The Heirloom Read online

  ‘This is a lovely place you have here,’ remarked David Sears. ‘I hear that property comes pretty pricey in Rancho Santa Fe.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ I told him. ‘You can pick up a two-roomed shack for less than a quarter of a million.’

  ‘Doesn’t the peace and the quiet ever get on your nerves?’ David Sears asked Sara.

  Sara looked at me. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Ask me tomorrow, when I’ve had some sleep.’

  ‘I like to travel myself,’ said David. ‘One month I’m in London – then I’m here in California. Next month I’m off to Italy. Of course, I don’t have a family to take care of. Or, rather, I don’t now.’

  ‘Divorced?’ asked Sara.

  ‘No,’ said David, with a tight smile. ‘Margaret died in a fire. Very tragic business, really. More than five years ago.’

  ‘No children?’ Sara asked him, sympathetically.

  ‘Er, no. No children.’

  The rest of the meal finished rather lamely. Then, while our maid Hortensia cleared away the dishes, Sara and Jonathan both went upstairs to rest. David Sears and I smoked small Havana cigars by the pool, and finished the last of the wine, and then I suggested he look over the furniture that Henry Grant had left with us the previous afternoon. Miguel had driven up from the store during lunch in his dilapidated Hiace pick-up and shifted it all off the driveway and into the garage.

  I led David around the house and across to the garage. I unlocked the padlock, and threw back the doors. David strolled amiably inside, still puffing at the end of his cigar. He bent over a small walnut bureau, and tugged open its drawers. He tapped the veneered top of a bedside table. Then he peered at the long-case clock, opening up the front and closely examining the face.

  ‘It’s not an English clock,’ he said, after a while. ‘It looks as if it might be Canadian. There was a clockmaker in Quebec called DuPlein who made quite pretty clocks in the 1830s. They weren’t masterpieces, but they were sound; and this could be one of them.’

  ‘I’ll throw it in with the cabinet,’ I said, watching him.

  ‘You mean gratis?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well…that certainly gives me more food for thought.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘You don’t have to make your mind up right away. But I do have to warn you that one of my wealthier local ladies has been making eyes at that cabinet for a few weeks now, and she’s one of those old ladies who likes to pounce suddenly – just when she feels in the mood. Out comes the cheque-book, and away goes the furniture.’

  David looked at me, and nodded. ‘I understand. But never fear. I won’t keep you waiting very long.’

  ‘Is there anything else here which interests you?’ I asked him.

  He gave the contents of the garage a cursory glance. ‘Nothing that strikes me as first-class. What was all this – a house-clearance job?’

  ‘That’s right. One of our North San Diego luminaries is remodelling his home.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything else?’

  I shook my head. ‘What you see is what there was.’

  ‘Nothing…unusual?’

  The way he said that, standing there with his cigar in his mouth, his hands on his hips, struck me for some reason as peculiarly alarming. I thought to myself, he can’t know about old man Jessop’s chair. Not unless he’s already met Henry Grant – or visited the Jessops. Yet why should I be feeling unsettled about it? According to Henry Grant’s attorney, the chair was mine to dispose of however I wanted to; and if something’s yours, even if it’s a Rembrandt, there’s no law in the world which says you can’t flush it down the toilet if you want to.

  David Sears crushed his cigar butt out under his foot. Handmade shoes, in light tan. Then he raised his eyes, and said, ‘Well, I suppose in that case I’d better be off.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like some coffee? Some Tab?’

  ‘No, thank you, really. I’ve imposed on you too much already. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow and let you know about the cabinet and the clock. I’m staying at Presidio Place with some friends of mine.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘If you really have to rush off.’

  He tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘There’s one thing,’ he said. ‘You did promise to show me your Copley. Would you mind awfully if we went in and took a look?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, and led him into the house through the front door.

  We were halfway along the corridor when the telephone in the kitchen began to ring. Hortensia was outside, clearing away the lunch plates, so I told David Sears to go right ahead into the living-room, and hooked the phone off the wall.

