Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

BORGIA POMADE

“Oh, lord, will this business never end?”, I groaned, tossing over to my collaborator Alan Granville a letter which had just come. “Ever since that wretched book of ours on the development of the English manor-house appeared, we’ve been having this!”

The cause of my groans was this: ever since our book had been published three months before, we had been inundated with letters from the owners of noble old manor-houses up and down the country declaring they were absolutely positive there must be a priest’s hole concealed in such and such a part of the house, because there was a thickness unaccounted for—and so on, ad nauseam.

This was another of them, one John Holben, Esquire, of a place called Chaffington Manor, Northants.

“Anyway,” said Alan, “it does seem more interesting than most of them. For one thing, he doesn’t claim the usual priest’s hiding-place; all he thinks is that there may be a room ingeniously concealed behind the Tudor fireplace he’s discovered on stripping the wallpaper to restore the walls to half-timber.”

“Yes, yes,” I said testily, “but why the devil do all these folks seem to think we’re a couple of architects?—Still, I suppose we asked for it, writing a book like that.”

However tired of it we were, we could never resist the temptation to investigate all these mysterious places; so down to Chaffington Manor we went.

As it happened, Mr. Holben’s problem did prove of considerable interest, for measuring, followed by our breaking through the wall beside the huge chimney-breast, did reveal not only a lost staircase to the upper part of the house, but a secret room of quite decent size, most ingeniously built in, and having a window which we certainly could not identify from the outside.

By this time we were all three thoroughly filthy with dust and plaster, and Mr. Holben insisted that Alan and I have a good clean-up, stay for lunch, and examine the re-discovered room afterwards.

At lunch our host presented his wife, a very handsome and dignified woman of about 30, some years younger than he, and with a fine complexion that obviously owed little to art.

She proved, moreover, as cultured as her husband, and a real enthusiast for their splendid old house; and somewhat to our surprise, insisted that when we resumed our exploration, she was going to take a hand.

“My dear, you’ll get absolutely black in that hole!” protested her husband.

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, darling! You seem to forget I do most of the garden-pottering. What about my old slacks, a jumper, and weeding-gloves?”

So we all gathered in procession up the narrow stone staircase skilfully cut in the thickness of the wall, and five minutes later, were busy searching the room, which had evidently not been entered for at least a century—if not far more. A modern vacuum cleaner works wonders, and when we got the grime and cobwebs down off the walls, we found in one corner a tall wooden cupboard, the door of which had lost its key, but proved amenable to a little gentle prising.

We gallantly left it to Mrs. Holben to have the honour of opening the door, and when she did so, she gave a little cry of surprise and pleasure.

There on a shelf, covered with a thick layer of dust, stood a glowing piece of pottery, a jar something like a ginger-jar but not so wide, made of the rather coarse and garish-coloured faience ware known as Urbino, which was first made about 1470, and reached its height as a fashion in pottery in the mid-sixteenth century.

I happened to be nearest, and at once offered to lift down the jar, to save Mrs. Holben getting its dirt all over her.

Now I am not what one calls a particularly psychic person, but I do think that the queer experiences I have had, with some of which the reader of these pages is already familiar, have somehow developed a latent ‘sensing’ of occult atmosphere.

The minute I picked up that jar, a cold shudder ran right through me, and I nearly dropped it on the floor, for the jar felt warm and slimy, as though it were covered with blood.

In that instant, a sudden flash of vision came to me. The garish Urbino colours disappeared, and I saw what I knew to be human blood trickling over the sides of the vessel.

The scene, the people, in that ancient secret chamber in England vanished . . . I was back in a renaissance palace of sixteenth-century Italy. Facing me was a tall, powerfully-built man dressed in the finest velvet of the time, with a huge, cruel lower lip and terribly decayed teeth. He was laughing evilly, and holding a jewelled dagger, from which the blood was still dripping . . . Then I saw, clutching him by the shoulder, a woman whom I knew to have been beautiful, but whose face was now half eaten-away by some foul disease.

