The Unhappy Medium, page 46
‘Over ?’ said La Senza, his eyes wide and staring in defiance. ‘Oh that’s what you’d like, isn’t it. Well what will you do ... if ... I ... jump?’
‘Jump?’ asked Viv. ‘What good will that do you? You’ll die.’
‘I’ve done it before!’ said the cornered Inquisitor. ‘There’s nothing to it. I’ll come back again, and again and again. If I jump I’ll take these with me – the book, the relics. They’ll all come with me. You won’t know where they’ll turn up. Someone will find them. Some lousy beachcomber, a child, I’ll take them over, I’ll possess them. I’ll return.’
‘Hold on. Can he do that?’ asked Newton sceptically.
‘Errr ... sadly yes,’ said Bennet, his face grim as gravel. ‘Yes, he can.’
‘I’m not scared of death! Don’t you see! I know it’s not a permanent state of affairs,’ laughed La Senza.
‘It might hurt a bit,’ said Gabby.
‘Hurt ? Ha! It’s nothing, stupid girl. You’ve no idea what pain is until you’ve been torn into pieces by Spanish peasants. You think I’m scared ... what, of drowning ? Ha! It means nothing to me! It’s an easy death. Nothing!’ La Senza backed closer to the precipice, wobbling dangerously on the edge of the drop.
‘I’ll grab him,’ Bennet muttered. ‘You get the bags.’
‘If you say so,’ said Newton doubtfully. They began to edge forward.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ warned La Senza, ‘I mean it!’
The Cardinal was balancing very unsteadily, the crashing of the waves below him a constant roar. He was either going to fall or jump, and Newton tensed at the prospect; the idea of fighting with a possessed nutcase on a cliff edge contained no appeal whatsoever. Luckily for Newton, the moment never came.
Disturbed in their nocturnal cliff-side roosts, a cloud of seagulls suddenly exploded up behind La Senza like a flock of angels, their white feathers flashing in the darkness. The cause of their disturbance was now appearing at La Senza’s feet. Two gigantic filthy hands were clumping and clawing up the very edge of the precipice. Rising up from the abyss came the Bonetaker. Huge and sodden from a long journey across the English Channel, the giant heaved his seaweed-draped mass up behind La Senza and paused. Terrified by the vision, a couple of Bennet’s men dropped their weapons and ran shrieking away into the mist.
La Senza was still blissfully unaware of what was directly behind him, and both baffled and insulted that his dramatic finale was losing its momentum.
‘Whaaat?’ said La Senza, suddenly crestfallen. ‘Whaaaat?’
‘What the hell is that?’ said Newton.
‘Bonetaker,’ said Bennet. ‘It’s OK, he’s one of us.’
‘One of us? Are you sure ?’ said Newton, as Gabby edged behind her father.
‘Kind of a freelancer,’ said Bennet. ‘Long story.’
The Bonetaker was fully upright now, almost double the Cardinal’s height and twice his width. A mackerel flapped off his old leather hat and dropped wriggling onto the grass.
‘What’s going on?’ asked La Senza. ‘Why are you all looking at me like that?’
‘What makes you think we’re looking at you at all,’ said Newton. ‘You might want to turn around.’
La Senza, his face confused yet uncompromising, weighed things up. He wavered for a second, wondering whether it was a ruse or not. Then the Bonetaker’s right hand landed hard on the Inquisitor’s shoulder and clamped shut, pinning him in place. La Senza turned his head very, very slowly and looked up. Hanging over him, a ghastly display of mangled facial features and seaweed, was the Bonetaker. La Senza let out a low whimper.
‘Nooooooo, nooooo.’
‘EVIL!’ said the Bonetaker, his voice a low rumbling boom that Newton could feel in his belly. ‘Evil, bad!’
‘No ... I’m not,’ begged La Senza pathetically. ‘I’m not a bad Inquisitor. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone ... please nooooo.’
