The Burning Altar Read online

  Until he saw what Grendel had done to her.

  The child had the large room at the top of the house; there was an old-fashioned sash window with a padded window seat under it and a view of the park. The nurse liked to sit on it because the light of the low night-bulb fell directly across it, and she could see to read to Grendel from one of the brightly illustrated books that he liked: Winnie-the-Pooh and Rupert Bear and Thomas the Tank Engine.

  He heard the single terrible scream and then the abrupt silence that had followed it, and he had frowned, unsure whether the sound had actually come from inside the house at all. Someone outside? The screech of machinery even? Better go up to make sure nothing’s wrong.

  She was seated on the window seat, just as she so often was, and for a moment Lewis stood in the doorway, not understanding, because there was something wrong about all this, there was something dreadfully wrong. Was she wearing a mask over the lower part of her face? A new game? If so, it was rather a frightening game; it would terrify a child. The lower half of her mouth was wet and glossy as if it were covered with blood.

  A nose bleed. A fall where she had cut her face? But there was a very great deal of blood; it had spattered her chest and front and there were red finger-streaks on the window pane and the curtains, as if she might have clawed at them in a struggle.

  She stumbled towards him, her hands held out in entreaty, and there was a moment when he still did not understand, when his mind was still running on conventional lines: ice from the fridge for the bleeding, brandy for shock, a phone call to the nearest GP, or even a rapid drive to the casualty department of the local hospital . . .

  It was only when she fell at his feet that he saw with horror the white glint of bone and teeth through the blood. Her mouth and part of her face had been torn away. Bitten away. Something that was still in the room, seated in a corner, its eyes innocent but its lips smeary and crimson, had bitten away her face. Something that wore Grendel’s skin and had Grendel’s eyes and mouth. Something that still cradled a fragment of bloodied flesh in its hands, and squealed like a scalded cat when Lewis tried to take it from him . . .

  A nightmare. I have fathered a monster.

  But within the surge of appalled knowledge had been that other emotion: protect Grendel. Shield him from what he cannot help. The emotion had been so strong that it had almost choked him but he had thought: if he can be kept away from the world – and kept comfortably – I’ll do it! No pitiful communal asylums, no soulless institutions.

  Somehow he had managed it. He had paid for medical care for the nurse and later for plastic surgery. After a year he had bought an annuity which would bring her a moderate income. She had gone to live in the north somewhere and she had remained loyally silent.

  It had been then that the struggle to keep Grendel safe had started. The nursing homes, the subterfuge. Each year a little more difficult, each year the pretence a little harder. He had spared no expense, because by then, by dint of throwing himself into work, he was already dragging the House of Chance back from bankruptcy, first into what the accountants called break-even, then into profit, finally into prosperity. And although Grendel must be shut away from the world, he could be shut away lovingly. Humanely.

  But all the time had been the fear, because the ancient darkness that had attended Grendel’s birth was a darkness that could cast very long shadows.

  Dawn was silvering the sky when Lewis finally shut the door on the dreadful, memory-drenched cellar and returned to his own flat at the top of Chance House.

  He had tapped at Elinor’s door, and spun a story about an ordinary intruder and the discovery of a broken window near the cellars with a disposable hypodermic thrown down. It told its own story, he said.

  There was an unnerving moment when Elinor looked at him very directly and said, ‘So it was an intruder, high on something.’

  ‘Probably roaring drunk in addition. There was an empty whisky bottle as well.’ Don’t overdo it, Lewis.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elinor thoughtfully. ‘I see.’ She did not quite say: So that’s the story we’re selling ourselves, is it? But the words had hung on the air.

