Susan woke early the next morning – moving quietly around Paul, who was still asleep on the sofa – and headed for the library, determined to find out everything she could about the land that Opocapopopoulos’s house had been built on. She came prepared, with her battered but trusty old laptop, a large pad of paper, several pens (she was something of a stationery fetishist, and could never resist buying a pen she saw if she didn’t already have one like it) and a thermos flask full of coffee, which she was hoping she’d be able to sneak sips from while nobody was looking.
It was quiet in the library, unusually so. There were only three people she could see: an old lady browsing the Barbara Cartland section, a bored-looking teenager using the computers, and a man in a suit who appeared to be deciding which U2 album to borrow. She sat down at a table, plopped the laptop in front of her, and left her bag on the chair while she went and browsed the History section.
When she got back, she had found about six books which looked like they might be useful. There was E. N. Gyroball’s A Short History of Eastwestchestershire, which had a load of old photos in it that might show something or other, Matilda Spangleton’s Crypts and Catacombs of Great Britain, Jackson Ummagumma’s three-volume Encyclopaedia of Modern Ruins, and three books of collected local ephemera that contained letters, newspaper cuttings, land reports and other bits and bobs dating back to the 1700s. A Short History of Eastwestchestershire looked like it might be the most accessible of the bunch, so she flipped it open and began to read. There was a photo of the High Street, the way it had looked in 1904, with gas lamps and omnibuses and people dressed in bowler hats. A series of photos of the local manor-house in the 1870s, which appeared to have been a very grand affair before it had been pulled down in the 1960s to make way for a grotesque block of flats which had at the time been designed as a “garden in the sky” but had in no time become a magnet for drug-users and dealers. A few plans of the railway station before it had been built –
Hang on. She went back to the section on the manor house, and read:
Originally built in 1607 by the first Baron Drevenell of Manstordean, Eastwestchester Hall was considerably enlarged during the period 1750-1810 by the fifth Baron, with gardens sculpted by Capability Brown and the frontage of the house redesigned by Robert Adam in 1761. Notable amongst its features were a 1200-yard drive, a set of formal boating lakes in the shape of a crucifix, modelled on those at Versailles, and an extensive underground network of cellars, built to house the Baron’s extensive collection of wine.
Now that, thought Susan, might be it. Where had the manor been built?
Construction of the main house, she read, began on an eight-acre plot of land owned by the Baron’s father, a noted highwayman and itinerant mendicant-made-good, just outside the village of Retchford, now a suburb of the town. The site – at the top of a gentle hill overlooking the town, and bordering some woods – was chosen for its good drainage, its lush vegetation and the fact that you could, in the words of the Baron, ‘roll a Turde at marauding peasants, and notte have them Roll it back up at you’. The house faced north-south, with the cruciform boating-lakes pointing due north towards Oxford. It was noted shortly after construction began that the house would lie directly on a ley-line, but works had already begun and it was felt too expensive to restart somewhere else, so there it stayed.
Susan found a map in one of the other books, and traced a line from the centre of town through Retchford, now one of its nicer areas, out towards the woods where Opocapopopoulos House was. That must be it, she thought: presumably the Sixties block of flats which replaced the original mansion were converted into a block of executive flats in the Eighties in a desperate bid to try and move the place upmarket, but that didn’t work. She wondered briefly why anyone would want to demolish a perfectly decent stately home in the middle of the countryside to build a stonkingly ugly concrete tower block there, but put the thought from her mind. The cellar complex that she and Paul had been in, she decided, must have been part of the old house; were there perhaps plans that she could get from somewhere? It was doubtful, if the tunnels they’d seen were anything to go by, that the layout of the cellars had been changed much since they’d been built, so the original plans would be enormously useful. She turned to Crypts and Catacombs of Great Britain, which had been published in 1963 and which might therefore have something in them about the original house, found the section on Eastwestchestershire, and read:
The fictional county of Eastwestchestershire has a far higher than average count of underground cellar complexes. Notable among them are those of Bagpuss House (p. 45), built for the wealthy cloth importer Maximillian X. Tackett; Wampire Common School (p. 76), which counts the explorer Olaf Sigurdssen and the actress Dame Hilary Tennell among its alumni; and Eastwestchester Hall (p.70), the magnificent neo-classical seat of Lord Drevenell of Manstordean.
She turned to page 70, and read on.
