The Second Wish and Other Exhalations Read online

  “Mumbo jumbo,” she answered. “No, I think I shall simply put the blame on this place. It’s bloody depressing, really, isn’t it?”

  He tut-tutted good-humouredly and said: “My God! — the whims of a woman, indeed!”

  She snuggled closer and laughed in his ear. “Oh, well, that’s what makes us so mysterious, Harry. Our change­ability. But seriously, I think maybe you’re right. It is a bit late in the year for wandering about the Hungarian countryside. We’ll stay the night at the inn as planned, then cut short and go on tomorrow into Budapest. It’s a drive of two hours at the most. A week at Zjhack’s place, where we’ll be looked after like royalty, and then on to London. How does that sound?”

  “Wonderful!” He took one hand from the wheel to hug her. “And we’ll be married by the end of October.”

  The inn at Szolyhaza had been recommended for its comforts and original Hungarian cuisine by an inn­keeper in Kecskemet. Harry had suspected that both proprietors were related, particularly when he first laid eyes on Szolyhaza. That had been on the previous evening as they drove in over the hills.

  Business in the tiny village could hardly be said to be booming. Even in the middle of the season, gone now along with the summer, Szolyhaza would be well off the map and out of reach of the ordinary tourist. It had been too late in the day to change their minds, how­ever, and so they had booked into the solitary inn, the largest building in the village, an ancient stone edifice of at least five and a half centuries.

  And then the surprise. For the proprietor, Herr Debrec, spoke near-perfect English; their room was light and airy with large windows and a balcony (Julia was delighted at the absence of a television set and the inevitable ‘Kultur’ programs); and later, when they came down for a late evening meal, the food was indeed wonderful!

  There was something Harry had wanted to ask Herr Debrec that first evening, but sheer enjoyment of the at­mosphere in the little dining-room — the candlelight, the friendly clinking of glasses coming through to them from the bar, the warm fire burning bright in an old brick hearth, not to mention the food itself and the warm red local wine — had driven it from his mind. Now, as he parked the car in the tiny courtyard, it came back to him. Julia had returned it to mind with her headache and the talk of ill-rumoured Stregoicavar and the Black Stone on the hillside.

  It had to do with a church — at least Harry suspected it was or had been a church, though it might just as easily have been a castle or ancient watchtower — sighted on the other side of the hills beyond gaunt autumn woods. He had seen it limned almost as a silhouette against the hills as they had covered the last few miles to Szolyhaza from Kecskemet. There had been little enough time to study the distant building before the road veered and the car climbed up through a shallow pass, but nevertheless Harry had been left with a feeling of — well, almost of déjà vu — or perhaps presentiment. The picture of sombre ruins had brooded obscurely in his mind’s eye until Herr Debrec’s excellent meal and luxurious bed, welcome after many hours of driv­ing on the poor country roads, had shut the vision out.

  Over the midday meal, when Herr Debrec entered the dining room to replenish their glasses, Harry mentioned the old ruined church, saying he intended to drive out after lunch and have a closer look at it.

  “That place, mein Herr? No, I should not advise it.”

  “Oh?” Julia looked up from her meal. “It’s dangerous, is it?”

  “Dangerous?”

  “In poor repair — on the point of collapsing on someone?”

  “No, no. Not that I am aware of, but—” he shrugged half-apologetically.

  “Yes, go on,” Harry prompted him.

  Debrec shrugged again, his short fat body seeming to wobble uncertainly. He slicked back his prematurely greying hair and tried to smile. “It is … very old, that place. Much older than my inn. It has seen many bad times, and perhaps something of those times still — how do you say it? — yes, “adheres” to it.”

  “It’s haunted?” Julia suddenly clapped her hands, caus­ing Harry to start.

  “No, not that — but then again—” the Hungarian shook his head, fumbling with the lapels of his jacket. He was obviously finding the conversation very uncomfortable.

  “But you must explain yourself, Herr Debrec,” Harry demanded. “You’ve got us completely fascinated.”

  “There is … a dweller,” the man finally answered. “An old man — a holy man, some say, but I don’t believe it — who looks after … things.”