  There had been that other moment as well, when he had felt what the poets called the thin batsqueak of sexuality between them. He had repressed it instantly because to succumb to even such a tenuous shiver of attraction would be very unwise, and Elinor Craven was not the sort of girl he would want to get involved with. She was brusque and awkward and although she was far from being ugly, she was no raving beauty, and Lewis had always carelessly and arrogantly demanded a high level of physical and mental charm. She had unusual eyes and good skin and that intriguing voice, but that was all. Even in the right clothes – dark exotic crimsons and mulberry colours or glowing jade greens, with slightly bizarre jewellery, garnets and chunks of amber – even if she stopped scowling at the world—

  Lewis switched on the lights in his own flat and poured a large whisky, discarding his dinner jacket and the stiff uncomfortable evening tie as he did so. He pushed aside the suddenly vivid image of Elinor as she might look if something or someone could give her some self-confidence, and threw himself down in the chair facing Patrick’s portrait. There were lines of exhaustion about his mouth and at the corners of his eyes, but the resemblance to his ancestor was strongly marked. If I had any sense I would burn you, he said silently to the enigmatic regard. I should have made a huge symbolic bonfire of you years ago and ensured that nothing was left.

  If any blame was being dealt out Patrick had to shoulder a good deal. Patrick had been feckless and reckless, and he had travelled beyond the last blue mountain and across the angry glimmering sea, sought by and beloved of all the legendary pilgrims in all the myth-laden cultures of the world. Patrick had not cared about Homer’s wine-dark seas or Flecker’s snow-barred mountains: he had taken the Golden Road to Samarkand for lust of knowing what should not be known – and if only half the stories about him were true, lust had probably been the driving factor behind most of it. Lewis refilled his brandy glass and thought that he was dredging up a fine ravelled richness of poets tonight.

  But I had my own lusts, he thought. And for lust of wanting to know what Patrick really found, I took the same road. Tashkara.

  The road was probably still there, even today: winding its secret way into the lost city; dry and dusty and desolate, and so far removed from the modern world that it was like stepping back in time. Not golden – the road to Tashkara was never golden, just as the road to Samarkand was only golden in the poem, just as the streets of London were only paved with gold in the visions of the ambitious and the gullible. In both cases it was fool’s gold, only you did not find that out until it was too late.

  Lewis met Patrick’s stare again. We both took that golden dusty road, Patrick, and for you it ended in some appalling destiny that you never revealed and that I can only guess at, and for me it has not ended at all.

  But the road had its vein of gold for all that, said a sly little voice in his mind. Remember? Remember how it enabled you to restore the House of Chance?

  But at what cost? Because the ancient, blood-drenched legend – the dark revenge that I’ve spent the last twenty-odd years running from and guarding Grendel from – is reaching across the years again.

  Chapter Eight

  Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary

  London, March 1888

  I’m writing this surrounded by cabin trunks and Thos. Cook itineraries and a general atmosphere of upheaval.

  It’s been decided to send me abroad, which is a way of keeping me quiet about the Duke of Clarence/Chloe Cambridge scandal, of course. Expect they think another scandal in the Royal Family would be untenable at present, what with poor old Eddy reportedly prowling the streets around Cleveland Street on the lookout for young boys again. Still, if they never say any worse of him than that, he’ll have cause to be grateful.

  I thought of protesting, but after listening to Father ranting about shame and ruinat
ion for the last three days will happily take the road to hell to get out of earshot – it’s said to be an easy road to travel anyway, quite apart from the gate being permanently open and broad the way that leadeth. Father and Freddie Inchcape seem to think I’m halfway there as it is.

  ‘And you’ll take a travelling companion,’ shouted my father, by way of Parthian shot as he stormed off to the City, empurpled as to complexion and choleric as to humour. ‘You’re not rampaging and womanising across Europe unchecked, Patrick, so don’t think it!’

  It would serve them all right if I did rampage and womanise across Europe and then write my memoirs afterwards.

  Am afraid that by companion he means keeper, which will be a dreadful bore, unless it turns out to be Theodore Chance, who’s some kind of second cousin and hasn’t a bean, but is reasonably good company, although a touch prim. But if I have to go abroad I don’t see why I shouldn’t have some fun while I’m travelling, and it might be amusing to corrupt the virtuous Theodore.