“Quick, catch that jar, he’s fainting!” said someone.

I came round to find myself lying on the floor in the room with the Holbens and Alan bending solicitously over me, Alan sprinkling water on my face and my hostess holding the jar.

“Put it down, put it down!” I muttered, “Murder, blood, cling to that pot!”

“Hm! A touch of fever,” I heard Holben say, his voice sounding a mile away, “Better get him down on to a couch—very stuffy up here.”.

When, down in the lounge, I fully recovered, feeling an awful ass for the exhibition I had given, Mrs. Holben had gone off to make tea, and her husband was sitting on another settee facing me and looking at me very curiously. Alan was standing at the table, examining the jar but not, I noticed, touching it.

“Now, Mr. Wayne, if you feel better,” said our host, “I feel very curious to know what exactly happened. You see, I have lived in the East for some years—one gets used to queer things there. No need to feel foolish about it, my dear fellow. Do you mind telling me exactly what you saw that caused you to mutter remarks about blood and murder?”

I sat up, apologising for having caused so untoward an interruption in the secret room, and told him exactly what I had witnessed.

Before I realised it, Mrs. Holben was standing in the doorway, and she must have heard everything, for she came forward, followed by a maid with a tea dumb-waiter, and exclaimed:

“Oh, Mr. Wayne! Some of you historians do have a vivid imagination. I think it’s a perfectly sweet jar—Urbino, isn’t it?—and I shall use it for face-cream on my dressing-table. It will look lovely there!”

Her husband looked very thoughtful, but all he said was: “Well, my dear, you do it at your own risk. Personally, I think there is more in these queer things than you give credit for—but you always have been a sceptic!”

When a woman makes up her mind to a thing (I have been given to understand by misguided individuals who have married) there is nothing more to be said.

We all examined the pomade-jar together; my flash of the fey had gone, and there now seemed nothing sinister about it. I did, however, take particular care to inspect every inch of the vessel for any hollow part or concealed spring, but it was quite evidently solid and honest in workmanship. A perfect Urbino piece of that period (about 1500 to 1600 A.D.) is hard to obtain, so we left Mrs. Holben gloating over her jar, and her husband over his secret room—and, having much else to do, on our return home Alan and I quite naturally forgot all about the matter.

We were destined within a week to be rudely reminded of it, however; for on coming down to breakfast six days after our visit, I found addressed to me a brief but harrowing letter from our late host.

I passed the distressing letter over in silence to Alan, who remarked: “Poor devil! You at least must go, Gregs even, if I don’t—and somehow I think you’d do more good on your own, for it was you who had the queer vision connected with it. I fully expect you will find the manuscript is in medieval (probably dialect) Italian, and you’re much better at that stuff than I am.”

I hurried over breakfast, and in little over an hour reached the stricken manor-house.

Holben did not wait for a servant to answer my ring. He rushed to the door himself, grasped both my hands, and broke down in trying to thank me for coming so quickly.

Mrs. Holben had been rushed off to hospital, but the specialists and doctors had confessed themselves utterly floored by the weird eruption that had transformed Mrs. Holben, from a woman known throughout the county for her beauty, into a horror on which one dared not look. It was no skin disease known to medical science. They had even called in, without success, an expert from the Ross Institute, which probably knows more about tropical skin-eruptions than any other institution in the world.

“The jar! The jar!” groaned Holben, “God, I daren’t touch the thing. They took some of the face-cream for analysis—she cleaned and used the pot, as she said she would, the day we found it—but the cream is absolutely free of any kind of poison. It’s still on her table in the bedroom.”

By degrees I got him calmer. I spotted a decanter, and made him take a very stiff peg of his own whisky. He was making a noble effort to pull himself together, and when he finally succeeded, I said gently:

“I won’t offer empty condolences—after all, she may recover. I know just how you are feeling, and like you, I was afraid something would happen—but I did not bargain for this. I take it you would like me to try to read this manuscript you say your wife was found clutching, to see if it puts any light on the matter?”

