diana’s voice rises, sharpened by the confidence of her impending victory. “Just think, Mr. Parks, you can all go to bed tonight knowing you have a handsome amount of tax-free money in the bank and, more importantly, that evil thing removed from your house, out of your lives forever. Can you honestly tell me that doesn’t sound attractive?”