  “A caretaker, you mean?” Julia asked.

  “A keeper, madam, yes. He terms himself a “monk”, I think, the last of his sect. I have my doubts.”

  “Doubts?” Harry repeated, becoming exasperated. “But what about?”

  “Herr, I cannot explain,” Debrec fluttered his hands. “But still I advise you, do not go there. It is not a good place.”

  “Now wait a min—” Harry began, but Debrec cut him off.

  “If you insist on going, then at least be warned: do not touch … anything. Now I have many duties. Please to excuse me.” He hurried from the room.

  Left alone they gazed silently at each other for a moment. Then Harry cocked an eyebrow and said: “Well?”

  “Well, we have nothing else to do this afternoon, have we?” she asked.

  “No, but — oh, I don’t know,” he faltered, frowning. “I’m half inclined to heed his warning.”

  “But why? Don’t tell me you’re superstitious, Harry?”

  “No, not at all. It’s just that — oh, I have this feeling, that’s all.”

  She looked astounded. “Why, Harry, I really don’t know which one of you is trying hardest to have me on: you or Debrec!” She tightened her mouth and nodded determinedly. “That settles it then. We will go and have a look at the ruins, and damnation to all these old wives’ tales!”

  Suddenly he laughed. “You know, Julia, there might just be some truth in what you say — about someone having us on, I mean. It’s just struck me: you know this old monk Debrec was going on about? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be his uncle or something! All these hints of spooky goings-on could be just some sort of put-on, a con game, a tourist trap. And here we’ve fallen right into it! I’ll give you odds it costs us five pounds a head just to get inside the place!” And at that they both burst out laughing.

  The sky was overcast and it had started to rain when they drove away from the inn. By the time they reached the track that led off from the road and through the grey woods in the direction of the ruined church, a ground mist was curling up from the earth in white drifting tendrils.

  “How’s this for sinister?” Harry asked, and Julia shiv­ered again and snuggled closer to him. “Oh?” he said, glancing at her and smiling. “Are you sorry we came after all, then?”

  “No, but it is eerie driving through this mist. It’s like floating on milk! … Look, there’s our ruined church directly ahead.”

  The woods had thinned out and now high walls rose up before them, walls broken in places and tumbled into heaps of rough moss-grown masonry. Within these walls, in grounds of perhaps half an acre, the gaunt shell of a great Gothic structure reared up like the tombstone of some primordial giant. Harry drove the car through open iron gates long since rusted solid with their massive hinges. He pulled up before a huge wooden door in that part of the building, which still supported its lead-covered roof.

  They left the car to rest on huge slick centuried cobbles, where the mist cast languorous tentacles about their ankles. Low over distant peaks the sun struggled bravely, trying to break through drifting layers of cloud.

  Harry climbed the high stone steps to the great door and stood uncertainly before it. Julia followed him and said, with a shiver in her voice: “Still think it’s a tourist trap?”

  “Uh? Oh! No, I suppose not. But I’m interested any­way. There’s something about this place. A feeling almost of—”

  “As if you’d been here before?”


  “Yes, exactly! You feel it too?”

  “No,” she answered, in fine contrary fashion. “I just find it very drab. And I think my headache is coming back.”

  For a moment or two they were silent, staring at the huge door.

  “Well,” Harry finally offered, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” He lifted the massive iron knocker, shaped like the top half of a dog’s muzzle, and let it fall heavily against the grinning metal teeth of the lower jaw. The clang of the knocker was loud in the misty stillness.

  “Door creaks open,” Julia intoned, “revealing Bela Lugosi in a black high-collared cloak. In a sepulchral voice he says: “Good evening…”‘ For all her ap­parent levity, half of the words trembled from her mouth.

  Wondering how, at her age, she could act so stupidly girlish, Harry came close then to telling her to shut up. Instead he forced a grin, reflecting that it had always been one of her failings to wax witty at the wrong time. Perhaps she sensed his momentary annoyance, however, for she frowned and drew back from him fractionally. He opened his mouth to explain himself but started violently instead as, quite silently, the great door swung smoothly inward.