Eastwestchester Hall, originally built in 1607 by the first Baron Drevenell of Manstordean (yes, yes, thought Susan, I know all this), possesses some of the finest and most comprehensive subterranean catacomb complexes in the whole country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They extend beyond the main house like the roots of an oak tree, and have been added to over the years, but so far in sympathy with the existing construction. They are accessed not only from the house itself, but also from an exterior pagoda constructed by William Chambers in 1763, and modelled on his famous reconstruction of a Chinese Ta at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Containing over 2.2 miles of underground corridor, they were originally contructed to house the first Baron’s extensive collection of whisky, but became something of a folly for successive Barons, who seemed to want to compete with each other to extend them by the largest amount. Presently the cellars are disused, but the ninth Baron, who at the time of writing doesn’t have any children yet and that reminds me I must write to him again and see how he is, pays for their upkeep by conducting guided tours around them every third Tuesday of the month. Last year (1962) he conducted a successful Christmas party in one of the crypts, which was attended by 120 children from St Hoosier’s School and raised £4 6s 9d for charity.
Now that was interesting. So the pagoda had been there all along, she thought to herself, but it had just had the maze built around it a few years ago… which presumably hadn’t been widely reported, since by that time Opocapopopoulos had cut the rest of the world off from what went on inside his walls. There was unfortunately no map of the cellars in Spangleton’s book; she looked through the Encyclopaedia of Modern Ruins, but found only a short reference to the house being pulled down and no further information that would help.
She jotted all this down in the pad of paper she’d brought with her, and stared into space for a few moments, trying to think what she could do next. There was something she was sure she was missing, but she couldn’t place it.
Then, in a flash, she knew what it was. St Hoosier’s School was where her uncle Xavier had gone. It was a long shot, but maybe it would be worth seeing if he knew anything more about it –
She dialled her mum, not caring at this point that she was using her phone in the library, and guessing that the two other people in there – the man in the suit evidently still hadn’t found what he was looking for – wouldn’t either. The phone rang a fe times, and then Jill answered.
“Hello, Blitherington 960.”
“Mum, it’s me. Susan,” she added, before her mother had a chance to be vague. “Listen, I think I’m on to something about Bartholomew. Have you got Xavier’s number?”
“Xavier? Yes, I think so. He called here yesterday, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh really?” Xavier was one of those types of people who never called to see how you were. “What did he want?”
“He was interested to hear if the will had been read. I think he wanted to know if he was going to inherit anything, really.”
“Oh yeah?” Susan suddenly realised she hadn’t told her mum about the cabinets, and decided now probably wasn’t the best time to, either. “Do you know if it has?”
“Actually,” Jill admitted, “I don’t. I wouldn’t expect him to leave us anything, of course, but you might think that a will of that size would be reported in the press… ah, here it is. It’s Bradfield 516497.”
Susan dialled the number, feeling a strange tingle of excitement, and waited. It rang and rang, and then went to an answerphone message, which started with a dolorous Chinese gong, and then Xavier’s sepulchral tones: “I am not in. If you wish me to reply, please write to me; otherwise, leave me a message.”
Bollocks, Susan thought, but decided not to hang up. “Hi Xavier, it’s me, Susan,” she said. “I just wanted to pick your brains, really – I’m investigating the catacombs at Eastwestchester House, and I wondered if –”
There was a rattle and a clink, and then a bonk as if someone had picked up the phone and then dropped it. Susan stopped, and there was a pause. Then from the other end came Xavier’s voice: “Hello?”
“Oh, you are there,” Susan said brightly, “that’s good. How are you?”
She remembered a second too late that Xavier wasn’t the kind of person to give you updates on how he was; he was awkward with small talk. “What are you trying to find out?” he asked, after a moment’s silence.
“Well, it’s a long story,” she replied, “but Paul and I ended up in the cellars at Opocapopopoulos House last night –”
“Really,” Xavier mused. “Go on.”
“They looked too old to have been built when the rest of the house had been, so I came to the library this morning to see what I could learn about when they’d been built. Turns out they were part of the original manor house. And there was a bit in one of the books I found, about St Hoosier’s.”
She heard him suck in his breath. “”Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” he said slowly, “a looooong time.”
“You did go there, didn’t you?” she prompted.
“Yes, I did,” Xavier replied. “It was a very long time ago – a period in my life that I prefer to forget about. But I do remember very clearly that we took a day trip up to the Hall, before it was demolished, one Christmas.”
“Can you remember the layout of the cellars?”
“May I ask,” Xavier asked, “why you are so interested?”
