The Gobblin' Society E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Langdon St. Ives
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 203

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

"…[A] twisted but delightful fantasy tale... Mystery, mesmerism, murder, and mayhem combine into a jolly good time. Blaylock's fans will be gratified." —Publishers Weekly When coffins bearing what might be living corpses are discovered in a sea cave long used by smugglers, Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice are precipitated into a hellish mystery involving an ages-old house standing on the chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast. The strange house, shunned by the people Broadstairs and Margate, caters to a century-old eating society that offers a secret catalogue of corpses for sale and a menu for wealthy members with… eccentric tastes. When the society sets out to entrap St. Ives, an onrushing adventure ensues as Alice and the formidable Frobishers fight for their lives—an adventure that seems to ensure a deadly ending.

Leseprobe

THE GOBBLIN’ SOCIETY

Copyright © 2020 by James P. Blaylock

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Published in North America by Subterranean Press

ISBN 978-1-625674-89-0

Cover design by Dirk Berger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Final Chapter

About the Author

Also by James P. Blaylock

For Viki

Chapter One

A Quiet Supper

The half-timbered manor house, built in the Gothic style, stood on a prominence above the village of Broadstairs, well back from the sea. High and narrow, with bay windows and sharply peaked gables, it had been built some years before Broadstairs itself grew up along the chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast. A widow’s walk on the southeast corner was partly obscured by the grove of elms and beeches that had risen around the manor over the last century.

From the eminence of the widow’s walk, there was a view of the ships anchored in the Downs or steaming up from the Channel, and one could just make out the forward edge of Kingsgate Castle through the trees. On particularly clear nights moonlight shone on the Goodwin Sands, and in the pre-dawn darkness, a sharp eye might pick out smugglers running in toward convenient bays in swift-sailing luggers. There were arched shutters over the second story windows of the house, closed at night, which gave it a secretive air, and when the house and high trees were veiled by a sea mist the old, grey manor simply vanished. Holiday travelers staying in one of the seaside hotels in Broadstairs might remain a month in the village and be unaware of the manor’s existence. Local residents shunned it.

Julian Hobbes studied the house uneasily, having passed through the open gates and walked halfway along the long carriage drive that led up from the road. The shutters on the second floor windows were thrown open and he could make out a figure moving beyond the leafy shadows on the panes of glass. The sun was low in the sky, and it was later in the day than he would have chosen to arrive, given the spectral house that loomed above him. His coach had lost a wheel, however, coming out from Canterbury, and had taken hellfire long to repair.

He had no idea what welcome he would receive here, if any sort of welcome at all, but he was fairly certain that his mission did not warrant bringing a constable along. If there was trouble, the weighted stick that he carried would have to suffice. There was something off about the old house, something unsettling that he couldn’t quite name. But it was a fanciful thought, and not being a fanciful man he dismissed it from his mind, knocked the head of his stick against his palm, and set out through the trees, determined to be comfortably aboard the evening coach that left for Canterbury in two hours.

* * *

In the wood-paneled second-story room of the manor, three men sat at a heavily built dining table illuminated by a candlelit chandelier. They were members of an eating club, the Gobblin’ Society, and the old house in which they met was known by the whimsical members as Gobblin’ Manor. Morbid anatomical paintings by the French artist Gericault hung on the wall. The table rested upon a central column cut from a section of hollowed-out tree trunk, which housed the mechan-ical workings that elevated food from the kitchen on the floor below. A silver platter had just come ratcheting up, covered in a high dome, and the bottle of claret had gone around for the second time, the four men getting by without the help of servants. Beside the domed platter lay a wooden board on which sat a loaf of dark bread and a long knife.

“I have it on good authority that my great grandfather dined on the corpse of the poet Chatterton,” Harry Larsen said in a loud voice after awakening from a doze. As well as having the inconsiderate habit of falling asleep after a second glass of wine, Larsen boasted far too often about his doubtful ancestors. His nonsense was countenanced because he was rich. He had an abnormally large, round head with hair like frizz, and his nose angled slightly upward, revealing yet more frizz.

