What infectious madness in Great-Grandmother’s letter had driven him to such extremity? Those dreams
… those dismal dreams of the little girl! The wretchedly eloquent pleading of her eyes, the perplexing compulsion of her tears! She and the beautiful Unicorn … the thought stalled as he crowed in delight. Light! There was a pale sliver of light ahead. Providence followed the Unicorn, he decided–capitalising the word unconsciously in his mind–and barked his shin sharply on a protruding beam.
A dance of silent agony followed
until the pain subsided.
He put his eye to the crack. The Blue Room! He was there!
His initial thrill faded swiftly into annoyance at the passage of time as the means of ingress proved elusive. But eventually he snagged his sleeve on a protruding handle, which led him to a catch, and a moment later he stepped from behind a hinged bookcase into the musty study. A quick glance about showed him a room as untouched as the day she must have last seen it, a thick and undisturbed layer of dust covering all surfaces like a perfectly-contoured wrapping. Should Father enter here and see his footprints, it would all be over.
Kevin
’s knees buckled at the notion and he caught himself against the edge of the desk to keep his balance.
“Almost there,” he grunted aloud, for the comfort of hearing his own voice. He spoke to himself
far too much. “Don’t be such a nincompoop, Jenkins!”
He tottered over to the mantelpiece.
‘Firstly, the Key-Ring, which is hidden under the mantelpiece in the Blue Room’, the letter averred. The question was, where and how was it hidden? It must be secret, for there was no way Great-Grandmother would have hidden some special treasure right where a casual visitor might chance upon it–if only Father had not snatched the letter! His fingertips scouted the edges above the fireplace, hunting for any imperfections or clues, but it was firmly affixed to the stone and in no way mobile. Next he pored over the brickwork surrounding the fireplace, without finding anything unusual there either. He reached up the chimney as far as he could–no luck. Eventually, Kevin stood back and reconsidered the whole endeavour, scratching his chin absently. Perhaps there was another Blue Room? No, he had must have been over the plans a dozen times. This was her private study, a logical place–no, perhaps it was the
least
logical place for him to be looking. He glared silently at the mantelpiece before going over every inch of it a second time, and the brickwork, and the sooty chimney–but apart from blackened fingers and face, he achieved precisely as much as before, which was to say, nothing at all.
“Where would one hide a key-ring?”
Kevin glared at an oil painting of some obscure relative hanging above the fireplace, which actually depicted a rather attractive young woman in Victorian dress seated primly on a straight-backed chair, hands folded in her lap over a leather bound book. She and Aunt Beatrice–Kevin’s favourite Aunt–might have been sisters. He should ask her next time … ah, the picture! Kevin reached up to explore the picture frame. He was woefully short, but this inadequacy hardly mattered, for he happened upon it within seconds–a tiny rough edge, a curling of paper beneath his fingernails. With shaking hands, he extracted and unrolled the slip.
He squinted and read, ‘I wonder what Colette is thinking?’
“Jiminy Cricket!” Was this a joke? Some unsuspected sense of humour on the part of Great-Grandmother, who had always struck him as rather distant, stern, and disapproving of snotty little boys? Colette’s portrait received the full brunt of his displeasure and annoyance. “Now,” he said, peering closer, “what are you hiding, my dear?”
Her portrait
was rather plain and lacking in interesting details, although some peculiar force of gravity caused his gaze to dally for some moments on the journey between her smiling face and the book in her lap–in purely aesthetic study, naturally, though the room seemed at once ten degrees warmer in result. That he could discern nothing of what she was thinking was partly due to her simple, happy expression, and partly due to the sudden lapse in concentration on his part. Kevin’s eyes jumped guiltily to the book, cradled protectively between her slim, pale hands. It had miniscule gold lettering on the spine.
“Needs a magnifying-glass,” he said to himself, casting about the room. “Can’t read a
darned thing in this dreary moonlight!” A swift search turned up a fine glass in the top desk drawer, whence he returned to Colette and focussed on the book. “Well I say, what perfectly strange book for a young lady to be reading. ‘
Locks Through the Ages: A Complete History?
’ A tad offbeat.” Struck by sudden inspiration, he whirled. “It couldn’t be …!”
