The Heirloom Page 9

  ‘You came to Rancho Santa Fe for one thing only, David,’ I told him. ‘You came for that chair.’

  ‘Well,’ said David, dropping his cigarette at last, and crushing it out, ‘I suppose I’ll have to come clean.’

  ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘Do you think we might have a drink?’

  ‘I guess so. What about the chair?’

  David made a face. ‘I don’t think it’s going to run off.’

  We went inside to the breakfast-room, where I poured us each a large glass of chilled pinot chardonnay. David sat on a stool at the breakfast counter, and tiredly ran his hand through his hair. The afternoon light shone through the white Venetian blinds on to the white tiles, and the room seemed like a diffused photograph.

  ‘I’ve known about the chair for some time,’ said David, his head lowered so that I couldn’t see his face. ‘I didn’t mean to deceive you in any way, or “pull” anything, as you put it. But you’ve already experienced for yourselves how – difficult the chair can be.’

  ‘You heard about it in England?’ I asked him.

  David nodded. ‘More than that. I saw it in England, about fifteen years ago, before Sam Jessop acquired it.’

  ‘Then Jessop did own it. I called up yesterday to check, but some woman there denied all knowledge of it.’

  ‘Oh, Jessop owned it, all right. He bought it from a banker friend of mine called Williams. I made an offer for it myself once.’

  ‘Williams said no? Or was he asking too much for it?’

  ‘He wasn’t in what you might call a position to sell.’

  ‘What position was he in? Standing on his head?’

  ‘You don’t understand. He couldn’t have sold the chair even if he’d wanted to. The chair can never actually be sold in the vulgar meaning of the word. I can buy it from you for ten thousand dollars – as indeed I am attempting to do – but it may be necessary for certain other obligations to be fulfilled before the chair decides that it actually belongs to me.’

  Sara said, ‘I don’t even know why you want it. It seems to do nothing but cause damage and frighten people.’

  “That’s because it has a fundamentally malevolent aura. It was made that way.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ David explained, ‘the story is that the chair was originally made in England in 1780 on the order of the Earl of Beckenham. Young Beckenham was a notorious gambler, who sometimes lost three or four thousand pounds in a night, and in those days that was money. He wanted a chair to sit in while he played which would give him “the luck of the devil”. That, incidentally, is how the expression was first coined.’

  ‘Go on,’ I told him, refilling his glass.

  ‘Beckenham went to all the famous cabinet-makers of the day, but all of them turned him down. His credit was shaky, and apart from that, none of them liked the idea of what he was proposing. By accident, however, he spent a night in Derbyshire, and there he came across a cabinet-maker and wood-carver called Thomas Unsworth, who was responsible for some of the most inspired furniture ever to come out of the eighteenth century.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ I nodded. ‘Wasn’t he crippled, or something?’

  ‘He liked to put it about that he was crippled… but in fact he had a growth on one side of his head which made him frightening for most people to look at, and smell rather offensive. His isolation from normal society and the company of women had made him a little peculiar, to say the least. He was said to believe in the black arts, and to eat cats, whenever he could catch them. He undertook to make Beckenham’s chair for him for six thousand pounds, and Beckenham agreed.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Sara. ‘Did Beckenham’s luck improve?’

  ‘So it was said,’ nodded David. ‘By the turn of the century, he was a wealthy man, and he was so lucky at the tables that most of the London gamblers refused to play with him. He died, though, in mysterious circumstances, at the age of fifty-four, and it was found that all the trees and flowers on his estate had died away. Where the chair went after that, I simply don’t know… there are no records of it having been sold before Beckenham’s death, and it doesn’t appear on the inventory of furniture at Beckenham Hall that was made the following week.’

  ‘But this malevolent aura you were talking about…’ said Sara.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ David replied. ‘The chair had a malevolent aura about it all right, and – as you’ve unhappily found out for yourselves – it still does. It has a malevolent aura in just the same way that the rood-arch of a church has an aura of sanctity. Because in just the same way, this chair is a gateway.’