But the Bonetaker was not to be deflected in his mission. He’d followed the scent of La Senza’s evil back and forth across the Channel and his programming was so deep and so strong that there was nothing that could have distracted him from his target. He grasped La Senza like a fat child picking up an action figure, and with his other shovel-like fist, he scooped up La Senza’s ghastly possessions. Then he pulled the Cardinal over the cliff into the abyss .
Newton and the Purgatorians waited for the splash. There was nothing, only silence. Puzzled, they crawled forwards and peered over the cliff edge to look down to the sea far below.
On a ledge some fifty feet beneath them, the Bonetaker had landed with his prey. Babbling in sheer terror, the Inquisitor was pinned like a butterfly under the monster’s huge sodden right boot as the Bonetaker plucked at the flaps of his oily coat, retrieving the tools of his ancient trade. As Newton, Viv, Gabby and the Purgatorians watched from above, the Bonetaker arranged his bowls and powders. In a low muttering incantation, he began to prepare his ghastly subject for oblivion. With La Senza weeping in terror beneath him, he started to crush the carved boxes. One by one he lifted them from the bag and mashed them against the rocks, picking amongst them until the grinding bowl was filled with nothing but the fragments of La Senza’s previous fingers. Missing nothing, the Bonetaker reached down and tore the trinket with the remaining bone from La Senza’s neck. It joined the others.
As the huge form continued its incantations, a ghastly purple aura began to form around La Senza. It grew into evil little wisps and as he stared at the beginnings of his own annihilation, the vile little man began his last desperate pleas for forgiveness.
‘Please, I’m not guilty. I was only obeying holy orders! I’ll be good now I promise, just tell me what you want, I’ll get it for you. You can join me ... I dunno ... just don’t do this to me ... please ... PLEASE!’
It was a pathetic and hypocritical display. Just as so many had begged and pleaded to this same Cardinal for mercy, so now he did the same. And just the same, it fell on deaf ears. Programmed to seek and destroy evil in all its forms, the Bonetaker was unstoppable. Like a machine, he continued unmoved by the Inquisitor’s pitiful begging. As he ground the relics, mixing in his blood from a fresh cut he had slashed in his own hand, the glow around La Senza and his relics built, flowing in ghastly spiralling fingers. Amazed and horrified, Newton and the girls watched as the Inquisitor, his eyes pleading towards them, began a horrible twitching spasm. Driven by the incantations, the soul of La Senza was about to be evicted from the stolen body of Chris Baxter.
‘Nooo ... I beg of you. Show me mercy!’ La Senza beseeched.
‘No,’ said the Bonetaker, his refusal booming like a foghorn .
‘Please, have you no pity?’ said La Senza finally, doing his best to look vulnerable and misunderstood. The Bonetaker stopped.
On hearing the words, he paused in his grinding and his huge head turned slowly and deliberately until the old tired eyes looked directly into the eyes of the Inquisitor.
‘Pity?’ he asked in a deep bass baritone.
‘Yes ... please ... show me pity!’ begged La Senza, hopefully. The Bonetaker took what felt like a lifetime to reply.
‘NO,’ he said bluntly, and turning back to his work, he ground hard into the mess of bone fragments. The blue flames intensified as La Senza spasmed one final time, his ridiculous party robes bathed in a vortex of purple tendrils. They rose in a coiled representation of a human figure for one last second before, with a rushing roar, they flew into the Bonetaker’s bowl ... and fizzled out.
All that was Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza was gone.
Gone for good.
Beneath the Bonetaker’s boot lay the bruised and battered body of one Christopher Baxter, salesman. Poor Baxter looked up in mystified horror at the Bonetaker then down at the crashing waves below him, and he did the only sensible thing he could.
He fainted.
CHAPTER 37 – After the fir e
It took all night for the asylum to burn to the ground. For hour on hour it crackled, roared and hissed, the flames charging down the long corridors consuming all before them. As the blaze took the building there was a symphony of tumbling masonry, tortured girders and splintering glass. Finally, the vile edifice died, the walls falling in upon each other until there was nothing left of the building but a Stalingrad-like wreckage of toppled brick. At 4am, the firestorm jumped the short distance from the asylum to Hadlow Grange. By the time the pale wintry sun finally rose in the east, both buildings and all their questionable contents had been consumed.