  ‘Oh, Ricky?’ asked a woman’s voice. ‘Is Sara there? It’s Helen Fallbrook.’ Oh, God, I thought. Helen ‘The Babbling’ Fallbrook. That’s all I need.

  ‘Hi, Helen, how are you? I’m afraid Sara’s resting right now. She had a bad night. Can I take a message?’

  ‘It’s only about Wednesday’s bridge night. I’ll call her tomorrow, shall I?’

  ‘Great idea,’ I said, and briskly hung up.

  Helen Fallbrook would undoubtedly tell Sara tomorrow that I had been ‘extraordi-narily abrupt’, but right now I couldn’t face one of her gushing monologues about how wonderfully she had redecorated her breakfast parlour, ‘in turquoise, of all the daring colours, my dear’.

  I found David Sears in the living-room, standing admiringly in front of my Copley.

  ‘This is very fine,’ he remarked. ‘If I didn’t think that you wouldn’t part with it for any price I could possibly name, I’d name you a price for it.’

  ‘You’re right, I’m afraid,’ I told him. ‘This is one work of art that’s staying right where it is.’

  David nodded a couple of times. ‘How about the chair?’ he asked me.

  ‘Chair? What chair?’

  He looked at me with a face that seemed to have been washed in white wine vinegar – tight-lipped, questioning, sour.

  ‘You don’t have two chairs as fine as that, do you?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I retorted. ‘The only antique chairs in the house are the dining-room chairs, and they’re not very good quality shieldbacks.’

  ‘Are you putting me on?’ said David. ‘I mean, I really don’t mind if you don’t want to sell it...’

  ‘What chair?’ I demanded.

  David raised his arm and pointed towards the library. ‘The chair I saw standing in the library when I walked past. The big mahogany armchair, with all the carvings on it.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I whispered.

  ‘The big mahogany armchair with all the –’

  I turned my back on him in mid-sentence and walked towards the library door as if I was under the influence of sodium pentathol. Blurry, but single-minded. I pushed the library door wide and stood there staring at it and I couldn’t help shaking with sheer dread.

  ‘It’s a magnificent piece of work,’ said David, right behind me.

  ‘You really want it?’ I asked him hoarsely. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The man-serpent appeared to be laughing now, his jaws wide open in demonic amusement. His eyes were alight with terrible glee.

  ‘Want it? I’d give you twenty-five thousand for it. It’s a masterpiece.’

  I finally managed to turn and look at him. ‘I’ll take ten. Do you have a truck?’

  ‘Well, my dear chap, I can’t take it with me now…’

  ‘Take it now or don’t take it at all,’

  ‘Well, that’s a bit abrupt, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s my day for being abrupt.’

  ‘I thought you were celebrating.’

  I closed my eyes tiredly. ‘I was,’ I told him. ‘Now, can you take the chair away or can’t you?’

  ‘I can arrange it if you absolutely insist.’

  ‘I do. I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right, then. If you can help me lug it outside, I’ll stow it in the back of the
Rolls.’

  ‘You lug it outside. I’m not touching it.’

  David raised his eyebrows. ‘I must say you’re rather prickly,’ he told me. ‘Most of your colleagues in Southern California are normally so laid-back… so benign.’

  I took in a sharp breath. ‘Just – get rid of the chair, will you?’

  ‘Very well.’

  I stood and watched him as he half-tilted, half-dragged the chair out of the library and along the corridor. By the time he had reached the kitchen, he was trembling with effort, and he had to stop to take off his smart white coat. He folded it fastidiously and laid it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Hortensia, who was stacking the dishwasher, took one look at David and the chair and crossed herself.

  At last, David had succeeded in carrying the chair out on to the driveway, and pulling it behind him until he reached his Rolls-Royce.

  ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to lift it into the car by myself, old boy,’ he called out.

  ‘You’ll just have to,’ I said. ‘I’m not touching it, and that’s my last word.’

