Last Rites 1

Extracts from the Personal Diary of Dr Belinda Durham

31^st October 2008

I’d had a letter out of the blue stating that MI13 thanked me for my service but no longer required me – and please would I return any MI13 property in my possession.

Then on 31^st October I’d had a formal invitation to a commemoration of Sir Lionel Woodthorpe at Drummond House in the village of Cliffside in Scotland. Of course MI13 had no reason to tell me that Lionel had died. I googled his obituary, and found out more about him than I’d known before. He was a curator at the British Museum before I was even born! However, he’d also had to bear the deaths of his son-in-law Henry Ennis and granddaughter Sophie, drowned in a boating accident in 1990 as well as the death of his daughter Nicole in 1991. His older granddaughter, Lucinda, was still alive. That must have affected his thoughts about the Dreamworld.

I accepted, partly out of curiosity to see who would be there, as well as to see where Lionel came from and more of beautiful, wild Scotland. However, the reunion started immediately because Barbara phoned me and we agreed to drive up together. It would take at least a day to get there since Cliffside was at the end of a remote part of the western coast on the Morven Peninsular in Argyll. There were several places to stay and I decided on a holiday cottage on the harbour front near the Museum.

We arrived in early evening at the village and went straight to Drummond House. The last stretch had been very tedious along a winding single track road with passing places and grass in the middle. The road passed ruined mine workings, a water tower and the ruins of St Mary’s Priory, although the church looked intact, and finally zig-zagged down the cliff to the village but Drummond House was at the top of the cliff.

There were a surprisingly large number of people already at Drummond House. The food was traditional Scottish – haggis, neeps and tatties! I could not keep up with the introductions but later worked out who they were. They split between family and villagers, MI13 and British Museum. We were introduced to Lucinda aka Lucy (who looked like she had been crying a lot) and her husband, Thomas Grady, who looked and was ex-military and was very protective of his wife. Among the villagers was Mary Patterson who had been Lionel’s housekeeper and, we were told, acted as a mother to Lucinda after her mother’s death. There was also Dougal McInnes, the local historian who ran the local museum. We also met Emily Parker, who had worked as a school teacher in England then retired to Cliffside and ran the small café. Her behaviour was exceptionally superstitious since she kept doing rituals such as touching wood and throwing salt over her shoulder.

There was Freddy Wincanton from the British Museum, a specialist on the Middle East who had studied the Minoans for his PhD. Gemma Sampson (Egyptology curator) and Oswald Overton, a conservator, were also from the British Museum. Then James Elliott ex-MI13 (I think I might have met him once) and Amanda who still had a desk-job with the security services, although her hobby of climbing would be useful if she ever had to go into the field. Marmaduke and Mavis appeared, and Mavis looked completely different in new clothes and with her hair well groomed. He asked me if I missed the MI13 work, but I told him that things were going very well at my University with a promotion, grants and a new field-site about to start excavation, so I did not miss the distraction of MI13. There was also an American, Mr Green, who was Lionel’s opposite number in the USA. His business card said simply ‘555-7941 Delta’. Barbara spoke with him and later told me that some of our ex-colleagues were now working for Delta Green, and he’d offered her a job.

We had to go and view Lionel’s body. He’d been embalmed and was lying in a coffin in the living room with candles at his head and feet. There was also a wooden plate on his chest with a pile of soil on the left side and salt on the right. They told us that this was an old Scottish custom relating to the corruption of the body and purification of the soul after death, which sounded plausible at the time. I was a bit surprised by how much weight he’d lost since I last saw him about 10 months ago. I vaguely wondered if he’d had a cancer even though the obituary had implied he’d died of the natural causes that afflict those in their 80s.

There were photographs around the room of him when younger, with his late wife (Camilla Penharrow) and ones of his granddaughters. There were also objects decorating the room including a genuine Egyptian alabaster funereal urn engraved with the image of a winged goddess and a ceramic bull with interesting enamelling that was an image of Shiva’s steed Nandi from the Hindu religion.