  We’ve settled on the very Far East although Thomas Cook’s people are sepulchral about the choice – Can’t guarantee safety, sir . . . Extremely hazardous routes, to say nothing of lack of sanitation and uncomfortable travelling conditions. And then there’s the language problem . . . Dear me, sir, wouldn’t you prefer Kitzbühel – very nice at this time of year – or perhaps Venice?

  But I have stuck out for Tibet from sheer contrariness, because if they’re sending me into exile I’ll damn well make it a dramatic exile and as much trouble to everyone as possible. Freddie Inchcape and the Withering idiot can sort out visas and permits and whatnot; it’ll serve them right for stirring up scandal-broth.

  Dare say the actual journey will be unbearably tedious, even so.

  Lewis had found the journey into Tibet almost unbearably tedious.

  If this was the road that Patrick had taken it was a very long and arduous road indeed: in fact it was more like the road to hell than Flecker’s visionary Golden Road to Samarkand.

  Even in the high-tech 1970s, reaching the East was an exhausting affair of long hours in the air, of swapping planes at half-staffed airports, and of uncomfortable Eastern hotels with nonexistent air-conditioning and a plenitude of insect life, some of it nocturnal, most of it apparently on permanent cannibal duty.

  But he had been twenty-five and his name had become synonymous with greed and deceit on that huge scale, and the thought of running away – of donning Patrick’s mantle – had been immensely tempting. The thing had had to be done on a shoestring, of course, because there had been hardly any money left by that time. What had not gone in dividends to creditors (shamefully small), had gone to pay the costs of the public examination and the later court costs for the fraud hearing.

  But even without the money, he had done it with panache. He had donned the arrogance he was already learning to assume – Patrick’s arrogance although no one had ever guessed – and although Tibet was still wrapped in its deliberate isolation in those days, he had bullied visas and permits out of government departments. In the end he had actually gone directly to the airport from his father’s funeral, the smooth black limousine speeding effortlessly through sheeting November rain, its boot loaded with suitcases. I’m leaving it all behind, thought Lewis. I’m stepping out of one world into another – through that falling curtain of rain, and out the other side. There was delight in the knowledge but there was a trickle of unease as well. Because of what might lie beyond the beaded rain-curtain? But at least I’m going beyond the reach of the accusing whispers and the curious stares, and out of range of the swarming newsmen.

  But the newsmen had tracked him down; they were waiting at the airport like buzzing flies, firing machine-bullet questions and flashing cameras as he loaded a trolley with luggage.

  Why should he not leave England? he had said angrily. What was there to stay for? The Belgravia apartment and the Wiltshire property had been sold along with the rest of the disposable assets. The Banking House was in the hands of its trustees and Lewis himself had no money and no job.

  ‘And,’ he had said coldly, ‘I certainly don’t intend to live in furnished rooms in Watford or Hackney.’

  Hackney had been an unfortunate choice of word because half the subeditors in Fleet Street had seized on it with glee, and the next day’s headlines had read: ‘Disgraced banker’s son refuses to live in Hackney-ed squalor.’ Lewis, scowling at this gem at a stopover halfway across the Northern Hemisphere, thought you could always trust the gutter press to dredge up the mot juste.

  I’m an exile, he thought, folding the newspaper and waiting for the continuation flight to be called. I’m an exile, just as Patrick was an exile.

  Patrick would not have had swift hire cars at his disposal, nor, of course, air travel, although it was astonishing to count the inconveniences that Patrick would not have had to endure and that Lewis did. Inconveniences such as discovering that two pieces of luggage had not found their way to Delhi Airport, and queuing for two hours with a cosmopolitan assortment of travellers in similar plights.

  Patrick would simply have directed a few porters to load a cabin trunk on to a steamer, paid a few more to reload it on to a ponderous but probably not uncomfortable railcar, and sat back and enjoyed the journey in between. That he had enjoyed it was evidenced by his book, in which he devoted an entire chapter to describing two separate encounters with two different ladies en route in the railcar, which must have enlivened the journey very considerably. Trying to recapture his belongings, struggling with unfamiliar languages and incomprehensible dialects, Lewis began to think that by comparison, Patrick’s journey must have been almost luxurious, particularly if you took into account the railcar.