  ‘A gateway?’ frowned Sara.

  ‘That’s right. It exists not only in the real world as you know it and I know it… but in an unreal world as well. And because of that, it somehow forms a nexus through which certain things… certain influences… can freely pass.’

  ‘Did this banker friend of yours ever tell you where he got it from? This Williams?’

  David shook his head. ‘I asked him once, but he was very reluctant to talk about it. That wasn’t unusual for him – he didn’t like to talk about his personal life at all. But he once mentioned that it could only be bought and sold by what he called a runic transaction, whatever that meant. He never explained it to me, and he never sold me the chair.’

  ‘Was he successful? I mean, was he rich?’

  ‘Who, Williams? My God, yes. He was one of the richest men I ever knew. He had two Gainsboroughs and a Van Gogh. And you ought to have seen his country house, in Surrey. He owned the landscape as far as you could see.’

  ‘So he had the luck of the devil, too.’

  David shrugged. ‘You could say that, yes.’

  I stood up, and walked across to the window. ‘So did old man Jessop. Right up until five or six years ago, Jessop’s were nothing more than a struggling company who built aeroplane components for Boeing and Douglas and McDonnell. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed. They landed a contract for cruise missile systems, and all kinds of subsidiary stuff. Old man Jessop became a millionaire overnight.’

  ‘I’ve passed his house in Escondido,’ said David. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’

  I swallowed wine. ‘Hideous taste, but quite something.’

  There was a pause, and then David said, ‘I really don’t know anything more.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered our original question.’

  ‘Which was…?’

  ‘Which was why do you want the chair at all? The Earl of Beckenham may have made his fortune with it, and your friend Williams may have used it to get rich. So might Jessop, apparently. But look what it’s done to us.’

  David looked away. His aquiline profile was silhouetted by the sunlight flooding through the blinds. ‘Perhaps you didn’t want what it had to offer,’ he said, cryptically.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know. The truth is that I’m not acquiring the chair for myself I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but I’m acquiring it on behalf of a client. He’s an influential man, and I do a great deal of business with him, so obviously I’m not going to betray his confidence. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even ask him myself what he wanted the chair for. As long as I can deliver it to him intact, that’s all I’m concerned about.’

  There was a sudden buzz at the back doorbell. I went to answer it, and it was Dr Isaacs, wearing a limp fishing-hat pinned with flies and a camouflage jacket. His plump little feet were encased in monkish sandals, and the legs of his pants were still wet from the river. He was panting hard.

  ‘I came as fast as I could,’ he said. ‘They told me it was an emergency.’

  I took his arm and led him around to the front of the house. ‘I’m afraid Sheraton’s already dead, Dr Isaacs. It was like some kind of rabies. You know, convulsions, foaming at the mouth.’

  I lifted the plaid travelling-blanket. Dr Isaacs was fumbling to find his spectacles
, but when he had carefully perched them on to his nose, and focused on Sheraton’s remains, his jaw dropped as if he were about to sing the first chorus of a barbershop quartet.

  ‘Mr Delatolla,’ he breathed.

  I turned. I’d been looking away, because right then there were few sights I was less inclined to see than the tom-up body of the dog I had raised, loved, and cared for. But what I did see was something else altogether – something that gripped my throat with nausea, and made me toss away the travelling-blanket as if it were on fire.

  Sprawled out on the asphalt were grey translucent lumps of glistening tissue that looked like intestines and membranes and heaps of body fat. No dog, just guts. And what was even more sickening was that it was all thick with blowflies, which rose up when I threw away the blanket and then settled again.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Dr Isaacs, in a shocked voice. ‘Mr Delatolla, what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. I started to retch, but I managed to hold it back. ‘You’ll just have to forgive me, that’s all.’

  ‘Should I call the police or something?’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Well, if someone’s done this to your dog…’

  ‘Nobody did it to my dog, Dr Isaacs. It was an accident.’