“Well, we think –” Susan began, and then lowered her voice, glancing quickly round the library to make sure nobody was listening. “We think we’re onto something about Bartholomew’s death. We followed his gardener, Thimble, back to the house last night – he was with a friend who seemed paranoid that something they were doing, or that they’d done, was going to be discovered. He went into the cellars via the pagoda in the middle of the maze, but we lost him, and then we decided that we didn’t really know what we were doing, and that we’d better find out more about the layout of the cellars before we went back.”
There was silence for a few moments, and then Xavier said:
“Are you free to come over to see me about this? I don’t think we should be talking about it on an open line.”
Why the hell are you being so paranoid, Susan thought, but decided to play along with him. “Yes, I’m free now,” she said. “See you in about half an hour?”
So it was that, roughly forty minutes later, she stood in an anonymous street in a suburb of town, scanning the numbers on the doors for a 71c. It wasn’t easy to find, but she finally decided on one that it was likely to be, went down the steps to it, and knocked the knocker, which was shaped like a lion’s claw. A low, muffled booom echoed in the depths of the flat, there was a pause, and then a small panel in the door slid across, revealing a pair of eyes.
“Have you been followed?” Xavier hissed.
“No,” Susan said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, positive.”
The door opened a crack. “Come in, then,” came Xavier’s voice. “Quickly.”
She entered, and Xavier hastily snapped the door shut behind her, drawing across a couple of bolts and sliding a chain into place. It was dark inside, and Susan’s eyes took a few moments to adjust to the gloom, but once they had she saw low ceilings draped with parachute webbing, a cramped toilet to one side, and a narrow corridor leading into a small, higher-ceilinged, galley-style kitchen, little more than a slightly wider section of corridor.
“Tea?” Xavier asked. “I have Earl Grey, peppermint, Lapsang Souchong, Darjeeling or builders’.”
“Earl Grey, please,” Susan replied, although she wasn’t really concentrating on what he was saying; the flat was crammed with so much interesting stuff it was an assault on the senses. The skeleton of what looked like a shark hung from the ceiling, painstakingly stuck together with thread, and so low she could have touched it if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. Through the door on the other side of the kitchen was a corridor, with shelves on both sides piled high with books, box files, model dragons, broken things she couldn’t quite make out, and a set of antique weighing scales.
“Biscuit? Hob Nob, Garibaldi, Bourbon or Jaffa Cake?”
That was easy. “Jaffa Cake, please.”
They sat in Xavier’s cosy living room, which was painted blood red and somehow managed to accommodate two sofas despite its size. Susan put her cup of tea on the carved wooden coffee table next to a copy of White Dwarf magazine, and Xavier fixed her with a penetrating stare.
“Please go on,” he said. “I apologise for being so cautious, but there are… many reasons for me to be. You were saying about Bartholomew’s death?”
Susan explained about the conversation Paul had overhead in the Oily Moon between Thimble and his friend; how they had followed the four of them to the house, and then followed Thimble and Kel through the maze, into the pagoda and down into the bowels of the cellars. She told him about the odd ranks of numbered lockers, and the activity down there that had necessitated golf buggy deliveries. She stopped short of telling him about the Napoleon III cabinets with their mysteriously destructive exhortation. When she had finished, she took another sip of tea, and Xavier leaned back in the sofa and said, “Interesting.”
“So I was wondering,” she carried on, “since you went to St Hoosier’s, you’d probably be the best person to ask about the Hall, as they knocked it down not long after they’d started showing people round it.”
Xavier’s eyes glazed over. “I’m not sure I’d be the best person to ask,” he said, in a faraway tone of voice. “Tell me – do you happen to know why the Hall was demolished?”
“No,” Susan said; the question had thrown her a little. “I just assumed it was because that’s what happened to grand old buildings in the 60s.”
“It’s what happened to a great many grand old buildings,” Xavier corrected her, “but that was not the reason why the original Hall was demolished. No, it was demolished because of a scandal – a scandal involving the very class at St Hoosier’s that I was in. It was a big item of news at the time: I’m surprised that you didn’t turn up anything about it in your research.”
Susan remembered the book of newspaper clipping she hadn’t got around to reading. “What happened?” she asked.
“It was 1964,” Xavier replied. “I was ten. St Hoosier’s – which isn’t there any longer, I believe they’ve turned it into executive flats – was just the local state school; it didn’t have any money. Christmas for us was generally a poor affair, not much to celebrate.”