  The opening of the door seemed almost to pull them in, as if a vacuum had been created … the sucking rush of an express train through a station. And as they stumbled forward they saw in the gloom, the shrunken, flame-eyed ancient framed against a dim, musty-smelling background of shadows and lofty ceilings.

  The first thing they really noticed of him when their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness was his filthy appearance. Dirt seemed ingrained in him! His coat, a black full-length affair with threadbare sleeves, was buttoned up to his neck where the ends of a grey tattered scarf protruded. Thin grimy wrists stood out from the coat’s sleeves, blue veins showing through the dirt. A few sparse wisps of yellowish hair, thick with dandruff and probably worse, lay limp on the pale bulbous dome of his head. He could have been no more than sixty-two inches in height, but the fire that burned behind yellow eyes, and the vicious hook of a nose that followed their movements like the beak of some bird of prey, seemed to give the old man more than his share of strength, easily compensating for his lack of stature.

  “I … that is, we …” Harry began.

  “Ah! — English! You are English, yes? Or perhaps American?” His heavily accented voice, clotted and guttural, sounded like the gurgling sound of a black subterranean stream. Julia thought that his throat must be full of phlegm, as she clutched at Harry’s arm.

  “Tourists, eh?” the ancient continued. “Come to see old Möhrsen’s books? Or perhaps you don’t know why you’ve come?” He clasped his hands tightly together, threw back his head, and gave a short coughing laugh.

  “Why, we … that is …” Harry stumbled again, feeling foolish, wondering just why they had come.

  “Please enter,” said the old man, standing aside and ushering them deeper, irresistibly in. “It is the books, of course it is. They all come to see Möhrsen’s books sooner or later. And of course there is the view from the tower. And the catacombs …”

  “It was the ruins,” Harry finally found his voice. “We saw the old building from the road, and—”

  “Picturesque, eh. The ruins in the trees… Ah! — but there are other things here. You will see.”

  “Actually,” Julia choked it out, fighting with a sudden attack of nausea engendered by the noisome aspect of their host, “we don’t have much time …”

  The old man caught at their elbows, yellow eyes flashing in the gloomy interior. “Time? No time?” his hideous voice grew intense in a moment. “True, how true. Time is running out for all of us!”

  It seemed then that a draught, coming from nowhere, caught at the great door and eased it shut. As the gloom deepened Julia held all the more tightly to Harry’s arm, but the shrunken custodian of the place had turned his back to guide them on with an almost peremptory: “Follow me.”

  And follow him they did.

  Drawn silently along in his wake, like seabirds following an ocean liner through the night, they climbed stone steps, entered a wide corridor with an arched ceiling, finally ar­riving at a room with a padlocked door. Möhrsen unlocked the door, turned, bowed, and ushered them through.

  “My library,” he told them, “my beautiful books.”

  With the opening of the door light had flooded the corridor, a beam broad as the opening in which musty motes were caught, drifting, eddying about in the disturbed air. The large room — bare except for a solitary chair, a table, and tier upon tier of volume-weighted shelves arrayed against the walls — had a massive window composed of many tiny panes. Outside the sun had finally won its battle with the clouds; it shone wanly afar, above the distant mountains, its autumn beam somehow penetrating the layers of grime on the small panes.

  “Dust!” cried the ancient. “The dust of decades — of decay! I cannot keep it down.” He turned to them. “But see, you must sign.”

  “Sign?” Harry questioned. “Oh, I see. A visitors’ book.”

  “Indeed, for how else might I remember those who visit me here? See, look at all the names …

  The old man had taken a leather-bound volume from the table. It was not a thick book, and as Möhrsen turned the parchment leaves they could see that each page bore a number of signatures, each signature being dated. Not one entry was less than ten years old. Harry turned back the pages to the first entry and stared at it. The ink had faded with the centuries so that he could not easily make out the ornately flourished signature. The date, on the other hand, was still quite clear: “Frühling, 1611.”

  “An old book indeed,” he commented, “but recently, it seems, visitors have been scarce …” Though he made no mention of it, frankly he could see little point in his signing such a book.

