• • •
We headed south-west out of Edinburgh with Carl driving our Range Rover at a leisurely pace, and within three-quarters of an hour turned right off the main road onto a narrow strip whose half-metalled surface climbed straight as an arrow toward the looming Pentlands. Bald and majestic, those grey domes rose from a scree of gorse-grown shale to cast their sooty, mid-afternoon shadows over lesser mounds, fields and streamlets alike. Over our vehicle, too, as it grew tiny in the frowning presence of the hills.
I was following a small-scale map of the area purchased from a filling station (a “garage”), for of course the district was completely strange to me. A lad of five on leaving Scotland—and protected by my mother’s exaggerated fears at that, which hardly ever let me out of her sight—I had never been allowed to stray very far from Temple House.
Temple House…and again the name conjured strange phantoms, stirred vague memories I had thought long dead.
Now the road narrowed more yet, swinging sharply to the right before passing round a rocky spur. The ground rose up beyond the spur and formed a shallow ridge, and my map told me that the gully or re-entry which guarded Temple House lay on the far side of this final rise. I knew that when we reached the crest the house would come into view, and I found myself holding my breath as the Range Rover’s wheels bit into the cinder surface of the track.
“There she is!” cried Carl as first the eaves of the place became visible, then its oak-beamed gables and greystone walls, and finally the entire frontage where it projected from behind the sheer rise of the gully’s wall. And now, as we accelerated down the slight decline and turned right to follow a course running parallel to the stream, the whole house came into view where it stood half in shadow. That strange old house in the silent gully, where no birds ever flew and not even a rabbit had been seen to sport in the long wild grass.
“Hey!” Carl cried, his voice full of enthusiasm. “And your uncle wanted this place pulled down? What in hell for? It’s beautiful—and it must be worth a fortune!”
“I shouldn’t think so,” I answered. “It might look all right from here, but wait till you get inside. Its foundations were waterlogged twenty years ago. There were always six inches of water in the cellar, and the panels of the lower rooms were mouldy even then. God only knows what it must be like now!”
“Does it look the way you remember it?” he asked.
“Not quite,” I frowned. “Seen through the eyes of an adult, there are differences.”
For one thing, the pool was different. The level of the water was lower, so that the wide, grass-grown wall of the dam seemed somehow taller. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the dam, without which the pool could not exist, or at best would be the merest pebble-bottomed pool and not the small lake which it now was. For the first time it dawned on me that the pool was artificial, not natural as I had always thought of it, and that Temple House had been built on top of the dam’s curving mound where it extended to the steep shale cliff of the defile itself.
With a skidding of loose chippings, Carl took the Range Rover up the ramp that formed the drive to the house, and a moment later we drew to a halt before the high-arched porch. We dismounted and entered, and now Carl went clattering away—almost irreverently, I thought—into cool rooms, dark stairwells and huge cupboards, his voice echoing back to me where I stood with mixed emotions, savouring the atmosphere of the old place, just inside the doorway to the house proper.
“But this is it!” he cried from somewhere. “This is for me! My studio, and no question. Come and look, John—look at the windows letting in all this good light. You’re right about the damp, I can feel it—but that aside, it’s perfect!”
I found him in what had once been the main living-room, standing in golden clouds of dust he had stirred up, motes illumined by the sun’s rays where they struck into the room through huge, leaded windows. “You”ll need to give the place a good dusting and sweeping out,” I told him.
“Oh, sure,” he answered, “but there’s a lot wants doing before that. Do you know where the master switch is?”
“Umm? Switch ?”
“For the electric light,” he frowned impatiently at me. “And surely there’s an icebox in the kitchen.”
“A refrigerator?” I answered. “Oh, yes, I’m sure there is…Look, you run around and explore the place and do whatever makes you happy. Me, I’m just going to potter about and try to waken a few old dreams.”
During the next hour or two—while I quite literally “pottered about” and familiarized myself once again with this old house so full of memories—Carl fixed himself up with a bed in his “studio,” found the main switch and got the electricity flowing, examined the refrigerator and satisfied himself that it was in working order, then searched me out where I sat in the mahogany-panelled study upstairs to tell me that he was driving into Penicuik to stock up with food.
From my window I watched him go, until the cloud of dust thrown up by his wheels disappeared over the rise to the south, then stirred myself into positive action. There were things to be done—things I must do for myself, others for my uncle—and the sooner I started the better. Not that there was any lack of time; I had three whole months to carry out Gavin McGilchrist’s instructions, or to fail to carry them out. And yet somehow…yes, there was this feeling of urgency in me.
And so I switched on the light against gathering shadows, took out the envelope left for me by my uncle—that envelope whose contents, a letter and a notebook, were for my eyes only—sat down at the great desk used by so many generations of McGilchrists, and began to read…
4. The Curse
“My dear, dear nephew,” the letter in my uncle’s uneven script began, “—so much I would like to say to you, and so little time in which to say it. And all these years grown in between since last I saw you.
“When first you left Scotland with your mother I would have written to you through her, but she forbade it. In early 1970 I learned of her death, so that even my condolences would have been six months too late; well, you have them now. She was a wonderful woman, and of course she was quite right to take you away out of it all. If I’m right in what I now suspect, her woman’s intuition will yet prove to have been nearer the mark than anyone ever could have guessed, and—
“But there I go, miles off the point and rambling as usual; and such a lot to say. Except—I’m damned if I know where to begin! I suppose the plain fact of the matter is quite simply stated—namely, that for you to be reading this is for me to be gone forever from the world of men. But gone…where? And how to explain?
“The fact is, I cannot tell it all, not and make it believable. Not the way I have come to believe it. Instead you will have to be satisfied with the barest essentials. The rest you can discover for yourself. There are books in the old library that tell it all—if a man has the patience to look. And if he’s capable of putting aside all matters of common knowledge, all laws of science and logic; capable of unlearning all that life has ever taught him of truth and beauty.
“Four hundred years ago we weren’t such a race of damned sceptics. They were burning witches in these parts then, and if they had suspected of anyone what I have come to suspect of Temple House and its grounds…
“Your mother may not have mentioned the curse—the curse of the McGilchrists. Oh, she believed in it, certainly, but it’s possible she thought that to tell of it might be to invoke the thing. That is to say, by telling you she might bring the curse down on your head. Perhaps she was right, for unless my death is seen to be entirely natural, then certainly I shall have brought it down upon myself.