Two minutes’ perusal of Great-Grandmother’s bookshelves had that exact volume in his trembling hands–but that was where the inspiration faded, for no further clues offered themselves immediately to
Kevin’s questing mind. He already understood that ‘beneath the mantelpiece’ was a purposeful misdirection. Colette appeared from her picture to be gazing at the shelf from which he had carefully removed
Locks Through the Ages
, which made sense, but he was no closer to ‘what she was thinking’ than before.
All this mystery was beginning to excite him, to exert some allure on his feverish imagination, for he reasoned that if someone had taken such great pains to hide a Key-Ring, then it must be of
great significance. Great-Grandmother had never struck him as one given to frivolity. No, her purpose would become clear in time, he was sure. Until then, Kevin thought, reluctantly leaving the study with the book tucked firmly under his arm.
It had been a fine adventure.
K
evin was dozing in
the Library when Aunt Beatrice woke him.
“
Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” she cooed, shaking his shoulder gently, but with a certain implacable air common to retired schoolteachers everywhere. “Fancy nodding off at two o’clock! Why, you are missing a beautiful day. And how is my favourite nephew?”
“Hmm?”
“I must advise, my dear boy, that you should not snore with your mouth open so. A bird might build its nest in there and that would be frightfully amusing.”
Kevin
closed his mouth with a snap and sat up, pulling his bathrobe straight. What time was it? What day? He had asked Albert to call Aunt B first thing. Had he found the Blue Room only last night? Leaping lizards!
“Aunt B!
Did you fly here?”
“All the better to see you, my dear.” She tittered at her joke, patting an imaginary stray hair back into its rightful position. Aunt Beatrice was very proper and formal at all times, and always impeccably turned out. She reminded
Kevin of a wren, for she had a tiresome habit of pecking at fluff wherever she could find it–as she did now, plucking a thread off his bathrobe. “Faithful Albert delivered your message this morning. He has been a Jenkins family servant all his life, did you know? And his dear mother before him, who was my nurse when I was young.”
“Is that so?” He could not imagine Aunt B as a girl, for she was a contemporary of his grandmother’s–she was his great-aunt, strictly speaking, but insisted on just ‘Aunt’ rather than ‘Great-Aunt’. ‘We’d rather not give my age away, dear!’ she had once explained. Aunt B she had been ever since.
“I owe you an apology,” said Aunt B, who had not even removed her coat. “You caught me on my way to London–a dreadful business, that’s what it is. Perfectly horrid. Ivy, one of my oldest and dearest friends, has had a bad fall and is in hospital as we speak with a broken hip. At her age, too, she should not be climbing on chairs to reach into cupboards. It was fortunate that one of the neighbours heard the crash and came to investigate, for Victoria has lived all on her own since her Harry died of the pneumonia in sixty-four, and has nobody to look after her, the poor dear. I shall be her only friend and comforter.”
Kevin
smiled at her martial attitude. She had served during the war, a most enthusiastic supporter of the cause. As it was, she had enough projects and good works on the boil at any one time to make one’s head spin.
“I must confess,” she continued, “that your note proved a trifle cryptic, even by your obtuse standards. I was quite unable to decipher it. Hence my flying visit, for which I must offer my most profuse apologies. You do understand?”
“I understand,” he said dutifully. “I must not delay you. I’m sure that this matter can wait upon your return.”
“James has the Jaguar purring outside this very moment,” she said, referring to her driver. Father had dismissed James soon after they took over the Jenkins estate,
Kevin recalled; even then he had been a silver-haired grandfather figure. “He’s a real old devil sometimes–overly fond of breaking the speed limit, you know. He shall fly me to London as on a magic carpet.”
Kevin
, who from his bedroom window had on occasion marvelled at the familiar green Jaguar’s velocity as it raced up the long driveway to Pitterdown Manor, gave a dry little chuckle. “Even so, Aunt B, I don’t want to bother–”
She patted his arm. “On the contrary, my dear boy, I do wish you would think of your own needs more often. It’s unhealthy here in this house, what with Harold lording it up and your brother–what a nasty piece of work he’s turned out to be! Victoria
must be turning in her grave. I don’t know how you put up with those two louts, truly I don’t.”