  David took out a handkerchief and mopped carefully at his forehead. Then he executed an athletic knees-bend, what the Army physical training instructors call a burpee, and grasped the frame of the chair in both hands.

  It was at that moment that, from the back of the house, we heard an agonised shriek of terror and pain – a cry that was so desperate and vocal and prolonged that it could almost have come from the throat of a human being.

  But I knew it wasn’t a human being. It was Sheraton.

  4

  Consumings

  The dog came barrelling around the side of the house before I’d run even two or three paces. I’d never seen a dog run that way before and I hope I never have to again. His eyes were maddened and his mouth was billowing with frothy blood and he was jerking and convulsing and rolling over.

  ‘Sheraton!’ I yelled, and tried to catch him as he ran past me. But he was twisting and turning too violently, and as he came to the downward grade in the driveway he tumbled sideways and collapsed.

  I started towards him but David raised his hand and shouted, ‘Stay away!’

  ‘He’s sick!’ I protested. ‘The dog’s out of his mind with agony!’

  ‘That’s why you have to stay away!’ David insisted. ‘It could be rabies!’

  I ventured a little closer. Sheraton was lying on his side now, gasping and foaming. I guessed David was right. It could be rabies, from a squirrel bite, maybe; or a nip from a bat. But Sheraton raised his head and stared at me with an expression of such tortured desperation that it was all I could do to stay where I was.

  I heard the screen door bang behind me. It was Sara, disturbed by the noise.

  ‘Ricky!’ she called. ‘Ricky – what’s wrong?’

  ‘Keep back,’ I warned her. ‘Call Dr Isaacs, urgent. Tell him that Sherry looks like he’s gotten rabies.’

  ‘Rabies?’

  ‘He’s convulsing, and foaming at the mouth. Now, will you please hurry?’

  The screen door banged again as Sara went back inside. I glanced at David for reassurance but all he could do was shrug.

  Sheraton was silent for a few minutes, but then he began to whimper, soft and low, as if he didn’t have the strength to complain any more loudly. A wet stain spread across the driveway and I realised that he’d urinated.

  ‘You ever seen a dog like this before?’ I asked David.

  ‘I don’t know. I saw a dog that was knocked down by a car once. But it didn’t froth the way yours is frothing.’

  Sara came to the door and said, ‘Dr Isaacs is coming as fast as he can. He shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes.’

  ‘He’s coming by mule or something?’ I snapped.

  Sara came out and stood beside me, taking my arm. ‘Poor Sheraton. He looks just awful. You don’t think we’ll have to have him–?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s impossible to tell. It could be anything. Maybe he ate some rat poison. I don’t know.’

  Slowly, Sheraton’s belly began to convulse, in deep, shuddering ripples. He rolled on to his back with his legs held weakly in the air, but in a horrifying way the convulsions in his abdomen seemed to gain in strength. Soon, his head was being flopped this way and that by the muscular force in his body, and his legs were slapping uselessly against the asphalt.

  It looked as if there were actually something inside of him, some other creature with far greater strength, and that it was wriggling and stretching itself and trying to get out.

  Sara was clutching my arm so tightly that it hurt, but I was almost glad of the pain. It was my only anchor on reality. Neither of us spoke as the bulging and contracting in poor Sheraton’s belly grew to a furious shaking, like some enraged madman trying to shake coins out of a fur coat, and the dog’s tongue suddenly slid out of the side of his mouth and hung across his upper jaw.

  ‘The chair,’ whispered Sara suddenly. ‘You didn’t tell me the chair was back.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I told her.

  ‘But it’s back!’

  Sheraton screamed. It was the most hideous sound I ever heard in my life – a dog screaming for mercy. And then his bowels were stretched inexorably open, wider and wider, and a black insect head emerged, slick with intestinal mucus, like a giant woodlouse.

  ‘Oh, Jesus God,’ I said, and my stomach went over. I was so frightened that I couldn’t even run away.