  ‘But how––?’

  I took his hand. I was sweating and shaking as if I had pneumonia, and Dr Isaacs was staring at me with an expression of alarm and sympathy, like trying to take care of Hamlet.

  ‘You’ll just have to forgive me,’ I repeated. ‘Please. It’s been a bad day.’

  Dr Isaacs turned around again and balefully regarded the grey remains on the driveway.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to make a report about this,’ he said. ‘That poor dog’s been annihilated.’

  ‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘You make a report. Tell the ASPCA that one of your clients who normally treated his golden Labrador as if it were a loyal, dignified, and trusted friend, suddenly and inexplicably went out of his head and reduced the animal to a grey pulp. Tell them that. And don’t expect me to bring anything around to your clinic again. Not even a turtle.’

  Dr Isaacs began to retreat down the driveway, where his pale blue Le Baron was parked.

  ‘I can’t pretend it never happened,’ he called, from a safe distance. I think he believed I might chase after him and hit him, and for a dizzy moment I think I might have done. I stood and watched him drive away, his tyres skittering on the road, and it was only when he was gone that I looked again at the chair, standing tall and dark beside David’s Rolls-Royce, a grotesque memorial to my dead Sheraton. I could almost feel the influence of that chair as if it were a sonic vibration in the air, the same way that you can feel the humming power of a high-voltage electricity cable. It affected everything around it – the temperature, the trees, the grass, and the flowers. It even affected my temper. And there were no squirrels around today like there usually were, foraging for oranges.

  I performed, by myself, one simple and grisly task. I went to the garage for a shovel, and scraped up what was left of my dog. Then I buried the remains under a yucca in the back yard. The soil clung to the soft intestines, and I filled the hole in with the quick, jerky movements of fright and disgust.

  Back in the breakfast room, Sara said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘With Dr Isaacs? He thought I’d done it.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about the chair?’ asked David, putting down his glass of wine.

  ‘You think I’d tell him that? He’s quite convinced I’m crazy already. He says he’s going to have to report me to the ASPCA.’

  Sara said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll call Ruth in the morning and straighten it out.’

  I poured myself another glass of wine. I was getting slightly drunk, particularly after all that champagne we’d finished off at The Inn, but then I reckoned I deserved to.

  ‘Tell me, David,’ I said. ‘What do you think your client’s going to do with that terrible chair?’

  David turned the stem of his wineglass around and around between his fingers. ‘I really don’t know. My instructions are simply to get hold of it.’

  ‘The question is…’ I asked him, ‘what was Henry Grant doing with it? I mean… if it couldn’t be sold in the ordinary way… only by “runic transaction”… what was he doing with it? And why did he bring it around to me? And, most of all, why did it take such a liking to me and my house that it wouldn’t leave?’

  ‘I wish I knew what to say,’ said David, with an uncomfortable little smile.

  I leaned forward. ‘I think you know what to say but you just aren’t saying it. After all, your knowledge of what this chair’s all about does seem to be conveniently patchy. A whole lot of rich historical detail which could be fiction or could be fact. But not very much in the way of helpful, up-to-date, meaningful input.’

  ‘I’m sorry it appears that way,’ said David. ‘I assure you that I’ve been as straightforward as my professional code allows me to be. Perhaps it’s really rather better if I leave.’

  ‘Taking the chair with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, there’s no way. Because I’m going to go out there now, and I’m going to chop that chair up into firewood.’

  David went pale. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t advise it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, huh? So what would you advise? Maybe you’d advise me to sell you the chair so that in less than an hour it can come back to my library like some kind of goddamned hellish homing pigeon? Is that it? Or maybe you’d advise me to give it to you for nothing, just so that I can get the damned thing out of my life? For all I know there’s nothing wrong with the chair at all, and you’ve been doping my drinks so that I’ve missed out on eight hours of sleep, and spraying my garden with defoliant, and poisoning my dog, and trying to drive me and my family crazy.’