Lucy said that she wanted time alone with him so we moved to the study. This had a mummified kitten in a glass cabinet as another Egyptian souvenir. I deliberately did not think about how these artefacts had got to Scotland; it must have been before the modern era of permits, agreements and ethical conduct. The study included a computer, the normal 21^st century object of devotion! There were shelves with an extensive collection of books and papers about Egyptology (electronic media have not yet replaced print for all information needed in archaeological research). There was also a locked glass-fronted shelf with occult books that included the Unaussprechlich Kulten, Cultes des Ghouls, the Arachne Papers, two copies of the Book of the Dead (one on the open shelves) and a book without a title on the spine. We spotted An Encyclopaedia of Scottish Folklore by Justin Woodthorpe, Lionel’s father, published in 1922. There was a corkboard on the wall with a ‘to do’ list and also two old newspaper cuttings pinned to it, one about the death of Nicole in 1991, the other about Sophie’s death in 1992. The floor next to the desk had a safe standing on it. The locked gun cabinet held a pair of Purdy shotguns as well as a pair of duelling pistols. I appreciated their beauty and function as weapons much more now that Gloriana was part of me.

We rejoined the others and among the conversations I overheard was Mary Patterson saying that people thought that Sophie was murdered and the police suspected Lionel. Also, Donald said he’d discussed the things he’d seen at sea with Lionel.

1^st November 2008

It was a dull and cold morning with someone going round gritting the road and steps. Barbara and I had breakfast in the tea-shop and then headed to Drummond House for 10 am. The villagers lined the route to the church as six men, Dougal, Thomas, Marmaduke, Donald, James and Freddie, carried the coffin from the house.

The minister, Rev. Edward Rooke, gave a knowledgeable eulogy about Lionel, about his career and how his friends will miss him. The body was being buried rather than cremated so the service ended with us all trooping out into the graveyard with Thomas reading ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ by Dylan Thomas at the graveside. Lucinda cried and looked even paler. There was a man in the graveyard who had not been at the service. We were told he was Maurice Talbot, a retired policeman. When others in the congregation spotted him there was some muttering and Lucinda said angrily ‘Why is he here?’ Indeed, one woman, Catherine Smythe, the local JP, walked away.

We were all invited back to the house for the reading of the will, which I though was rather odd since I’d imagine it would only be relevant to family and maybe his old friends. However, this was not the case. After a buffet lunch – why do all human rites revolve around food? (Write your answer in no more than 10,000 words ….) – we assembled in the living room to hear what the lawyer Hamish Blawke had to say.

The bulk of the estate, as anyone would expect, went to Lucinda – the house (valued at £340,000), a part of the peninsula and some shares with the condition that she should not sell it for at least a year. Mary Patterson was given thanks and a very practical £50,000. Then he read out a list of names, including mine and the others I’d known through MI13 and said we would each be entitled to £5,000 if we stayed here for at least 48 hours after the burial as moral support for Lucinda. Finally he announced a strange bequest of a shoebox wrapped in brown paper and string to Lucinda, who promptly started sobbing and left the room.

Awkwardly, we went through to the dining room for a buffet lunch. As people talked, I heard about the history of the house and what Lionel had been doing recently. Sir Thomas Drummond bought the Morven peninsula from the crown in the 1600s. Several buildings called Drummond House had been erected on this site. Sir Thomas’s Tudor mansion was burnt down during the Regency period. The current Drummond House is Victorian.

The snippits of information about Lionel included that he was working on pre-dynastic antecedents of the texts written in coffins by the Egyptians, the so-called Coffin Texts. In his younger days he was a good sailor. He had been very happy that Lucinda had married Thomas.

Lucinda reappeared, looking very tense, and intense. She went round thanking everyone for coming, insisting on shaking hands very firmly. I asked Dougal about Perch Rock and he said that the name came from the past when a Lady had watched from it for her returning Lord. Now, the place was tainted in people’s minds because Sophie had died there.

Suddenly I could hear Lucinda speaking loudly and angrily to a young man who turned out to be Robert Patterson, Mary and Donald’s son. ‘Stop talking to me you sad gimp!’ and then she stormed away. Everyone stared, some of the men started to move towards him, and then he ran off as well. Lucinda then reappeared and continued shaking people’s hands and staring at them. One woman started complaining that her hand had been crushed.

I decided to ask her about the box, because her reaction to it indicated it meant something profound to her, but she told me firmly that it was something between her grandfather and herself alone. At this point an elderly balding white-haired man called David is about to leave and she breaks off to insist on gripping his hands while telling him that she’ll pop in to see if she can do something for his wife Barbara tomorrow. Suddenly, she looks like she is about to faint. My first-aider training springs into action and I get her to lie down. Later someone tells me that Barbara has dementia and David cares for her.

Everyone is now leaving except Mary and Emily whose offer to stay to help out is accepted. I try to get over to the others still in the house that Lionel has set us up in some way, with his request to support Lucinda for at least 48 hours, so we should prepare for the worst.