A cat jumped up on the arm of Susan’s sofa, and she started. It looked at her, measuring her up, and then, deciding she would make a good cushion, padded carefully down onto her lap, and pawed her thighs, looking up at her with an expression that seemed to say: if you move one inch in any direction, lady, I’ve got claws. Xavier ignored it.
“This Christmas, the buzz went round that one class would be chosen to have a tour of Eastwestchester Hall. The Baron only gave one tour per year, and these were generally sponsored: he only let a maximum of twenty-five people look round it at once, and chose the group at random from the local schools. This year, it was our turn, and the Headmaster announced in assembly one morning in November that the class with the best marks throughout November would be the lucky ones selected to have the tour.
“Naturally, we all worked like anything. My favourite subject was what you would probably now call religious studies, but back then was called Divinity, although I wasn’t much interested in the divine – I just liked the stories of gods and plagues, kings and servants, temples and pillars of salt. I slogged away like I’d never slogged before that month, as we all did. Every week, the Headmaster would produce a leaderboard showing where all the classes were in relation to each other, and we were consistently near the top, but never in the first position; that was 5H, the Headmaster’s own class, who were renowned for being beastly swots. In the last week, the entire school had a big Divinity test, and I stayed up almost all night revising for it. I can still hear my father’s voice telling me to go to bed, as he practised his flaming unicycle routine in the front room – he was a circus clown, too, just like your dad; I think that’s where your mother met Gareth.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true; ask her. Anyway, in the morning I was dog tired and didn’t want to go to school, but they dragged me in and we all sweated our way through this test, and then at breaktime we stood around in huddles. Nobody wanted to run around and play, we were all too knotted up about the results of the test, and busily comparing our answers. I was feeling confident that I’d got them all right, and from what the other children were saying I felt I probably had. That afternoon, we got our results back, and I was ecstatic to find out that I’d got them all right, bar one. Between us, we totted up the marks we had got, and we felt hopeful, at least, that we might have a chance of winning the chance to have the tour of the Hall.
“The next morning was the headmaster’s assembly. We all sat down quietly – it was the quietest I’d ever heard it – and waited for the headmaster. He was a minute or two late, but finally he strode to the lectern at the front of the school hall, where a blackboard had been set up on an easel. He turned to it, and began writing the class names and their overall marks down, starting at the bottom of the board with the lowest. We all craned our necks to see what he was writing: each line drew a groan from one class or another, but ours – 4C – didn’t appear. Finally, he got up to number two, and in the ‘name’ column wrote 5H. It was clearly painful for him to do that. We didn’t even see what score they had, or what score we had; it didn’t matter, we were going on the tour.
“The day of the tour came, and we dressed up as smartly as we could, and walked the mile or so to the gates at the end of the drive – I think Bartholomew kept those pretty much as they were. A liveried servant opened them for us, and we walked up the drive and met the Baron, who was standing resplendent in mink and ermine robes with a fucking great crown on.”
The cat on Susan’s lap lazily dug its claws into her thigh. She winced, and tried to get her hand underneath it to shoo it away, but it squeezed a little bit harder and so she stopped.
“He welcomed us to the house, gave us a bit of a spiel and so on, and then led us away from the house and into the grounds, towards a walled garden. Above the walls we could just about see the top of the pagoda, and we were all twittering amongst ourselves wondering where we were going; we had assumed we would be getting to the cellars via the main house. Once inside the garden, we stopped in front of the pagoda, and the Baron motioned for us to be silent.
“‘What you are about to see,’ he said, ‘very few people have ever seen. I do not allow members of the Press into the cellars, so if anybody has brought a camera with them, please hand it over to me now.’ We all giggled nervously, but of course nobody had a camera; we could hardly even afford shoes. ‘Then, we shall go in,’ announced the Baron, and led the way into the pagoda, down the spiral staircase – it sounds, from your description, as if that hasn’t changed – and into the catacombs.
“It was dark down there, and cold; there was no electricity or heating system, but the Baron lit a wax flare with a match, and used that to light a number of gas lamps set into the wall. We walked for probably two hundred yards along the corridor you and Paul were in last night, which bends around to the right, as I remember, and ends at a T-junction, at which we turned left. The tunnel opens out after that, and we found ourselves standing in a sort of crypt, like an underground chapel. There was a long table set out in the middle of it, laden with all manner of fine foods, and exactly twenty-six chairs around the table – one for each of us, and one for him.”
Susan had produced her pad of paper, and was making notes, trying not to lean on the cat on her lap, which was being unambiguous about what might happen to her if she did.
