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Richer Dust part 1
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30th
November 04 |
Part 1 by Ed Berridge
 Jacob
Houdan shuffled his way towards the hotel bar, completely failing to notice the
beautiful red glow of the sunset that streaked through long windows, bathing the
thronging guests clustered on the white marble flooring in its blood-red hued
cloak. He valiantly tried to ignore the people he barged past, head downturned,
crunching feet against feet, elbows in ribs and creating screams of surprise and
howls of protest as he wound his eccentric way to the bar area, set firmly against
the far wall.
Young people get
their just desserts when they get old, Jacob thought. For all their sex, fashion
and idiotic, thoughtless behaviour, they all have to get old and deal with incontinence,
senility and the growing realisation that the world has absolutely no place for
them anymore. He wriggled himself up to perch on a bar stool, himself already
a man of increased years at sixty-eight years old. He was not given to humour
at the best of times, and today was certainly not. He felt cold and fluish and
he could already feel a migraine setting up camp in the corner of his right temple.
Why had he agreed to come to this godforsaken place, with its strange creaking
and groaning in the night when he desperately needed sleep and where his memory
seemed even dimmer than usual? He couldn’t even remember which year it was
sometimes, let alone the day.
“Drink, sir?”
the waiter loomed over Jacob like some over-friendly shark, all teeth and thick-smelling
hair lacquer, oozing false charm before he closed in for the kill.
“Get me a
double brandy, a black coffee, and a medium sized bowl of assorted nuts, damn
your cunning!” Jacob retorted sharply, before turning his back to the bartender.
He surveyed the crowd that stretched out from the bar, across the ballroom to
the wooden stage at the far reaches of his myopic vision. Some faces he recognised;
Kaswell sat at the far end of the bar, his face painted in clownish innocence
as he performed hand-magic for the youngsters gathered obligingly around him;
Countess Marcia Karnstein sat icy and aloof from the proceedings at a table next
to her latest ‘beau’, the lederhosen-clad Aryan wet dream who seemed
perpetually attached to her side, like some kind of parasitic limpet eel; old
William Renfield was evidently still alive, impressing the impressionable young
ladies with his senile doddering on the dance floor; Saxton and Wells could be
seen be seen skulking intently in the far corner by the potted ferns, probably
arguing about the size of their allocated room once again. There were a few other
faces that he half recognised, but all were quickly swallowed into the billowing
throng that composed his fellow guests.
The waiter returned
with Jacob’s order, and then moved swiftly on to the next customer. Jacob
poured the brandy into the coffee and stirred the mixture with a spoon, ignoring
both the milk and sugar provided. He never trusted a barman to pour the correct
amounts into a pre-mixed concoction if left to his own devices, and preferred
to gather the constituent parts himself. Standards,
he thought, have indeed fallen. He sipped at the harsh tasting mixture, the only
thing he found could now stimulate his near-dormant taste buds.
Jacob popped a
cashew nut into his mouth, and rolled it round apathetically with his tongue.
He still felt ill-at ease. Of course, he always hated such social events, especially
ones that couldn’t decide whether they were business or not. And he hated
being stuck around so many of the ‘paranormal community’, who seemed
these days to be populated almost exclusively by rich, vacuous young thrill-seekers
with too much money and a desire to use occultism as an excuse for their licentious
behaviour. There were too few old faces present: too many of Jacob’s colleagues
had already passed on to explore the great unknown, or had retired to comfortable
obscurity.
But this feeling
was something else, something greater. There was something about the hotel.
He hadn’t
noticed it when he had first arrived, which he put down to his senses being dulled
by old age and wine. But the longer he stayed, the more aware became of something
slowly creeping in the backdoor of his mind, a growing sense of dread, of anticipation
of… what, he didn’t know. He felt as though he were in someway connected
to something... some other kind of intelligence.
