The Heirloom Read online

  THE HEIRLOOM

  Graham Masterton

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About The Heirloom

  An antique chair comes into a family’s possession. But they soon discover that this is no ordinary heirloom. All manner of strange things begin to occur, including shifts in the fabric of time itself...

  In the vein of The Wells Of Hell and The Devils Of D-Day, The Heirloom, is a fast-paced, entertaining horror.

  ‘The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’

  –St John, 12:12

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Heirloom

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Forebodings

  Chapter 2: Witherings

  Chapter 3: Returnings

  Chapter 4: Consumings

  Chapter 5: Explorings

  Chapter 6: Alarmings

  Chapter 7: Exorcisings

  Chapter 8: Threatenings

  Chapter 9: Bargainings

  Chapter 10: Sunderings

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  About the Scarlet Widow Series

  Also by Graham Masterton

  From the Editor of this Book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  Forebodings

  How he managed to drive up to my door in that huge black van without my seeing him I shall never know. But I came around the side of the house with my sweeping-brush to tidy up some of the fallen eucalyptus leaves, and there he was, tall and silent, dressed in one of those long grey dusters that removal men and french polishers sometimes used to wear. His face was as long and pale as a calico kitbag, and his eyes were hidden behind the tiniest dark glasses I had ever seen. His hands were thrust into his pockets.

  Behind him, neatly parked next to my Impala wagon, was the van. Old-fashioned, upright, and painted in a black so glossy that I could see a distorted reflection of the house and the eucalyptus trees in it.

  ‘Mr Delatolla?’ he asked, raising his cap.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded. ‘This is private property.’

  ‘My name’s Grant,’ he said, mildly. ‘I’m sorry to drop in on you without an appointment, but a friend of mine told me you might be interested in purchasing some unusual antiques.’

  I glanced at the van. ‘Oh, yes? Well, it depends how unusual they are. What have you got?’

  He smiled a little. ‘I’m not a time-waster, Mr Delatolla. I’m a house-clearer; and I can assure you that I only clear the best.’

  ‘This is local stuff?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘I came down from Santa Barbara especially to do it. You’ve heard of the Jessops, of course?’

  ‘You mean the Jessops who sell jewellery in San Diego or the Jessops who build aeroplanes at Long Beach?’

  ‘The aeroplane Jessops. They have a house at Escondido.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ I told him. ‘My wife always calls it the worst and only example of North San Diego Baroque. But surely none of the Jessops have died?’

  Grant pursed his lips. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. They’re simply… restyling. They wanted to dispose of some of the extraneous furniture.’

  ‘How extraneous?’ I wanted to know. ‘I don’t buy garbage.’

  ‘I know your reputation,’ said Grant. ‘If I didn’t think you’d be interested in what I’ve got here, I wouldn’t even have come along. Do you want to take a look?’

  ‘Couldn’t you bring it around to my store tomorrow?’ I asked him. ‘I’m supposed to be taking my son to the wild-animal park in about ten minutes.’

  Grant looked away, across the tree-lined drive. ‘I regret I have to be back in Santa Barbara by tonight.’

  He said it in a strange, wistful way; and his voice was like the Sunday-afternoon breeze which rustled the leaves in the nearby lemon grove. He said nothing more to persuade me to look at what he had brought in that travelling hearse of his. He left it entirely up to me. And that, as I learned later, was one of the devices with which such antiques must be sold.

  I checked my watch. ‘Okay,’ I told him abruptly. ‘You open up the van, and I’ll go tell my wife we’re going to be running a half-hour late. I suppose a half-hour is going to be long enough?’

  He nodded. It’s strange, thinking about him today, because I can never quite remember what he really looked like. Sometimes I picture him like that French comedian Fernandel, only grimmer. Other times he appears in my memory as Jason Robards, or Richard Nixon. I watched him walk towards his van to open up the back doors, and it was like watching somebody walk through the shallow surf at the beach, an odd wading sort of walk.