“Aunt B, you are a perfect brick.”
“You are too kind, Kevin. And how is the old chest bearing up?”
“Well enough, thank you.”
“Now, before I rush off, Kevin, you absolutely have to tell me what your note was about, or I shall worry about it all the way to London.”
“Briefly, Aunt B, I was reading a book from the Library and discovered a letter within it from Great-Grandmother, addressed to me.”
She adjusted her spectacles, frowning. “Addressed to you, did you say?”
“To one
Kevin Albert Jenkins–I know no other.”
“Indeed! How queer.”
“It’s a fine mystery,” Kevin said. “In it she asked me to look beneath the mantelpiece in the Blue Room–but before I could read further, Father caught me reading the letter and … got angry.” Aunt B huffed, but before she could launch into a tirade, he added quickly, “The letter mentioned a Key-Ring that I should find. Do you know anything about it? It was not where the letter intimated it should be found.”
A
curious fire lit his Aunt’s eyes. “How did you ever get into the Blue Room, Kevin? Your Father keeps it under lock and key.”
“There’s a secret passage from the dining room,” he said, shrinking back into the armchair. “Last Tuesday, in the dead of night, I snuck in and
nosed about.”
“Why, you brave fellow!” she exclaimed, then lowered her voice quickly, hearing footsteps in the hallway outside. “
Kevin, this is very important–I cannot stress it enough. Listen closely.”
“I am.”
Her manner was so fierce, he shrank back into the armchair. “We need to talk when I get back from London. In the meantime, it is imperative that you do not tell
anybody
what you have seen or done.”
Both sets of eyes flickered to the doorway as one of the servants entered.
Kevin stared at his Aunt. What had he stumbled upon? How did Aunt B know about the Key-Ring? And why the need for secrecy? A thousand questions jostled in his mind.
“Swear it!”
His heart lurched in his chest. “I swear.”
* * * *
Kevin had hidden
Locks Through the Ages
directly after returning from the Blue Room, but now he brought it out and devoured the weighty tome. 857 pages on the subject did little to enthuse him, although it did contrive to give him a backache and a numb posterior. It was late evening by the time he finished the last few pages, reading by the light of the full moon streaming in through the Library windows. That was when the penny dropped.
“Oh, I could kick myself!” he hissed, vastly irritated. His unfeeling fingertips played with the dog-eared top corner of the page. “Here you’ve been castigating
the curvaceous Colette for turning over the pages, when all along she was leaving clues.”
He flushed
richly, quite certain he was not supposed to be considering a dead female relative ‘curvaceous.’
Swiftly
, he scanned the page for any obvious writing or markings. He turned the leaf over to examine the back. As he did, it so happened that the moonlight shadowed a couple of small indentations near the top of the page, where it appeared someone must have pressed overly hard with a pen or pencil, leaving an impression on the paper. His fingers quivered. A quick grab across the desk netted him a square of tracing paper, which he had used to trace the architectural drawings of Pitterdown Manor. He rooted a soft pencil out of the drawer. He shaded very lightly over the indentations, gradually forming a picture of the word beneath.
“Cellar,” he
breathed at last. “Something in the cellar.”
He knew Pitterdown Manor had extensive cellars, although he had never been down there. The drawings examined during his search for the secret passage revealed two levels of cellars running not only under the buildings themselves, but also
beneath the central courtyard. The wine cellar alone was over two hundred feet long.
Kevin
flicked back through the pages, searching for previous dog-ears. He had meticulously turned each and every one upright again. The picture began to build up, word by painstaking word. Finally he could string all the clues together: CELLAR BOTTOM NORTH-EAST CORNER LARGE CHEST.
“By all that’s holy!”
Without thinking, his hands gathered together the scraps of paper and methodically shredded them one by one into the wastepaper basket. Then he packed up the book, tucked it under his arm, and headed for bed. He was exhausted.