“I don’t believe it, Larsen,” Jason Forbes told him. “Chatterton’s flesh would have been poisoned by the arsenic he drank when he murdered himself. And starving poets have no meat on their bones in any event. I’ve been told that they rarely eat well unless heavily sauced, and even then they’re a stringy lot, like eating an old rooster.” Forbes wore a lavender cravat with an amber stickpin in the center of the knot. A bee looked out from within the amber. Beside Forbes’s chair hung a gold-braided rope with royal blue ribbon threaded through it, and he fiddled with the rope as he spoke.

“Chatterton was alleged to have consumed arsenic,” Larsen said. “My grandfather had knowledge to the contrary.”

“Was your grandfather a poet, then?” asked the third man, the current President, whom the members of the Society called Southerleigh, although it was not his actual name. “We’re enlivened and influenced by what we consume, after all.” Southerleigh was an abnormally tall and skeletal figure, unsmiling unless the smile was contrived, who spoke while looking into the ruby contents of his wine glass through the pince-nez clinging to his nose.

“Indeed,” Larsen said. “He was a minor poet, but a good one. Johnson admired his work.”

“Dictionary Johnson?” Forbes asked skeptically.

“The very man.”

“Then your grandfather should have dined on Johnson,” Forbes said. “Johnson’s plump corpse would have been far more unctuous than Chatterton’s, and sweetened by genius into the bargain. Chatterton’s poetry was unreadable, the maunderings of a clever boy who hadn’t anything of his own to say.”

The door opened and a man in servant’s livery looked in. He had the appearance of a human ape, his arms hanging to his knees and a prominent forehead and oversized jaw. “A Mr. Julian Hobbes has arrived and has asked for an audience, sir,” he said to the President. “Shall I turn him away, or is he expected?”

“Hobbes, do you say? Show him in, Jensen, and seat him in the draped chair. We are indeed expecting him.”

“Shall I unfasten the collar from its compartment?”

“Yes, and of course stand by once the door is secured and the gentleman is seated.”

Jensen bowed, walked across to a heavily carved wardrobe cabinet, and opened its door. Inside, locked to an eye-hook, hung a circular, yoke-like, wooden collar with holes in its perimeter, each hole adjacent to a small, iron turn-buckle. He produced a key, opened the lock so that the collar might be removed, and then left the room again, noiselessly shutting the door behind him.

A long moment later, Jensen ushered Hobbes into the room and intoned his name.

“Welcome, sir,” Southerleigh said cheerfully. Jensen draped Hobbes’s coat from a hook by the door and rested his weighted cane in an elephant’s foot umbrella stand. Jensen stepped to the specified chair, which was draped from seat to floor by a floral-painted curtain. He swiveled the chair to the left, making it possible for Hobbes to sit down, and then swiveled the now-occupied chair back again until it clanked into place.

“Good day to you gentlemen,” Hobbes said, looking around skeptically. He caught sight of the morbid paintings on the wall now—severed limbs and heads, a dismembered skeleton—and could not prevent a look of distaste from passing across his face. Being an entirely rational man he had little patience for quirk-iness or fancy, morbid or otherwise, nor was he impressed by it.

“My name is Southerleigh,” the President said to him cheerfully, “and my two compatriots are Mr. Forbes and Mr. Larsen. The bottle stands by you, Larsen.”

“Why, so it does,” Larsen said, pouring wine into an empty glass. “You’ll drink a bumper of this capital claret, Mr. Hobbes?” He pushed it across to Hobbes, who nodded his thanks and tasted it.

“Very gratifying,” Hobbes said.

“Mr. Julian Hobbes!” Southerleigh said now, peering at him through his pince-nez, which made his eyes seem unnaturally close together. “I could almost believe you to be the son of Hobbes the chemist—Canterbury Hobbes?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Then we’re doubly happy to make your acquaintance. I knew your mother, in fact, although it was many years ago, and in another country, as The Bard would have it. Do you also have a scientific bent, sir?”

Hobbes stared at him for a moment, not quite knowing what to do with the reference to his mother. He decided to ignore it, however, and said, “I dabble in electronic medicine. I studied in Paris.”