  I turned and went inside. Jonathan, my six-year-old son, was sitting on the Spanish-tiled floor in the hallway, studiously tying up his sneakers. Sara was in the kitchen, tidying up after preparing tonight’s carnitas and tortillas. I came up behind her and kissed the side of her neck.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ she asked me.

  ‘Believe it or not, I have an antiques dealer outside,’ I told her.

  ‘Today? Sunday? Here?’

  ‘He’s from Santa Barbara. Apparently he has to go back tonight, otherwise I’d have had him call at the store in the morning.’

  Sara wiped her hands on her flowery Danish apron, and then untied it. ‘What’s so important he has to come around on Sunday?’

  ‘He cleared some furniture from the Jessop place at Escondido. Says they’re redecorating or something like that, and they had one or two special pieces they wanted to get rid of.’

  ‘They’d better be pretty special to interrupt your one day of rest,’ warned Sara. She could be just as prickly as I was when she wanted to be. ‘How long do you think you’re going to be?’

  ‘A half-hour. Not longer.’

  Jonathan said, ‘Are we going? I want to get in the car.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I told him, ruffling up his sun-blond hair. ‘I just have to talk to that man outside for a couple of minutes. Then we’ll go straight away. Faster than a speeding bullet.’

  Jonathan squeaked the soles of his sneakers along the hallway in impatience. I warned, ‘Jonathan,’ and he looked up at me and gave me one of those sulky, silly, persuasive little smiles, just like Sara’s.

  ‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ I told him. ‘Go chain up Sheraton in his kennel, and make sure he’s got a bowl of water.’

  ‘’Kay,’ said Jonathan, and skidded off.

  Outside, on the asphalt driveway, the man called Grant had laid down a wide black velveteen rug, with black silk fringes. On it, he had already set out four dining-room chairs, two torchères, a circular Victorian bedside stand with a marble top, a pair of soapstone statues of fat naked ladies, and a lacquered Chinese-style Regency desk.

  I walked around the furniture and statues and gave them a cursory once-over.

  ‘Mr Grant?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ He was struggling to lift down a brass-bound military chest.

  ‘Mr Grant, I hate to have to say this, but if this stuff is any example of what you have to offer, then I suggest you pack it all up again and go. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is crap.’

  He set down the chest and walked towards me. He was panting slightly from his exertions, and there was a decorative tiara of sweat across his forehead.

  ‘These are simply make-weight items,’ he said. ‘You can have all these for nothing if you decide to buy the pièce-de-résistance.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have paid you anything for them anyway,’
I told him. ‘Come on, Mr Grant, this is junk-shop fodder. Those torchères don’t even match. And what happened to that fat lady’s left buttock? It looks like someone attacked it with a circular saw.’

  Mr Grant nodded. He didn’t seem to be denying how poor all these items were. But he didn’t seem to doubt that I was going to take them, either. He stood there with his hands on his hips, regaining his breath, while I stared at him as meaningfully as I could and waited for him to say something. Anything. In back of the house, I heard Sheraton barking as Jonathan chained him up in the yard.

  ‘Listen –’ I began, but Grant lifted a single finger to interrupt me.

  ‘When you see the pièce-de-résistance,’ he said, ‘you’ll change your mind.’

  ‘All right,’ I told him. ‘Bring it out.’

  ‘It’s heavy. Why don’t you step into the van with me and take a look?’

  ‘What the hell is it? A busted ottoman? Really, Mr Grant, I can’t –’

  He looked at me, hands raised, his face wrinkled up into one of those expressions that says now then, now then, don’t get excited. I looked at the van again, and for some reason I felt a sensation of prickly coldness. That kind of butterflies-in-the-palms-of-the-hands feeling you get before a tough examination in school. I hadn’t felt like this since the previous fall, when I’d attended an auction in Los Angeles of the porcelain collection that had once belonged to George Charovsky, the mass-murderer who used to live in La Jolla. Sara had coaxed me into bidding for a dancing shepherdess there, and I’d paid $875 for it. Three days later, I’d thrown it into the trashcan because I couldn’t stand to have it around.