“Yes, yes!” he replied eagerly, welcoming anything which would keep his mind off what must have been an appalling sight for him. “I’ll get it.”

He crossed to a bureau, and returned holding gingerly by a thumb and forefinger a yellow scroll of vellum with one torn, jagged edge.

“Where on earth my wife found it, I don’t know,” he said. “I have never set eyes on it till then. My theory is that in her agony she got some sort of vision, rushed to the secret room, and found it there.”

“Well,” I said, “before I examine it, I can tell that tear is new; I have an idea you are right, and that she did get a sudden vision telling her she must find this thing—and that the rest of it is still somewhere in that room. Do you feel equal to helping me look for it?”

The stricken husband agreed eagerly; it would give him something active to do, so up we went.

Instinctively I made for the cupboard where we had found the fatal jar—and there at the back of it was revealed a sliding panel, that had evidently been opened by the unfortunate woman; we must have missed it in our search. Jammed in the grooving was the rest of the manuscript. In agony and terror Mrs. Holben must have wrenched at the document, and pulled away half of it before she collapsed into merciful unconsciousness.

We took the piece down to the lounge and fitted it to the one we had in silence. Alan was right; it was in slightly archaic Italian, but so clearly written that it gave me no trouble whatever. I translate literally the story there written down, etched in lines of acid hate. It read:

“God! What a fiend!” exclaimed Holben when I had finished reading out my translation. “To think that a curse could be laid, so powerful that it has lived on for over four centuries!”

“Yes,” I replied quietly, “but four centuries are a mere nothing in the duration of evil thought-forms. What about the Egyptian curses which appear to operate after nearly five thousand years?”

“I wonder,” I added, “who last experienced this thing in your house, and how the jar came here. Someone evidently knew its evil, or the thing would not have been so carefully hidden away where they thought no-one would ever find it again.”

“Ah, now you mention that,” said Holben, “I recall that our title-deeds, over which I was looking recently with my solicitor in connection with selling a small farm, do contain a counterpart of the lease of the manor-house—speaking off-hand, I believe the date was 1782 or so—to an Italian, Signor Utrillo, who was (I have heard) a political refugee from Rome. He probably brought that damned jar with him.”

The poor fellow shuddered and for some minutes sank huddled in his chair, overcome by his memories. Then suddenly his self-control left him again, and he burst into a wild fit of sobbing.

“Christ!” he screamed, “why should my wife, who is no loose woman, but a true and loving companion, be taken by this evil thing. Why were we ever allowed to find it? Is there no justice in the world?”

“Evidently Ambrogio da Borja thought not,” I replied grimly, answering the last of his questions—the only one any man could answer, “so he set out to get his own justice by hellish means, reckless of possible repercussions on the innocent.”

“However,” I added, laying a consoling hand on his shoulder, “we will make certain that no-one else shall ever suffer for his wrongs. That, it is not too late to prevent, and I feel that we may be able to break the curse.”

Poor Holben looked upon me with a kind of dazed, dumb gratitude that cut me to the heart.

I left him very quietly and got a maid to show me her beloved mistress’ boudoir. On the dainty dressing-table stood the jar, glowing evilly at me.

Taking it up, I hurled it through the open window to crash in fragments on the crazy-paving of the garden below.

In my left hand, I found, I still clutched the terrible Italian manuscript, of which my copy now reposed in my pocket. This I took down to the kitchen, where I persuaded Cook, agape with astonishment, to let me stand over the grate until I was sure that its evil had been consumed in the all-purifying flame.

No, there was no diabolical laugh from the depths of Hell over my shoulder as I watched the parchment shrivel; indeed, as if in proof that good life and a pure heart can overcome even the malevolence of the Things beyond the grave, there came within two hours a telephone call from the London hospital—a much puzzled house-surgeon told Holben that his wife’s skin had suddenly started to clear, in a manner almost miraculous; and on receipt of a joyous invitation to visit the Hall a few months later, I was again greeted by a lovely and radiant hostess.