1 - David J. Schow - Visitation ANGUS BOND CHECKED INTO THE HERMITAGE ALONE, Under an assumed name. He had been recognised in consort with too many fanatics to risk a travelling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead. "Room 713," said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. "One of our suites, mister… ah, Orion, yes. Heh." The man's smile looked like a mortician's joke on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk's suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie. Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no. The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him - the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling, Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas. The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death's-head. Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters. The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought. It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man's pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering yellow bulbs in the brass sconces. "A gentleman to see you, sir," he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist's dummy. Angus picked up the card. It bore two words: IMPERATIVE. BRAY. The clerk stood fast. When Angus realised why, he decided to test the water a little. "Just a minute." He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar. Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand. He wore dusty butler's gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand. The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk's features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way a lightbulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second. The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said "Thank you. Sir." He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation. The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the bearing of the man was that he was very old - not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man. Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory. "You are Angus Bond?" said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. "I am Turquine Bray." "Nicholas Bray's father?" said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived. "Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant's life and desired nothing but material things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend." The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas. "I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances," said Bray. "But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a vulture's eyes water… as it is no doubt intended to do." The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby's imposing double doors. Outside, the slate grey bulk of the Hermitage's castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds. "Gloomy," said Bray. "All this place needs is a tarn." "Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?" said Angus. "It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight - see? It's always overcast here." "The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignolish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film." "Rather like the supposed 'ambience' one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant," said Angus. "I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned 'atmosphere.' That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery - supernatural furniture. Atmosphere." "Hm." Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. "Sinister chic." The iron-coloured mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon. Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy. "Have you a room?" said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment. "I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first." "You followed me, then?" said Angus. "For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas' death already." "I need you, Mr Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died." Angus sighed with resignation. "Mr Bray," he said in a tone often rehearsed, "do you know just who I am?" Bray's steely, chrome-coloured eyes shot up to meet with Angus' watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. "You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago your profession was that of occult debunker - exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more con-men than sorcerers, and all the pop salesmen of lizard's tooth and owlet's wing. Until two years ago." Bray's breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research. "Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumour had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you've been supporting your now-private life with royalties?" "Something like that." "It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father - a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he died." "It ties together. The change in my life. Nick's death. I'm not sure you'd-" "I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr Bond. But I'm only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away." "Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn't tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time - do you recall it?" "It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the mid-1960s." "Yes," said Angus. "Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place's allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years before." Bray smiled again. "He was unnerved. When a horse 'smells' a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house 'felt wrong,' and skittish was the word to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later…" Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody dramatic. "It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface," he said simply. "Mr Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to coexist with the normal universe - yours and min...
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