  Let’s just say that I’m sensitive to all things rotten. Rotten movies. Rotten paintings. And, more than anything – rotten people. People who mistreat their children, never take their dogs for a decent walk, and yell at their wives for no reason.

  I’m not all that perfect myself. I drive badly. I snore when I’m asleep. I spank Jonathan when I shouldn’t. But at least I believe in living, and letting live. You don’t crap on my pumpkin-patch, and I won’t crap on yours.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mr Grant, and waved his hand towards the open doors of the van.

  I let out a tight, patient breath. ‘All right, Mr Grant. But let’s make sure that whatever it is you’ve got in there, it’s worth looking at. I’m already ten minutes late.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re usually so pressed for time,’ he smiled.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’m not. But it’s Sunday, and so far you haven’t impressed me at all.’

  ‘I didn’t intend to,’ smiled Mr Grant. ‘It’s all part of the sales pitch.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked him, as I took hold of the handrail, and hefted myself up into the back of the van.

  ‘Never more so,’ he replied. His voice was completely devoid of feeling. He held out his hand, and I helped him up. His fingers were as dry as corn husks.

  ‘It’s right in front,’ Mr Grant said, and led me through a narrow and awkward avenue of nineteenth-century chairbacks and battered Victorian table-legs, until we had penetrated the furthest reaches of this mobile collection of unwanted junk, and reached the very front of the van.

  In the corner, something was draped in a flour-sack. Whatever it was, it was tall and narrow, and it was made out of dark Cuban mahogany. I could just see one of its sides, burnished and carved, and the wood had a dark glow about it that you rarely saw in furniture made after 1860.

  ‘Can you take off the sacking?’ I asked Mr Grant.

  ‘Take it off yourself, if you want to take a look,’ he told me.

  I hesitated. ‘What is it?’ I asked him. One lens of his tiny sunglasses was shining blind and bright as a quarter. It was stifling in the back of his van, and I was sure I could smell flowers. Gardenias. Or maybe stock.

  ‘It’s a chair,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’

  I reached out hesitantly and grasped the coarse fibre of the flour-sack. I felt an extraordinary feeling, as if I were about to tear somebody’s clothes off. Then I dragged the sack away and dropped it on to the floor, and there it was. The chair from the Jessops’ place at Escondido.

  It was difficult to see very much in the darkness. Mr Grant had no torch, and no light rigged up; or else he wasn’t going to switch it on, for reasons of his own. But I could tell at once that this chair was the real McCoy, a genuine and very unusual antique. There was something about it. A stateliness. A sense of proportion. And whoever had carved the back and the arms must have been some kind of furniture-making genius. There were snakes, and apples, and wolves’ heads, and at the very crest of the chair, the face of a grinning creature that looked like a cross between a man and a sea-serpent. From what I could tell, the seat was upholstered in black leather.

  ‘That’s some chair,’ I told Mr Grant. ‘Can we see it in the daylight?’

  ‘Sure. If you help me move all this other stuff, and lift it out.’

  I turned back to the chair and peered at it closely. There was no question about it. It was carved mahogany, and very old. I’d never seen anything quite like it in my life.

  ‘Where did Jessop get it?’ I asked Mr Grant, as I helped him lift ten shield-back Chippendale chairs off the tail of the van.

  ‘The chair? In Britain, I believe. He used to travel a great deal when he was younger. You ought to see some of the Italian antiques he’s got out there at Escondido. He has two architectural landscapes by Guardi.’

  It took us almost a half-hour to clear the back of Mr Grant’s van. By the end of that time, my driveway looked like a garage sale, and Sara had come out twice to complain. The third time she appeared, we were almost through, and I asked her to wait and see the chair.

