“—from now, if you please, Herr Owsley is no longer—”
The weirdly disembodied voice faded again as she turned away, like a lighthouse beam sweeping by. I heard her say, in English, “Very well, sir. I understand.”
I called up to her, “What is it you understand, Mrs Scragg?”
She made no answer, but the newcomer inclined his head more closely to hers, speaking softly and urgently. As he did so she turned again to look down the steps in my direction, a look of conspiratorial attention on her face. Although the lids of her eyes were suggestively half closed, the fact that she again turned towards me accidentally opened up his words through her consciousness.
He was saying, “—tonight it will change, for I have ransacked his mind and I know what he is to you, but now you are mine, if you come to me when I will, I shall take you as mine, for you are the ravishing prize I have sought in return for the sacrifice I make in this quest, but you will be rewarded with such pleasures as you cannot easily imagine, for I have the power—”
And on, glibly and pressingly, suggestions and innuendos and flattering promises. I heard them all until the moment when at last she looked away from me and the torrent of intimations was silenced.
I was recovering my wind at last and I began to mount the stairs.
“Patricia,” I called. “What is he saying to you?”
She glanced at me again (his oleaginous insinuations had temporarily ceased), and she said, “Mr Owsley, I must ask you not to approach!”
“I am still the master of the house, Patricia,” I said. “I want you to accord our visitor every courtesy, but you will continue to take instructions only from me.”
She spoke, but I knew at once that the words were not hers. She was mouthing them on behalf of Tomas Bauer. Her voice had taken on a deeper timbre than usual.
She said (Tomas said), “You have failed to stem the tide of evil that flows beneath this mound. Your efforts have been insufficient to the task. I shall assume responsibility. You may assist me if you wish, but I should prefer you to stay away. This is no longer a matter for your family, but concerns the world. It is my mission to seal the pit forever.”
“You don’t know how!” I shouted. “You have no experience!”
He stared directly at me.
“No experience? What then is this?” With both of his strong hands he ripped at the front of his tunic, pulling it open. The buttons on his shirt followed, and his broad, hairless chest was revealed. A misshapen, reddened mound disfigured the area around his left aureole and a grotesquely enlarged nipple drooped horribly. Brown traces of a stain from some bodily discharge lay on the pale skin beneath. “You, haruspex, have consumed many such tumours. But this one, I say, is upon me and within me and it is consuming me. What better way is there to know evil than to have it upon you? And you say I know nothing!”
I was, in truth, stunned by his revelation. Tears were welling in his eyes and his head was shaking uncontrollably, as if with a nervous tic. His chest rose and fell with his suddenly stertorous breathing. I knew beyond question that he was not deceiving me. His bared chest made him vulnerable, piteous, the red carcinomatous flare marking his flesh like the petals of a burgeoning flower. He was a man who already stood on the brink of his own hellish pit.
“Tomas,” I said after a long silence. “Would we not be better co-operating?”
“I think not. I am here to take your place, Owsley.”
I detected, though, a softening of tone, a decrease in his arrogance.
“But surely—” I indicated his infected chest. “How long can you survive?”
“Long enough. Or do you propose to eat my entrails too?”
I was shocked again, this time by the candour of his reply. It did mean, as he had claimed, that in addition to placing words in my mind he could listen back to what I was thinking. I had been unable to suppress my inner excitement when I saw the rich potential of the tumour he had revealed on his breast. Doubtless he had sensed that too.
“Eventually, I should have to,” I admitted. “You must know that, Tomas. You are haruspical too.”
“Not as you.”
“You eat human flesh!”
Mrs Scragg gasped and turned away from us both. Tomas grabbed her arm, and spun her around.
“To your work, woman! Never mind what methods we use. I am hungry! I have not eaten in days.”
She looked imploringly at me. “Mr Owsley, is this right?”
“Do as he instructs, Patricia.”
“You concede my mastery, then?” cried Tomas, looking directly at me. Triumph charged his eyes.
“Mrs Scragg, prepare the next meal,” I said. “You may use the usual ingredients. Places should be laid for two. We shall dine in the Great Hall.”
I noticed she hesitated for a second or two longer. I recalled our usual conversations at this point when we discussed the way in which she was to prepare the pellets, but I nodded noncommittally at her and she left. Tonight of all nights I was prepared to let her cook in whatever way she felt best.
Feeling that a new understanding had been reached with Tomas Bauer, and even that some sympathy might be possible between us, I climbed the remainder of the steps to join him. He had lost interest in me, though, and was already striding away. Maddened again by his disdainful behaviour, first seemingly vulnerable, then almost without warning as overbearing as ever, I at first made to follow him but immediately decided against it.
Instead, I went downstairs, walked through to the kitchen to speak quietly to Patricia Scragg, then went to my library. I closed and locked the door, and with a dread feeling that Tomas Bauer would inevitably know what I was doing took out the final volume of my father’s irreplaceable set of haruspical grimoires, written in Latin.
The task of translation, started by his own grandfather and as yet only partly accomplished, was familiar and necessary, but also unfinishable. I sought only distraction. The abstruseness of the text never did help me concentrate at the best of times and on this evening my mind was racing with feelings of anxiety and conflict. I knew Tomas Bauer was somewhere in the Abbey, prowling around, investigating every corner of the old building. At odd moments I could detect his thoughts, and they came at me in distracting bursts of non-sequitur. Fear was coursing through me: it was almost as if one of the monsters below had at last broken out of the pit and invaded this continuum of reality. Tomas’s intrusion was of that magnitude. Nothing was going to be the same again.
Unless he died. I could not rid myself of the memory of his horribly inflamed chest, the cancer bursting through the flesh and skin. It was surely a terminal ailment? If so, how long would it be before he became too ill to function?
Was his inexplicable arrival from ‘the future’ connected somehow with his illness? From what was he really trying to escape when he travelled to England? Did he have one final destiny to fulfil? Was it involved with my haruspical mysticism, so that, in effect, it was not he himself who was taking control but the cancer he bore?
Mrs Scragg came hesitantly to the door of the library, calling my name. I laid aside the precious tome with a sense of finality and eased open the door. The candle flames bent to the side of their wicks in the sudden draught from the corridor, and wax ran in floods down the guttered stems.