“‘In a moment,’ said the Baron,” continued Xavier, “‘we shall eat. But first, I would like to show you my life’s work.’ He led us across the floor of the chapel and out of a small door at the opposite corner, which led into a corridor with hundreds of oak casks stacked along one wall, and lit at intervals by more gas lamps. There was a door at the end, which was locked, and we stopped; from behind the door came a low, insistent thrumming sound, like a hundred tractors under a duvet. ‘In here,’ the Baron confided, ‘is a machine which, I am hopeful, will one day make writing by hand obsolete. It is very big, very dangerous, and very loud. So that none of you get injured, I would ask you all please to take the greatest care when moving around it. There are lots of wheels and cogs which are moving very fast, and it is only a prototype, so safety has not been my primary concern when designing it. Do you understand?’ We all nodded and made encouraging sounds, but the truth was that we were all too excited to listen to him properly, and couldn’t wait to see whatever it was that he wanted to show us.
“He opened the door, and we trooped in. The room beyond was huge, bigger than the chapel, and three storeys high; we had come in on the third level, and were standing in a gallery overlooking what looked like an enormous factory filled with whirring machinery. The gallery covered three sides of the room, with the fourth being taken up by stairs so you could get from one level to another.
“We followed the Baron around the gallery and down two flights of stairs until we reached the bottom level; we must have been about a hundred feet underground by this point. Workmen scurried to and fro, pushing trolleys filled with stacks of paper. ‘This machine,’ yelled the Baron above the roar of the machinery, ‘takes the input of a modified typewriter, and prints it in virtually any way you choose. It can even do colour.’”
“We pretended to be impressed, but in fact we were all just deafened. I noticed two of the boys, Henry Filigree and Oliver Knightmeyer, slip away towards the machine; they’d always been troublemakers, and I wondered what they were going to do. The Baron hadn’t noticed, of course. I was about to try to attract his attention, but he turned away, leading us around the side of the machine, to show us another part of it.
“Just then, there was a piercing scream, and everyone turned to look in the direction it had come from. Those two boys had climbed up the side of the machine and were trying to dare each other to walk along the top of it.”
Xavier let out a long sigh. Susan’s leg was going dead.
“The Baron’s face went as white as a sheet. He cried, ‘Boys! No!’, and Henry, who was balancing on a strut at the top of the machine, turned to look at him. The act of turning his head made him overbalance, and he tumbled in; Knightmeyer tried to grab him as he fell, also overbalanced, and he, too, fell in.
“Everyone cried out in shock. The Baron rushed to a panel set into the wall, pulled at a large lever, and the noise of the machine slowly died down, but by then it was too late. I noticed three small drips of blood come out of a pipe above my head, and I turned around, and was sick.
“Then everyone made a mad dash for the exit. The Baron, panicking no doubt, tried to block our way; but we pushed past him, knocking him over, and raced up the steps to the third level, through the door, down the corridor with the barrels in, back through the chapel, along the tunnel and up the spiral stairs at the end. We didn’t stop running, or screaming, until we arrived back at the school.
“Well, there was pandemonium. Nobody believed us at first, but the police soon came, cordoned off the entire estate, and arrested the Baron on charges of manslaughter. He was bailed a week later, and escaped to Paraguay, which is where I believe he died eight years later, from syphilis.”
Xavier lapsed into silence; the room appeared to have grown colder, apart from the patch of Susan’s legs with the cat on it. “That’s awful,” she managed, finally. “So how did –”
“Ever since then,” Xavier interrupted, seemingly without hearing her, “I have had an innate distrust of authority, a fascination for crypts, and problems sleeping. But you asked about the layout of the basement,” he continued, getting to his feet and crossing the room to a small writing-bureau with a dead geranium on top, in a mildewy glass of water. “I have these plans which I drew shortly after the incident, which might not be much use to you – the cellar complex is much, much bigger than this, and I don’t think we did much more than scratch the surface of what was down there.” He handed Susan a tattered brown A4 envelope. “This is the only copy I have, so please be careful with it.”
“Thank you,” Susan breathed, and wondered for a few moments whether now was the right time to tell him about the cabinets. “There’s – there’s something I should tell you.”
Xavier leaned forward in the sofa, and cradled his dying cup of tea like a prisoner holding a mouse that he’s got attached to in a prison cell he can’t escape from.
“I am all,” he said softly, “ears.”
No comments:
Post a Comment