“Capital. An interesting field with a soaring future, to my mind. The world is electrifying at a prodigious rate.”

Hobbes nodded in acquiescence and said, “To get to the point, gentlemen, I’ve come about my mother’s death-book. I have it on good authority that the book might reside within this house.”

“Do you?” asked the President. “I’m puzzled by what you tell me. What do you mean by her death-book? Can either of you gentlemen enlighten me?” He looked quizzically at Forbes and Larsen.

“Alas, no,” Forbes said. “Our friend Larsen has the blood of a poet in his veins, however, bookish blood, perhaps…”

Larsen shook his head. “He jests, Mr. Hobbes. I have no use for books unless they’re ledgers.”

“I wish I could speak with more authority,” Hobbes told them, “but I’m led to believe that the book contains my poor mother’s memories, wishes, and regrets. Not overlarge—a quarto, probably, but richly bound. Truth to tell, I’ve never seen it. My father kept it under lock and key. He believes that there is something of her… spirit…in it. Her soul, let us say, and if it is not returned to him he will certainly die unhappily. I’m aware that it sounds fabulous, but there you have it.”

“It grieves me to hear this,” Southerleigh said to him,” but surely you speak metaphorically. You mean a diary?—perhaps in your mother’s own hand? A memoir?”

“Something more esoteric apparently,” Hobbes told him. “But the exact nature of the book is immaterial. What is material is that it was delivered to this very house by a scurrilous servant who stole it from my father’s desk along with a small lamp and a jeweled bottle of lamp oil, all of it contained in a wooden box with my mother’s name upon it. The servant confessed to the crime after we found a startlingly large sum of money hidden in his room, and it was he who sent me to this very house. My sole purpose is to fetch the lot of it home and to return the money to whoever purchased the book and the lamp. It is my father’s dying wish, gentleman, and so it is necessarily my wish also.”

“It’s thoughtful of you to have brought the ill-gotten money along with you, Mr. Hobbes, but the three of us are mere drones, and we speak in earnest when we tell you that we have no knowledge of the book and the attendant curiosities. Did this servant know the name of the man who purchased it?

“He believed the man to be a baron of some variety.”

“Of course,” Southerleigh said. “The Baron! This is entirely in his line. If this book was stolen by your servant, I assure you that the Baron had no knowledge of the theft itself and that he will return the book at once, or as soon as he can fetch it. The Baron is an honorable man. Will you wait for him, sir? He will join us shortly. Surely you’ll take a bite of something to eat in the mean-time? We’re an eating society, as whimsical as that might sound.”

“I had hoped to return to Canterbury aboard the post coach this very evening. It’s been a trying day.”

“Then drink another glass of wine and take your ease. You won’t have long to wait, I believe. We intend to sample an interesting… pâté, as the French have it. It is best eaten with bread.”

“Do you know that in the East,” Larsen told him, grinning strangely at him now, “they eat the brains of living monkeys? They trepan them, do you see, and at table they remove the silver cap that has replaced the disk of skull and dig out the flesh with a spoon. Brain matter has something of the consistency of figgy-dowdy.”

Hobbes stared at him in disbelief. “Apparently you enjoy practicing on strangers, sir. But I won’t be put off. I must insist that the book be returned to me. I’m prepared to pay for it in full, as I’ve said. I don’t expect anyone to lose a farthing. I’ll reiterate: it is the wish of my dying father, and I mean to see his wish granted. I am not at all in a mood for jesting.”

The three men regarded him for a time without speaking. Hobbes glanced uneasily at the door, which was shut tight, and he saw that his walking stick no longer sat in the ridiculous elephant receptacle. The heavy shutters were closed over the windows now. He could not see the servant, but he sensed that the man stood behind him.

“Forgive me,” he said, abruptly deciding to change his course. “My weariness has made me short tempered. I’m afraid my words were offensive to you.”

“Not at all, Mr. Hobbes,” the President said. “Our friend Larsen has an arcane sense of humor. We wouldn’t conceive of eating a monkey unless it was thoroughly stewed, and we very much regret that your father is dying, although all of us must tread that dark road from which, the poets assure us, no man returns. You’ll agree that some of us are condemned to tread upon it sooner than others.” He smiled so broadly now that his cheeks pushed his eyes half shut and revealed uncannily sharp incisors. “Mr. Forbes,” he said, “raise the dome and cut Mr. Hobbes a slice of cerebellum, if you will, ha ha!”