Despite the late hour and the stressful day, Newton, Gabby and Viv didn’t have the slightest desire to sleep. They perched on the roof of the tank some 200 yards from the conflagration, hypnotised as they watched the pyrotechnics and in their awed silence, the blaze warmed them like a fan heater.
Jameson and his clean-up squad arrived with the dawn. The motley collection of pre-war ambulances, antique fire engines and anonymous removal vans fanned out across the grounds until the entire site was swarming with stern-faced Purgatorians, busying themselves amongst the ruins in the search for anything that could raise awkward questions in the cold light of the new day. It soon became clear that La Senza’s ghastly contraption, tinder dry after centuries in the arid Spanish climate, had gone up like balsa wood. Like its creator’s dark ambitions, it had been utterly obliterated. As an extra bonus, the blaze had also taken all the other foul, evil-soaked artefacts so beloved of the late McCauley brothers.
Dawn had also seen the last of Van Loop’s henchmen located in the surrounding heathland or holding out in the castle at Langton Hadlow. Bloodied, broken and most definitely bowed, they offered no resistance to Bennet’s irregulars. Ahead lay an intensive few years in what from the outside, at least, appeared to be a religious retreat off the west coast of Scotland. Here they were to be thrashed into a more benign frame of mind through round-the-clock workshops in basket weaving, pot throwing and transcendental meditation.
There was a reunion between Eric the Greek and the Bonetaker, which was brief and bittersweet. They sat with each other alone for a while before the Bonetaker, his shoulders impossibly hunched and weary, ambled away into the last of the smoke and vanished. It took half an hour for the smell to clear.
Poor Christopher Baxter meanwhile was in an understandably lamentable state. For the one-time plastics salesman there was much therapy ahead, but for now it was as much as he could do to keep down the hot sweet tea and sympathy. Shivering in Cardinal La Senza’s cheap robes he rocked slowly back and forth, whimpering to himself and dribbling.
Needless to say, considering the scale of events, there was a mountain of Purgatory-related paperwork in the offing, but Sixsmith thankfully persuaded Eric the Greek to let it wait until Monday morning. However, Jameson insisted on making sure that the witnesses to the night’s events were to be trusted with what, one way or another, was a bit of a big story, so after a short induction course he sternly swore in Gabby, Viv, Baxter, the mechanics and the curator of the Langton Hadlow village museum. With these formalities duly observed, Newton was finally able to lead his daughter and girlfriend back to the battered Citroën. After saying his farewells to Bennet, they headed home.
******
Two weeks later, Newton pulled up gingerly in front of Rowena’s Cambridge town house to collect his daughter for the weekend. The Citroën had now been beautifully restored; from the chrome bumper to the leather seats, the crystal-clear windscreen and the fresh tyres, there was no trace of the car’s recent misadventures. At Newton’s request, even the heater had been given an overhaul.
He rang the bell.
‘What time do you call this?’ hissed his ex-wife, looking out to Viv in the passenger seat outside. ‘Gabriella!’ Rowena barked up the stairs. ‘Your father is here.’
‘Hi,’ said Newton hopefully to his ex-wife’s friends gathered around the antique kitchen table. It was not returned. There was a scramble of oversized boots on the stairs and Gabby huffed and shrugged her way down to the front door.
‘A word,’ said Rowena sternly. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, about last time.’
Newton felt a cold sweat pass through him like a late train. ‘Yes?’
‘Frankly, Newton, I don’t think you’re making enough effort.’
‘I’m not?’
‘No you’re not. Gabby complained that she was bored out her mind,’ Rowena declared sharply with a raised eyebrow.
‘Bored?’ said Newton confused. ‘Did she, did she really? Bored?’
‘Yes bored,’ said Rowena, waving a manicured digit. ‘Newton, look, you are her father. I really think you should try harder.’
There was a ripple of tutts from the table.
‘Oh I’m sorry,’ said Newton. ‘My bad.’
‘Be a better father,’ said Rowena with her eyes narrowed. And with the nodding reinforcement from the table endorsing her, she bustled Newton back onto the street where Gabby was sullenly slouched against the wall. The door slammed loudly behind them.