Finally we agree to open the safe. It has boxes of ammunition in it of many sorts, from antique bullet moulds accompanied by black powder to silver, gold and wooden bullets as well as conventional ammunition for a Beretta 418 and Walther PPK nestled into the safe. Lionel was prepared for a range of foes! The licences that accompanied them showed that the Beretta was Camilla Woodthorpe’s, his late wife. Intriguingly there was a set of keys with some that did not match any of the house’s usual ones. Some opened the locked bookshelf as well as the gun cabinet and desk.

The top drawer of the desk had about 50 letters, mostly between Lionel and Camilla, but some were to others. The next drawer had a very large business ledger which contained diary entries for 1946 onwards. I started to flick through, looking for the entry on the day Camilla died. There was a gap on Thursday 17^th June 1965 where he’d written afterwards that she had died in the Plateau of Leng. This immediately told us that his wife was in the same occult business, and it had ended badly.

We read the most recent diary entries, for May 2008:

Sat 3^rd May 2008: ‘Well it seems I have entered the final phase. Alan is in agreement with the specialists and no one believes I can last another winter in Cliffside. However I shall refuse their blandishments – this is my home and I choose to die here, in some comfort. Mary is devoted to me and a wonderful carer. And Lucinda and Thomas visit me when they can and indeed are here now, for the Bank Holiday. Dougal stops by for a game of chess at least once a week and I do not lack for company. True the stairs are a trial but even though I turn 82 next week I can still negotiate them if I take my time and a few puffs of oxygen, which I must now carry at all times. Personally I think I am better off than Ursula, poor girl. I wonder which of us will go first?

All seems quiet in London and I hope things stay that way for some time. All things considered I think now is the best time to broach my scheme to Lucinda. I know she will find it hard and alas I won’t be here to help her through the show in any meaningful sense but I have groomed her for her role to a certain extent and if it is successful she may find some closure – perhaps one day she may even speak to her sister in her Dreams?’

Mon 5^th May 2008: ‘Well they’ve gone! And I must say Lucinda didn’t hesitate for a moment to accept her part in things, though I made the point of describing the unpleasantness as clearly as possible – evidently she needs closure even more than I had suspected.

We have decided not to bring Thomas into our confidence. He is a fine fellow and strong but what we are attempting is far too outré to explain to someone whose eyes have yet to open. No doubt he will be receptive to an explanation afterward.

I have also spoken to Marmaduke. He is privately sure that once Ursula departs this mortal coil – and this could happen at any time – the powers that be will shut down MI13, but will do what he can to ensure success for our scheme – and anyway he would be hurt if he wasn’t invited to my funeral.

Knowing Marmaduke as I do, I suspect he may be playing a long game and I wouldn’t put it past him to use this as an opportunity to save or even resuscitate MI13, though some might think he’s too clever for his own good and in danger of cutting himself. Still, it tickles me slightly to think of one revenant effectively resurrecting another, metaphorically speaking.

So, the plan will be for Lucinda to perform the Sluagh ritual. I have already prepared the potion and dissolved it in a bottle of Tobermory. She will be the directing agent. She will use her special perceptions to search the surface thoughts of our neighbours – they will all visit, it’s a small village and everyone will be expected to pay their respects. Then Lucinda can tell me who to visit. Once justice has been performed on those still able to receive it, I can go to my rest and perhaps Lucinda or one of our friends can retrieve Sophie’s spirit from whichever Outer God received her sacrifice and send her to better things with Toby’s spell.

It’s a lot to place on Lucinda’s shoulders; I just hope she is up to the demands of her role, distasteful as it is.

I wonder how it will feel to be a Sluagh? I confess to feeling some trepidation.’

We looked up Sluagh in the Folklore Book and discovered a sluagh was a monster created from thwarted vengeance that does what the summoner does.

I looked back at 1990, for Sophie’s death. On 28 August 1990 he’d recorded that Sophie was missing, then dead and then Lionel himself was suspected by the police of murdering her. In September he had used a spell on Sophie’s body to summon her spirit with the aim to take her to the Dreamland. However, nothing happened, indicating that someone had accomplished the very difficult task of shattering or destroying it. But why do that to a 6 year old? He wrote that he will not rest until she is saved or avenged, or both.