  But Tibet, the remote rooftop world, the ancient realm of the Dalai Lama, certainly would not have changed much since Patrick’s time. It was for ever drenched in its pre-Christian beliefs and its deep tranquil religion, and Lewis, hurtling through the streets of Lhasa in a ramshackle cab, stared out at the tumbling raucous market stalls and the baked-clay houses, and the beggars and vendors and scavenging dogs, and thought this must be almost exactly how it had looked to his ancestor.

  Beneath the rattle-trap cars and the modem cool hotel and the unexpectedly efficient English-speaking desk clerk, he was aware of an undertow; of beliefs and rituals and cults that had been old before Man had learned to speak and walk upright. The machines and the urbanity were grafted on, and although there was a thin veneer of civilisation it was so thin that the slightest tap would shatter it and you would be through to the real Tibet. The ancient realm where magic sometimes walked; the place ruled by the priest-king in the glowing crimson pavilion that dominated Lhasa. Lewis glanced up at the glittering tiered palace of the Dalai Lama, and a tremendous sense of excitement began to unfold. I’m nearly through the curtain, he thought. I’m almost there.

  It turned out to be unexpectedly easy to engage a guide who would drive him into the remoter parts of Tibet’s interior. This was a thing many travelling gentlemen requested, explained the hotel clerk, all smiling urbanity, all modern civilisation. And there was a very good route that could be taken, very nice, very full of interest, although perhaps – the now-familiar spreading of hands – perhaps a little arduous for those of advancing years.

  ‘I’m not of advancing years and I don’t mind an arduous journey,’ said Lewis, and asked how the journey would be made.

  It appeared that a Jeep would be used for part of the journey. ‘As much as possible,’ said the desk clerk, avoiding Lewis’s eyes. ‘Then by walking. The Jeep is of American manufacture,’ he added. ‘Very good, very strong.’

  He eyed Lewis optimistically, and Lewis said, ‘American. How unexpected. Will it take me to Tashkara?’

  The thin shell of civilisation splintered. I’ve hit a nerve, thought Lewis. He leaned on the desk and waited, and presently the clerk said uneasily that Tashkara was a very difficult journey, very long, very hazardous . . .

  ‘Very expensive
?’ said Lewis sardonically.

  ‘Oh, very. It is not,’ said the hotel clerk, ‘a journey many make.’ In another minute he would say in a sepulchral voice, Many go there, but few return.

  Before he could say it, Lewis said, ‘Never mind. I’ll thrash it out with the guide.’

  ‘Thrash? What is thrash, please?’

  ‘Outmanoeuvre,’ said Lewis, and booked the guide for the following day.

  The Jeep turned out to be a relic from the Second World War, and looked as if it might have been abandoned by Roosevelt’s troops when the suspension gave out. Lewis eyed it doubtfully, remembering the hotel clerk’s explanation about making some of the journey on foot. He had been prepared for that but it looked as if the on-foot part would come sooner than he had expected.

  Patrick, in his diary, had not given much detail about the practicalities of this part of his journey: probably he had thought it too tedious to record. ‘Looked out of the window of the railcar for four hours this morning. Played chess with companion for two hours this afternoon. And so to bed.’ He had usually recorded the bed part.

  Thomas Cook’s seemed to have provided a guide for most of the journey, and Patrick had referred to two or three Sherpas who had taken him and his cousin into Tibet’s interior, and whom he seemed to have found companionable. Good for you, Patrick. Gregarious all along the line. You probably fared a whole lot better with your Sherpas than I shall with this rusting heap, thought Lewis. It’ll break down before we’ve gone five miles.

  It did break down. It misfired like a shying horse at the sight of the treacherous rocky gorges and the desolate mountain passes, emitting furious clouds of steam from the leaking radiator like an angry dragon, and refusing to budge. The guide, whose exact name and precise calling Lewis never managed to elicit, but who answered amiably to Cal and spoke English with a cheerful blend of accents acquired from other travellers, said they would be on foot now, this was all right?