  “Sign nevertheless,” the old man gurgled, almost as if he could read Harry’s mind. “Yes, you must, and the madam too.” Harry reluctantly took out a pen, and Möhrsen watched intently as they scribbled their signatures.

  “Ah, good, good!” he chortled, rubbing his hands to­gether. “There we have it — two more visitors, two more names. It makes an old man happy, sometimes, to remem­ber his visitors … And sometimes it makes him sad.”

  “Oh?” Julia said, interested despite herself. “Why sad?”

  “Because I know that many of them who visited me here are no more, of course!” He blinked great yellow eyes at them.

  “But look here, look here,” he continued, pointing a grimy sharp-nailed finger at a signature. “This one: “Justin Geoffrey, 12 June, 1926.” A young American poet, he was. A man of great promise. Alas, he gazed too long upon the Black Stone!”

  “The Black Stone?” Harry frowned. “But—”

  “And here, two years earlier: “Charles Dexter Ward” — another American, come to see my books. And here, an Englishman this time, one of your own countrymen, “John Kingsley Brown.’” He let the pages flip through filthy fingers. “And here another, but much more recently. See: “Hamilton Tharpe, November, 1959.” Ah, I remem­ber Mr Tharpe well! We shared many a rare discussion here in this very room. He aspired to the priesthood, but—” He sighed. “Yes, seekers after knowledge all, but many of them ill-fated, I fear …”

  “You mentioned the Black Stone,” Julia said. “I wondered—?”

  “Hmm? Oh, nothing. An old legend, nothing more. It is believed to be very bad luck to gaze upon the stone.”

  “Yes,” Harry nodded. “We were told much the same thing in Stregoicavar.”

  “Ah!” Möhrsen immediately cried, snapping shut the book of names, causing his visitors to jump. “So you, too, have seen the Black Stone?” He returned the volume to the table, then regarded them again, nodding curiously. Teeth yellow as his eyes showed as he betrayed a sly, suggestive smile.

  “Now see here—” Harry began, irrational alarm and irritation building in him, welling inside.

  Möhrsen’s attitude, however, changed on the instant. “A myth, a superst
ition, a fairy story!” he cried, hold­ing out his hands in the manner of a conjurer who has nothing up his sleeve. “After all, what is a stone but a stone?”

  “We’ll have to be going,” Julia said in a faint voice. Harry noticed how she leaned on him, how her hand trembled as she clutched his arm.

  “Yes,” he told their wretched host, “I’m afraid we really must go.”

  “But you have not seen the beautiful books!” Möhrsen protested. “Look, look—” Down from a shelf he pulled a pair of massive antique tomes and opened them on the table. They were full of incredible, dazzling, illuminated texts; and despite themselves, their feelings of strange re­vulsion, Harry and Julia handled the ancient works and admired their great beauty.

  “And this book, and this.” Möhrsen piled literary treas­ures before them. “See, are they not beautiful. And now you are glad you came, yes?”

  “Why, yes, I suppose we are,” Harry grudgingly replied.

  “Good, good! I will be one moment — some refreshment — please look at the books. Enjoy them …” And Möhrsen was gone, shuffling quickly out of the door and away into the gloom.

  “These books,” Julia said as soon as they were alone. “They must be worth a small fortune!”

  “And there are thousands of them,” Harry answered, his voice awed and not a little envious. “But what do you think of the old boy?”

  “He — frightens me,” she shuddered. “And the way he smells!”

  “Ssh!” he held a finger to his lips. “He’ll hear you. Where’s he gone, anyway?”

  “He said something about refreshment. I certainly hope he doesn’t think I’ll eat anything he’s prepared!”

  “Look here!” Harry called. He had moved over to a bookshelf near the window and was fingering the spines of a particularly musty-looking row of books. “Do you know, I believe I recognize some of these titles? My father was always interested in the occult, and I can remember—”

  “The occult?” Julia echoed, cutting him off, her voice nervous again. He had not noticed it before, but she was starting to look her age. It always happened when her nerves became frazzled, and then all the makeup in the world could not remove the stress lines.