“Ho for a slice of cerebellum!” Forbes shouted, tipping back the hinged dome and making antic faces at Hobbes, apparently having suddenly lost his mind.

Hobbes saw to his horror that a man’s severed head sat upon the platter. There was the smell of curry, evidently from the pool of yellowish-green sauce that was afloat with oyster mush-rooms. Then Hobbes saw that he was mistaken: the head sat upon its own neck. The platter surrounding the neck fit like an Elizabethan ruff, but made of silver instead of lace. It was a living head, the mouth mumbling soundlessly, the victim’s body concealed beneath the draped table.

Hobbes attempted to push himself to his feet, but the servant took him by the shoulders and slammed him down into his chair. Forbes reached up and gave the dangling golden braid a tremendous yank. Hobbes heard a clatter of meshing gears and felt a heavy vibration from beneath him. Suddenly he was unable to move at all, his hands pinned to his sides, and he realized in a wave of horror that a wooden keg had risen from the floor and encircled his chair with him in it, the chair’s drape having been drawn upward, spilling out around his kegged shoulders now like a winding sheet. He made another desperate attempt to push himself up using his legs alone, pitching his upper body backward to shake off the servant, but his knees were too tightly contained by the keg, and the chair was immovable.

The servant stepped away now, and a bare moment later a heavy wooden collar descended over Hobbes’s head and rested atop the keg, covering his shoulders. Turnbuckles snapped-to, imprisoning him in his upright coffin, and with that he had become a natural companion to the man whose monstrous head still gibbered on the platter, the tongue lolling as if endeavoring to slurp up the curry sauce.

“Our friend will go out with the current lot, I believe,” Southerleigh said to Larsen and Forbes with no hint of humor now. “And with haste—before any of his meddlesome friends come looking for him. Eat up, gentlemen. We have work to do when the Baron arrives.”

Forbes lifted the silver disk that had neatly covered the top of the man’s shaven pate, thereby exposing the convolutions of the brain. The man himself had fainted dead away now, out of fear or perhaps pain. The only evidence of life was the movement of his eyes behind the eyelids.

Southerleigh, nodding his satisfaction, unrolled a damask napkin from which tumbled an array of pickle forks and honed spoons.

Chapter Two

The Inheritance

Alice St. Ives sat in a pleasantly amazed stupor, only half listening to Mr. Bayhew, the St. Ives’s solicitor, who had come down from London to Aylesford to explain the details of Alice’s sudden inheritance—a house on the coast some distance below Margate that had belonged to her Uncle Godfrey Walton. Seaward, it was named—a word that brought forth strange but mostly pleasant memories when Alice recalled it or heard it uttered. It was a practical name as well: perched midway down a cliff, the lonely house looked out across the Strait of Dover. The inheritance had been bound up in legal complications for so many years that the thought of it had diminished in her mind, fading from something wonderfully hypothetical to something merely lost. Now it was suddenly found.

It was her second inheritance. Several years back she and her husband Langdon had moved from Chingford into their present house in Aylesford Village, which had been left to her by her Aunt Agatha Walton, Godfrey Walton’s sister. Alice had no need of a second house, which seemed extravagant to a fault, she being a woman and with only a remote claim on either of the houses.

The family, including young Finn Conrad, who had found them several years ago and stayed on as an honorary member of the family, sat around the dinner table. They had eaten the better part of a twenty-pound sucking pig stuffed with sage and onions, along with roast potatoes and a vast salad made of lettuces and herbs grown in the garden, tossed with a dressing of mashed boiled eggs, French olive oil, and Stilton cheese.

Tubby Frobisher and his Uncle Gilbert, both of them round men weighing some eighteen stone, had eaten their share. They were staying downriver in the village of Snodland, Gilbert having recently assumed proprietorship of the Majestic Paper Mill. They had arrived at the St. Ives’s house this afternoon bearing a machine for turning out frozen custard in stupefying quantities and also a vast basket of early-summer blueberries with which to flavor the custard.