  ‘You’ve emptied all this stuff out for one chair?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sara,’ I told her, ‘it’s something special. Just wait and see what you think of it.’

  ‘I know what I think of our trip out to the animal kingdom,’ she said, holding up her wrist and pointing at her watch. ‘It’s almost a washout. Well – you can explain it to Jonathan. Tell him we didn’t go to the animal kingdom because of a chair. I’m not going to.’

  ‘Will you just be patient?’ I asked her. ‘We’re going to the animal kingdom, even if we have to go in the dark. But we have also to take a look at this chair. It’s special.’

  ‘God give me strength,’ said Sara. ‘I should have married a fish-market manager on the Embarcadero. At least he wouldn’t be spending half of his precious Sunday afternoon buying pollock.’

  Mr Grant paused, and stared at Sara carefully through his sunglasses. ‘Mrs Delatolla,’ he said, in that whispery voice. ‘I’m real sorry for all the inconvenience. You must believe me. But, it had to be today.’

  ‘A Sunday,’ retorted Sara.

  Strangely, Mr Grant nodded, his long mournful face going up and down like a rocking-horse that some child had just abandoned in an upstairs nursery.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A Sunday.’

  At last, we had cleared a way through the furniture in the back of Mr Grant’s van. I tried to lift the chair myself, while Grant was kicking aside some loose ropes. Incredibly, I could scarcely lift it off the floor of the van, and I had to let it go. It thumped back into position, and the man-serpent face on the crest of the chairback seemed to be grinning at me in contempt. Even for solid mahogany, it was a monstrous weight. I’d hefted a solid mahogany wardrobe on my own before now, but this chair was ridiculous. Anyone who wanted to take it home would need a fork-lift truck.

  ‘I can’t believe how heavy this is,’ I remarked to Mr Grant.

  He turned. He was silhouetted against the sunlight outside of the back of the van. Beyond him I could see Sara standing impatiently amongst the forest of bentwood hatstands, Welsh dressers, bronze statuettes, library steps, and commodes. Jonathan was sitting on the stone kerb of the driveway a little further off, throwing pieces of bark and looking glum.

  ‘I’ll lend you a hand,’ said
Mr Grant, and came forward to the front of the van to help me. We took one side of the chair each, and gradually shifted it along the floor to the very edge of the tailgate.

  ‘Not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger the second, are you?’ asked Sara, as I jumped down, sweating, from the back of the van.

  ‘Do you want to try lifting it?’ I asked her, annoyed. ‘The damn thing weighs a ton.’

  ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it,’ she said, lifting her nose into the air into an exaggerated but serious expression of disdain. I knew it was serious because I’d tried before now to tease her out of it. When Sara lifted her nose into the air, you were dead, brother, and that was all there was to it.

  ‘I hope you realise what all this is doing to my marriage,’ I grunted, as I helped Mr Grant tilt the chair out of the back of the van, and lower it gently to the ground. ‘I’m going to have to buy flowers, and perfume, and a bottle of Napa Valley Brut, and I’m not even sure the pharmacy’s still open.’

  ‘Don’t worry about your marriage,’ said Mr Grant. ‘This chair will change your life.’

  ‘Are you a marriage guidance counsellor, as well as a purveyor of second-hand sofas?’ Sara asked him, cuttingly.

  Mr Grant eased the back legs of the chair on to the ground, and then turned to Sara and took off his cap. ‘Mrs-Delatolla,’ he said, ‘I am nothing more than a clearer of houses.’

  ‘You make yourself sound like an exterminator,’ she said.

  ‘Sara,’ I snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake. Just leave it alone.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. But if we’re not ready to leave for the wild-animal park in five minutes, I’m going to take Jonathan to Sea World, and you can stay at home on your own and play with your musty old furniture until you catch woodworm in the brain.’

  ‘Hee, hee,’ laughed Mr Grant, unexpectedly. I gave him the coldest stare I could manage but he was still smiling. An unsettling smile – more like a photograph of a smile than a real one.