• • •
It was a Wednesday evening, I remember, the shadows lengthening and the atmosphere heavy when I began to see just how my uncle’s mind had been working. He had apparently decided that if there really was a curse on the McGilchrists, then that it had come about during the construction of Temple House. To discover why this was so, he had delved back into the years prior to its construction in this cleft in the hills, and his findings had been strange indeed.
It had seemed to start in England in 1594 with the advent of foreign refugees. These had been the members of a monkish order originating in the mountains of Romania, whose ranks had nevertheless been filled with many diverse creeds, colours and races. There were Chinamen amongst them, Hungarians, Arabs and Africans, but their leader had been a Romanian priest named Chorazos. As to why they had been hounded out of their own countries, that remained a mystery.
Chorazos and certain of his followers became regular visitors at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I—who had ever held an interest in astrology, alchemy and all similar magics and mysteries—and with her help they founded a temple “somewhere near Finchley.” Soon, however, couriers from foreign parts began to bring in accounts of the previous doings of this darkling sect, and so the Queen took advice.
Of all persons, she consulted with Dr John Dee, that more than dubious character whose own dabbling with the occult had brought him so close to disaster in 1555 during the reign of Queen Mary. Dee, at first enamoured of Chorazos and his followers, now turned against them. They were pagans, he said; their women were whores and their ceremonies orgiastic. They had brought with them a “familiar,” which would have “needs” of its own, and eventually the public would rise up against them and the “outrage” they must soon bring about in the country. The Queen should therefore sever all connections with the sect—and immediately!
Acting under Dee’s guidance, she at once issued orders for the arrest, detention and investigation of Chorazos and his members…but too late, for they had already flown. Their “temple” in Finchley—a “columned pavilion about a central lake”—was destroyed and the pool filled in. That was in late 1595.
In 1596 they turned up in Scotland, this time under the guise of travelling faith-healers and herbalists working out of Edinburgh. As a reward for their work among the poorer folk in the district, they were given a land grant and took up an austere residence in the Pentlands. There, following a pattern established abroad and carried on in England, Chorazos and his followers built their temple; except that this time they had to dam a stream in order to create a pool. The work took them several years; their ground was private property; they kept for the main well out of the limelight, and all was well…for a while.
Then came rumours of orgiastic rites in the hills, of children wandering away from home under the influence of strange, hypnotic music, of a monstrous being conjured up from hell to preside over ceremonial murder and receive its grisly tribute, and at last the truth was out. However covertly Chorazos had organized his perversions, there now existed the gravest suspicions as to what he and the others of his sect were about. And this in the Scotland of James IV, who five years earlier had charged an Edinburgh jury with “an Assize of Error” when they dismissed an action for witchcraft against one of the “notorious” North Berwick Witches. In this present matter, however, any decision of the authorities was pre-empted by persons unknown—possibly the inhabitants of nearby Penicuik, from which town several children had disappeared—and Chorazos’s order had been wiped out en masse one night and the temple reduced to ruins and shattered quartz stumps.
Quite obviously, the site of the temple had been here, and the place had been remembered by locals down the centuries; so that when the McGilchrist house was built in the mid-18th Century it automatically acquired the name of Temple House. The name had been retained…but what else had lingered over from those earlier times, and what exactly was the nature of the McGilchrist Curse?
I yawned and stretched. It was after eight and the sinking sun had turned the crests of the hills to bronze. A movement, seen in the corner of my eye through the window, attracted my attention. Carl was making his way to the rim of the pool. He paused with his hands on his hips to stand between two of the broken columns, staring out over the silent water. Then he laid back his head and breathed deeply. There was a tired but self-satisfied air about him that set me wondering.
I threw the window wide and leaned out, calling down through air which was still warm and cloying: “Hey, Carl—you look like the cat who got the cream!”
He turned and waved. “Maybe I am. It’s that painting of mine. I think I’ve got it beat. Not finished yet…but coming along.”
“Is it good?” I asked.
He shrugged, but it was a shrug of affirmation, not indifference. “Are you busy? Come down and see for yourself. I only came out to clear my head, so that I can view it in fresh perspective. Yours will be a second opinion.”
I went downstairs to find him back in his studio. Since the light was poor now, he switched on all of the electric lights and led the way to his easel. I had last looked at the painting some three or four days previously, at a time when it had still been very insubstantial. Now—
Nothing insubstantial about it now. The grass was green, long and wild, rising to nighted hills of grey and purple, silvered a little by a gibbous moon. The temple was almost luminous, its columns shining with an eerie light. Gone the wraithlike dancers; they capered in cassocks now, solid, wild and weird with leering faces. I started as I stared at those faces—yellow, black, and white faces, a half-dozen different races—but I started worse at the sight of the Thing rising over the pool within the circle of glowing columns. Still vague, that horror—that leprous grey, tentacled, mushroom-domed monstrosity—and as yet mainly amorphous; but formed enough to show that it was nothing of this good, sane Earth.
“What the hell is it?” I half-gasped, half-whispered.
“Hmm?” Carl turned to me and smiled with pleased surprise at the look of shock on my blanched face. “I’m damned if I know—but I think it’s pretty good! It will be when it’s finished. I’m going to call it The Familiar…”
7. The Face
For a long while I simply stood there taking in the contents of that hideous canvas and feeling the heat of the near-tropical night beating in through the open windows. It was all there: the foreign monks making their weird music, the temple glowing in the darkness, the dam, the pool and the hills as I had always known them, the Thing rising up in bloated loathsomeness from dark water, and a sense of realness I had never seen before and probably never again will see in any artist’s work.
My first impulse when the shock wore off a little was to turn on Carl in anger. This was too monstrous a joke. But no, his face bore only a look of astonishment now—astonishment at my reaction, which must be quite obvious to him. “Christ!” he said, “is it that good?”
“That—Thing—has nothing to do with Christ!” I finally managed to force the words out of a dry-throat. And again I felt myself on the verge of demanding an explanation. Had he been reading my uncle’s notes? Had he been secretly following my own line of research? But how could he, secretly or otherwise? The idea was preposterous.
“You really do feel it, don’t you?” he said, excitedly taking my arm. “I can see it in your face.”
“I…I feel it, yes,” I answered. “It’s a very…powerful piece of work.” Then, to fill the gap, I added: “Where did you dream it up?”