A bottle of port stood in the center of the table now, along with biscuits, but was largely ignored in favor of coffee served out in mugs, the beans shipped in from Sumatra to Gilbert’s mansion in Dicker, roasted and ground not a half hour past. Gilbert was as rich as Croesus, although generous to a fault and often given to rash behavior. His nephew Tubby looked very like Gilbert’s twin, but with more hair on his head and thirty years younger.

Eddie and Cleo, the St. Ives children, were included despite the late hour, both of them amazed and happy, although Alice noted that Cleo’s eyes were half closed. Hodge the cat had sneaked onto Cleo’s lap and fallen asleep, which even Hodge knew wasn’t allowed at the table. Household rules had gone by the board. Alice watched Langdon’s face as he listened keenly to what Bayhew had to say, but after a moment or two of paying attention, her thoughts drifted into the past.

Her late uncle’s property, her property now, was an eccentric, rambling, isolated house a half a mile below the North Foreland Light. It stood above a deserted beach, where, in her childhood, Alice had spent countless weeks in the summer months, rambling along the seaside in complete and glorious freedom, looking into tidal pools and sea caves, and scavenging treasures thrown up onto the beach along that notoriously deadly stretch of coastline.

Her summer visits to Seaward had been shared with her cousin Collier, who had been a cheerful youth, gangly and often silly-minded and likely to be in trouble with their uncle for looking into locked rooms when he’d been told not to. The cousins had gone out rowing in the dory on calm days, sometimes as far out as the Goodwin Sands, and had trudged through the woods behind the house and fished for trout in the chalk streams. They had earned their room and board by cooking breakfasts and late suppers, most often leaving their uncle’s food on a plate in the kitchen and clearing up the remains the following day. Alice’s visits to Seaward had ended abruptly when she was thirteen years old.

Cousin Collier had simply disappeared out of her life at that same time, their respective families having no contact. Some six years later Collier had allegedly hanged himself after being disinherited by their uncle, who had no children of his own. That had been another source of guilt, since Alice had not been disinherited. And then five years ago, after the Uncle had died and the will was mired in the probate courts, cousin Collier had risen from the grave and contested it.

What exactly did she feel now, she wondered. Not guilt: her cousin’s strange antics scarcely warranted it. Happiness, she decided—something of the same happiness she saw at this very moment on Eddie and Cleo’s faces. She returned from her meanderings when she heard Langdon ask, “And so this man Collier Bonnet, who laid claim to the house—he’s an imposter?”

“In some sense an imposter, yes,” Bayhew answered, “but only in that his suicide turned out to have been staged. He is who he claims to be.” Mr. Bayhew’s steady demeanor, somber clothing, and iron-grey hair gave him a solid, unimaginative appearance— exactly what one wanted in a solicitor. “He provided documents proving his ancestry, and he unaccountably possessed a copy of Godfrey Walton’s first will, which had bequeathed him half of the estate. The second will, however, written a year after the first, obviated its predecessor, and Bonnet inherited nothing at all. Bonnet’s claim against the estate was quite without merit. He hired a Scottish attorney to represent him, and the attorney spewed out challenges and writs and stays until the young man was reduced to beggary. Put simply, Bonnet gambled everything on a bad hand of cards.”

“Was there nothing for cousin Collier?” Alice asked. “I was fond of him when I was a girl. We were playmates, you know.”

“Not a groat,” Bayhew told her. “These strange capers that he cut—failing to die when he insisted he had died, and then leaping out of the shadows when he smelled money… No, ma’am, he was too whimsical by half to be taken seriously by the courts. No doubt he had staged his death in order to escape criminal prosecution, or perhaps unhappy creditors, and then restored himself to life when he saw his chance to profit from it. If Godfrey Walton had died intestate, it might have gone differently for Collier Bonnet, but Godfrey Walton’s intentions were clear. He gave the house and all within it to you, ma’am.”

“Hurrah!” Cleo shouted, suddenly wide-awake, and Finn Conrad raised his mug and proposed a toast, which they all drank with great good will.