  With a ghastly tugging motion, the insect gave birth to itself out of Sheraton’s bowels, and for one moment of total dread it stood on the driveway motionless, while its black jointed back dried off. Then, with a scuttling rush that made all of us jump back in terror, it ran towards the mahogany chair, slithered up on to the seat, and disappeared down the crack between the back and the black-leather cushion. I had one last glimpse of its earwig-like tail as it disappeared.

  I helped Sara across to the steps, and we both sat down. David came over and leaned against the rail of the verandah, his face grey.

  ‘Cigarette?’ he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  He took out a lighter and clicked it three or four times before it worked. Then he unsteadily lit a cigarette and stood there smoking in nervous silence. None of us wanted to look at the chair, but none of us could take our eyes off it.

  Sara, without making any sound at all, began to cry.

  ‘You know what we have to do now,’ I said to David, as I stroked Sara’s hair.

  David looked at me expressionlessly.

  ‘We have to chop that damned chair up, set fire to it, and burn it to ashes,’ I told him. ‘Then we have to spread the ashes as far apart as we can. We have to destroy that chair, and I mean totally.’

  ‘This isn’t the first – incident – then?’ asked David. ‘I heard your wife say that the chair was back.’

  ‘Look around you,’ I said, pointing to the leafless trees and the bare hedgerows. ‘We were given that chair yesterday afternoon and since then we’ve been through hell. But never again, I promise you.’

  ‘You tried to get rid of it?’

  ‘That’s where I was earlier this morning, throwing it into the river at Lake Hodges.’

  ‘And it came back by itself, undamaged?’

  I said softly, ‘Yes. It came back by itself.’

  David stared at the chair for a long time. Then he said, ‘What makes you think you’ll be able to get rid of it by chopping it up and burning it? Won’t the same thing happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m willing to give it a try. That chair is absolutely evil and absolutely powerful. It’s hell on four wooden legs. I don’t know why it’s visited itself on me and my family. I don’t know what its purpose is, or whether it even has one. I don’t think I care to know. I just want it destroyed. Utterly, so that it can’t ever come back.’

  Over on the driveway, Sheraton lay dead, his body bloody and ripped. David left the verandah, circled cautiously around the chair,
and went to the trunk of his Rolls-Royce. He unlocked it, took out a plaid travelling-rug, and tossed it over Sheraton’s remains.

  Hortensia came to the door. ‘Everything okay?’ she asked, staring at us as if we were a party of picnicking lunatics.

  ‘Everything’s fine, Hortensia, thank you,’ I told her. ‘Never been better.’

  David came back across the driveway, his cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘let me try to take the chair away from here. Let me just pack it into my car, and drive off, and put as many miles between you and this chair as I possibly can.’

  ‘You’re not saying you still want it?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I still want it?’ asked David. His voice was noticeably sharp.

  ‘With that oversized bug hiding in the upholstery?’

  David glanced back towards the chair. ‘I’m not so sure that bug was real.’

  ‘It wasn’t real, huh? And I suppose what happened to my dog wasn’t real? What are you trying to pull here?’

  ‘I’m not trying to “pull” anything,’ said David, in a very English tone. ‘I’m just saying that what you perceive with your eyes isn’t always what’s really there. I know – something about the occult – and one of the first things you have to remember when you’re dealing with occult forces is that they manifest themselves in all kinds of extraordinary ways.’

  I bit at my thumbnail. ‘You didn’t really come here for the cabinet, then?’ I asked him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, come on, David. I’m not stupid. And you’re not very good at disguising your real interests. If you’d wanted that japanned cabinet, you’d have written me a cheque on the spot. It’s perfect, and you know it, and it’s a steal at ninety-three grand. I could drive it up to LA tomorrow and offload it for a hundred and ten, maybe more.’

  David said nothing. His cigarette burned away between his fingers. Sara, her eyes still glistening with tears, raised her head in curiosity.