* * * *
He had caught a chill working late in the Library. Kevin spent the following four days abed, while his nose dripped with the persistence of a leaky tap. The doctor issued him six blue pills in addition to his usual fifty-seven. He used up two boxes of tissues and eight helpings of the cook’s best vegetable soup, which was a nourishing remedy recommended by the doctor and hated by the patient. Kevin and vegetables had an acrimonious relationship at the best of times. By day four he was ready to scale the walls with his bare fingernails if necessary, for the doctor had banned all reading as ‘far too taxing for the invalid’–an indiscretion for which he would have paid in blood had Kevin the strength to rise from his sickbed–and as a result he was utterly bored. Even his fertile and usually boundless imagination had succumbed to ennui.
He fell asleep, and dreamed.
Amidst the boles of trees, damp-slicked by mist and reduced in the distance to vaguely threatening shapes, stood the ghostly little girl. She was crying. Her long hair fell in tangled webs about her face, soaking up tears of bitter distress, and her shoulders quaked with the force of her sobbing. To observe someone so distraught was painful to Kevin, who was convinced that some mysterious process connected him to her misery. Even sleeping, he was aware that he was kicking his blankets into an almighty tangle. But there was nothing he could do. Though the dream world drifted about him with listless purpose, he was unable, as always, to move or speak or change the course of events. The little girl seemed oblivious to his presence. This was a relief, for to see her pleading eyes was far worse than the crying.
The Unicorn came trotting through the trees, coming right up to the girl before she sensed his approach. He
lowered his head.
The little girl flung her arms around
the Unicorn’s neck, which she could barely reach, and sobbed even harder, although the scene appeared slightly unreal, as Kevin could hear no sound. It seemed inconceivable that such an elfin creature could produce such floods, but the beautiful Unicorn stood patiently by as the storm continued unabated.
By degrees,
Kevin became aware of a low-hanging bough near his left hand, laden with large, unfamiliar fruits–flattened disks covered with coarse hair, nestled amidst thickets of small, waxy leaves. But the leaves were spotted and sickly, hanging limp upon the branches rather than bursting with vitality. A noxious secretion oozed out of the darkest of the spots. Kevin thought he detected an aura of taint and disease that, as he shifted his gaze, was reflected to a greater or lesser degree on the trees around him. The spots were ubiquitous–tiny in many places, but spread throughout the foliage like the first sprinkling of a general infection. The forest was ailing.
This new understanding struck him
sharply. Was this the why the little girl was crying? Why should she care so deeply for mere trees? Unaccountably, the mystery of the dream had deepened. Yet he still could find no reason for his presence. With his limited knowledge of botany and even more limited experience of the outdoors, there was no assistance he could possibly offer them–save his pity.
Suddenly, the Unicorn’s noble head lifted and the full force of his gentle and knowing gaze permeated
Kevin’s awareness, so that for an infinitesimal fragment of a second there was a connection. He did not so much hear as sense the words:
Come to us.
Kevin
stumbled backwards with a soundless gasp. This was a nightmare, an eruption of the unconscious; his imagination stirred to raw, unexpected, terrifying life. It was like grasping a stick in the grass only to discover it was really a snake. Once again the dream had mutated, drawing him inexorably into its web of tangled obligations and hidden coercive forces. He wished only to be left in peace! They should not rely on him; he was powerless to offer remediation. There must be a catch. Panic constricted his throat and pulverised his ever-present mental barricades, so that he became vulnerable to whatever nefarious fate the Unicorn may have designed for him. For he knew that as its magical horn lifted and began to glow with eerie luminescence, that the jaws of the trap were closing and the Unicorn was about to ream him from head to toe; that he was about to be snatched away on wings of darkness; that the shadows in his mind had grown teeth and claws and dripping fangs and great waves of them were about to shred his helpless body … here they came … screeching and yipping and wailing … reaching out with monstrous and malefic intent …
“Help me!”
Kevin shrieked, flinging his pillow away from his face. He fell out of bed and flopped about on the floor like a gaping goldfish, wetting himself in the process. Then he fetched his skull a great crack on the foot of his bedside cabinet, and there collapsed insensible for a short while before coming to with an almighty headache.
“I’m going crazy,” he muttered. He gingerly fingered the bump on his
skull. “Ugh, Kevin! Can’t you stop yourself? At least until you reach the bathroom? No, you’d rather leave a puddle of stinking piss on your own bedroom floor, you worthless little weasel. It’s a wonder they haven’t locked you up already. You’ll end up a vegetable like your mother.”