‘Have you considered a career in the theatre?’ asked Newton discreetly, his eyebrow raised.
Gabby subtly returned her father’s wink and then flounced away to the car, throwing herself onto the back seat and folding her arms in perfect imitation of teenage sullenness. With Rowena’s gaze following them from the front window, they pulled gently away down the narrow street, into the suburbs, then out towards the ring road.
‘Right then,’ said Newton to his passengers as they finally dropped the theatricals. ‘What we got?’
‘Let me see,’ said Viv, consulting the job sheet. ‘Haunted hotel in the Peak District.’
‘Peak District eh?’ said Newton, shifting the gears. ‘Well, we’d better get a move on then.’
The Citroën purred, whined and finally found its voice once again. There was a surge of pistons, a throaty roar of carburettor and the scream of the supercharger. And then, like a spitfire roaring off the runway, the old car carried them away like a rocket to the north.
AUTHOR’S NOT E
Thank you for reading The Unhappy Medium. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you can spare a couple of minutes to write a review that would be great, and if you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter, which will include updates on my next book, please email me (t.j.brown@theunhappymedium.com ). You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter .
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ABOUT THE AUTHO R
Born in Dorset, T. J. Brown studied fine art and sang in bands before eventually settling into a career in publishing, designing and illustrating science and aviation titles for some of the UK’s biggest publishers.
He lives in Kent, dangerously close to two pubs.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Unhappy Medium 2: Tom Fool
Dr Newton Barlow and the Purgatorians are back.
Now that the fight between good and evil has become routine, one-time sceptical physicist and unhappy medium, Dr Newton Barlow, is badly in need of a challenge.
It arrives in the shape of a crime so cunning in its planning, so dastardly in its execution, that even the hyper-logical Dr Barlow will struggle to prevent it.
But with Barlow and his team navigating a flood of mind-curdling distractions, and an adversary that seems to know their every weakness, things are destined to get a little messy for the Purgatorians. Plus, with his girlfriend demanding a slice of the paranormal action, his old employer getting a bit too close to his personal life and his current employer using his home as a hotel, Newton’s challenges are hardly the kind he was seeking.
Missing links, an enigmatic jester and the unexpected nature of portraiture, Tom Fool is a fast and furious comedy about the perils of notoriety.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S
For being kind enough to read the story in an embryonic state yet not laugh and point at me until I cried, I'd like to thank:
Tim Benge, Loz Biggs, Pete Cane, Mark Conroy, Dave Edwards, Tanya Featherstone, Stephen Finnigan, Robert Forsyth, Olive Gilhespie, David Gurdon, Mark Harrison, James Hart, Stephen Heard, Nick Jenkins, Andy Knight, Duncan Mallard, Emma Marsh, Jimmy Muir, Lucian Randall, Bridget Rankin, Nick Ratcliffe, Joel Sassone, David Saxton and Marston York.
For being good sports and allowing me to include them in the pub scene at The Two Crowns, thanks to Jackie Jenkin, Pete Mckenna, Bill Rankin and Scott Robson.
Many ideas in the book were inspired by speakers and general chat at a UK Skeptics meeting at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria. For that, many thanks to everyone at the friendly gathering, particularly Jason Braithwaite, Chris French and castle manager Peter Frost-Pennington.
My mother Joy Brown listened to me read the chapters as I wrote them, a great help as the book took shape. Chris Rowan encouraged me to write in the first place, while my colleague Giles Sparrow has instilled some semblance of grammar and punctuation in my thick skull over the past fifteen years. Eduard Llena Portell advised on Spanish terms and Elly Truitt elaborated on medieval automata. Big thanks to all of them.
While writing this novel I found myself thinking a lot about two old school friends who are sadly no longer with us – Roger Davies, who introduced me to comedy a very long time ago, and Neil Torrible, who so wanted to write .
Most of all I'd like to thank and dedicate this novel to Hazel Muir.
No Noggin no novel. xx
T J Brown, The Unhappy Medium