He noticed it most
when he was on the plane between sleep and waking, that magical, timeless plane
of existence when, still conscious, the normal laws and set patterns of thought
were bent out of shape as subconscious dreams began to swamp the mind. At these
times, when Jacob lay in bed, limbs frozen in sleepy paralysis, it almost seemed
as if he could hear voices. Or at least one voice in particular, with the sound
of a multitude of whispers behind it, moaning in the blackness. He could never
make out what was being said, however, being dull and muted, almost as if he were
hearing it from underwater.
At these times,
he felt as if he could imagine the voices as part of a vast dark web, something
he could see with more than sight, which stretched out above him, blotting out
any sense of light in the depth of its blackness. It almost felt as if he were
being suffocated, a heavy weight on his chest as though something was squatting
on his chest smothering his face with a pillow, squeezing the life out of him.
The voices would grow in intensity with his discomfort, the pitch almost raised
to an electronic squeal inside his head, abattoir sounds in his mind. Just as
he would think that he could stand no more, Jacob realised that he could make
out a word in this fog of sound: a name. His name.
Jacob would wake
with a start, lungs gasping for air. The room would be black and silent, perhaps
a chink of moonlight cutting into the room between the drawn curtains. He would
turn on the lamp standing on his bedside table, fumbling for his glasses. He always
cautiously surveyed the room, half-expecting to see some sign of a malign presence,
but the room continued to appear resolutely normal and room-like, much to Jacob’s
exasperation, and secret relief. Eventually he took to leaving the light on at
night, something he had not done since he been twelve years old when he lived
with his father next to a mortuary in Nice. Even so, his sleep pattern was now
corrupted, for the fear of the nightly event reoccurring was almost as bad as
the event itself, and Jacob only slept in short fitful bursts from then on. Perhaps
he was going insane, he considered, but the longer he remained in this godforsaken
bloody place, the more certain he was that he would loose his mind.
There again, he
recollected, Inga, his Samoan nurse and housemaid, had claimed that he had said
the exact same thing about every single place that they had been in the last eighteen
years.
Jacob was drawn
out of his reverie as the band, sat in the orchestra pit at the foot of the stage,
broke into a loud portentous rum-pum-pumming to indicate the beginning of the
night’s events. The crowd gathered towards the stage, hushed expectation
flashed on their greedy, opulent faces. The red velvet curtain at the front of
the stage was pushed aside as a small, middle-aged, willowy man dressed in a dinner
jacket, small round glasses and a thin, upturned, waxed moustache approached the
microphone. The sound of the band died down as the man cleared his throat to speak.
“Good evening, ladies
and gentlemen, and welcome to the sixty-third annual general meeting of the Society
for the Study of the Occult Sciences.”
There was a round of applause,
followed by some loud whooping by the younger and less evolved members of the
crowd.
“And, although it’s
not so long since our last official meeting at the Eddie Whyteman Memorial Lecture
and Barn Dance, it’s pleasing to note how our numbers are still swelling.”
Good God! Jacob
thought. The man’s supposed to be delivering an opening address, not selling
us a used mopad! How much longer is this ingrate planning to prattle on for?
“As you
should all know, although maybe some of you don’t...” at this the
man with the microphone flashed an off-white grin of insincerity, and a titter
ran through the audience.
“...my name
is Humphrey Tatlock” the man with the microphone continued. “And I
am President of the Society. Well, we’ve got a whole host of entertainments
planned for you ladies and gentlemen over the next two days and I believe Serge
has been passing out a list of event times at the foyer?” He gestured out
into the audience. A spotlight arched out, hitting a thick-set man with long bleached
blonde hair in a ‘Scuba or Die’ t-shirt, who waved a stack of leaflets
in his hand, a happily vacant expression on his face.
“So, without
further ado, let me bring on our guest of honour, who generously flew from Monte
Carlo, replacing the Grace Brothers at the eleventh hour, to open the night’s
festivities.
“Ladies
and gentlemen, may I present to you, fresh from the Riviera, perhaps the world’s
foremost investigator of the supernatural, the otherworldly, and the otherwise
inexplicably bizarre:
“Devlin Waugh!”
To be continued...
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