  ‘Ricky –’ interrupted Sara. ‘Ricky, you know that none of that’s true.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t!’ I shouted. ‘All I know is that I’ve had two unwelcome visitors in the last twenty-four hours, and both of them have known more about that chair than I have! Well, maybe David here and Henry Grant don’t mind using me as a go-between, but I object. And just to show you how much I object, I’m going to break that chair into pieces!’

  David pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Ricky, please,’ he begged me. ‘I know how you feel. I know you’re angry. But if you try to damage that chair you’ll regret it.’

  ‘I’m not going to damage it, buddy. I’m going to smash it to smithereens.’

  David reached into his back pants pocket and took out a Security Pacific cheque book. He scribbled out a cheque for ten thousand dollars and held it out to me.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This completes the sale legally. You take the money, I’ll take the chair, and we’ll leave it like that. Okay?’

  I wouldn’t even raise my hand. David laid the cheque on the table, and pushed it over to me with his finger. I ignored it.

  Sara said, ‘Ricky, please. This might be the right way of getting rid of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said tersely. ‘It might be. On the other hand, it’s not my way of getting rid of it. And right now, just for a change, I feel like controlling my own destiny. That’s if Mr Sears here doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Ricky!’ shouted David. But I had already pulled open the back door, and was storming along to the garage for my axe. Whatever spells that chair could work, whatever hallucinations were concealed in its seat, whatever devilish bugs and beetles lived in it, I was going to take it apart at the joints. As I crossed the driveway, I turned to that eerily smiling man-serpent’s face and I thought, right, you just wait, in one minute flat I’m going to hit you smack in the nose with a single-bit Wisconsin-pattern village-forged axe, and then we’ll see who’s grinning.

  I took the long-handled axe down from its rack on the wall, and swung it around as I stalked back towards the chair. I don�
��t think I’ve ever been as mad at anything in my whole life, either before or since, and they could have told me the house was burning down, and I would have ignored it. I had only one compelling thought in my mind: I’m going to smash that chair.

  I positioned myself close, legs apart, and whistled that axe around my head. The chair stood silent and tall and dark, the doomed damned figures still tumbling on their never-ending journey down to Sub-Hell, the vipers still rising venomously from the man-serpent’s scalp, the pythons twisting their way around the arms.

  Don’t think I wasn’t conscious that within that black-leather seat some kind of huge woodlouse was probably nestling – and don’t think that it didn’t frighten me, because it did. But I was shaking with rage at what that chair had done to me and my family, and the Devil himself could have been inside of that chair and I still wouldn’t have held back.

  I took a hefty, two-handed swing at the man-serpent’s head. The axe chipped it smartly in the forehead, and cleaved its cheek. Now we’ll see who’s controlling things around here, I thought to myself, in a turmoil of temper. Now we’ll see who’s damned to destruction.

  The screaming was so high-pitched that at first I couldn’t make out what it was. I was leaning back with my axe for a second blow across the chair’s cresting-rail when I suddenly heard Sara shouting, ‘Jonathan! Jonathan!’ and David burst out through the screen door and yelled at me hoarsely and urgently, ‘Stop! For the love of God, stop!’

  I went as cold as winter. I let the axe slide from my hands, and topple sideways on to the asphalt. Jonathan. So that was it. And I looked at that mahogany face on the chair and it was gloating at me.

  ‘You see,’ it whispered, somewhere inside of my head.

  Then I was running towards the house. Hurling open the door, and taking the stairs two and three at a time. I ran down the corridor to Jonathan’s bedroom, and stopped in horror.

  Jonathan, my son, was lying on his bed with his head smothered in blood. His pillow was already soaked crimson, and there were queries and periods and exclamation-points of blood all the way up the wallpaper. There was a deep, savage cut all the way down his left cheek, and through the blood that welled out of it I could see the whiteness of his cheekbone. The cut had missed his left eye by less than a quarter of an inch.