We decide to keep watch all night in the house to see when Lucy makes her move. I’m in the first watch 10 – 12. Nothing happened so I went to sleep, only to be awakened by Freddie at 2 am. Lucy left the house, walking through the misty night towards the church. It was difficult to follow her, and from her swearing, she found it difficult to locate Lionel’s grave. We saw her over the grave, pouring whisky onto it. She said, ‘What a waste of good whisky,’ then something in gaelic and then after silence we heard her say ‘It’s working’ and then command ‘Grandfather, rise up and hide in the mines; go to David Fraser to avenge your grand-daughter.’

We find out who David Fraser is – a bank manager that people think is rather pompous. We went back to Drummond House and I accompanied Emily to look round the basement. We saw the freezer, wine-racks and various bits of junk but we were really looking for secret doors. Finally we spotted one concealed by rolled up carpets in a stone wall, indicating that it is has an old origin, before the current Victorian house. The key ring we found has a key that fits it but it won’t turn – so we use WD-40 on it! Thomas uses this and his skills from his army days to get it to turn, although he makes quite a noise during his efforts. As we are about to open the door, Lucinda appears at the entrance to the basement and obviously asks what we are doing. She looks even paler than before.

James, unconvincingly, says he is after a glass of water! She comes into the kitchen, and we cave in and say we are looking for a door in the basement. To my surprise she simply tells us that there is one but it does not open. Thomas says it will open now and she says to give her the key, which he does, and they then go upstairs together, perhaps to go to bed together (Thomas later tells us this is indeed what happened, and they had not slept together for days).

Monday 2^nd November

Woke again to thick fog, so we can only see maybe 10 metres. No sign of Mary so Emily gets started on breakfast. We have a tense moment when a large figure appears at the house door but it is Toby, Dr Allan’s son. He is very upset that Lionel’s grave has been disturbed and that Mary discovered its state. James and Freddie go with him to see. They come back and Mary is with them, crying and so upset in a way that I did not expect from someone who had known, and looked after, Lionel for decades. Perhaps he kept his occult work completely away from her? James tried to phone the police on a land-line but could not get a dial-tone. Mobiles do not work, of course. We try another land-line but no luck with it either. The phone line out of the village must have been cut. The rector has come back with Mary, and he says that this happens several times a year, and the fog makes it unsafe to drive. So we are really cut off. You would not think this could happen in Scotland in 2008! Lucinda is the last to get up in Drummond House wearing dark clothes and looks a little better but with a very determined set to her face.

There is a church service today, and we all go to it and find that probably everyone in the village is there apart from the Frasers and Maurice Talbot. So we did the right thing to go. The minister gives a strong sermon, mentioning the desecration of Lionel’s grave and that it must have been done by someone in the village. People look round uneasily at this.

After the service we go back to Drummond House. I become very uneasy about the way that the Sluagh is on the loose, and has been sent after David Fraser. I persuade Freddie to go with me to his house. We had no evidence that he was involved in Sophie’s death. Indeed, Lucy had spoken kindly to him and offered to help with his wife.

I kept remembering my grandfather who had looked after Nan with such patience and devotion as she became a different person through dementia. When we were children, he and Mum kept us away from Nan at her strangest. However, he still saw the woman he had first met decades ago and fell in love with. When she died before him he was distraught at his loss, as well as joyful at her release from suffering. David Fraser, another man looking after his wife as her mind melted away, was due our protection from the Sluagh. How wrong I was!

We got to the Fraser’s house and the front door was open. We went in and heard moaning from upstairs as well as seeing and smelling blood on the floor going upstairs and to a trap-door in the kitchen. I went upstairs, and my idea that David Fraser was like my grandfather was horrifically dispelled. He’d been torturing his poor, demented wife Barbara. It was a big shock for me. She was babbling ‘Very nice man,’ meaning Lionel the Sluagh, who had dragged her husband away and killed him. His dismembered body was in the cellar, and it was his blood all over the house. We found books under the bed and in a cupboard that left us in no doubt that David Fraser was a sadist and a cultist.

Freddie went to find a doctor and fortunately one lived near. Maurice Talbot, living next door, told him where to find the GP. He arrived and was shocked. We still could not phone for the police. Janet Rooke, the rector’s wife, arrived and wondered what was happening. She and the doctor were eminently practical. The doctor got his car and took Barbara in it to the Rectory. We were left to look round the house. We searched, including a desk in the living room, but could find nothing redolent of Cthulhu, only sadistic and ‘conventional’ Satanism like the ‘Night of the Goat’. Still shaken, I left the house with Freddie and we went back to Drummond House and told the others what we had found.