“And I did go, that very night. I drove up to Oxford.”
“To Oxford?”
“Yes, into the very lion’s den, as it were. In the morning I found a suitable hotel and garaged my car, and a little later I telephoned Magruser.”
“Just like that?” Again I was astonished. “You telephoned him?”
“No, not just like that at all,” he answered. “First I ordered and waited for the arrival of a taxi. I dared not use my Mercedes for fear that by now he knew both the car and its number.” He smiled tiredly at me. “You are beginning to see just how important numbers really are, eh, Henri?”
I nodded. “But please go on. You said you phoned him?”
“I tried the plant first and got the switchboard, and was told that Mr. Magruser was at home and could not be disturbed. I said that it was important, that I had tried his home number and was unable to obtain him, and that I must be put through to him at once.”
“And they fell for that? Had you really tried his home number?”
“No, it’s not listed. And to physically go near his estate would be sheer lunacy, for surely the place would be heavily guarded.”
“But then they must have seen through your ruse,” I argued. “If his number was ex-directory, how could you possibly tell them that you knew it?”
Again Crow smiled. “If I was the fellow I pretended to be, I would know it,” he answered.
I gasped. “Your friend from the ministry! You used his name.”
“Of course,” said Crow. “And now we see again the importance of names, eh, my friend? Well, I was put through and eventually Magruser spoke to me, but I knew that it was him before ever he said a word. The very sound of his breathing came to me like exhalations from a tomb! ‘This is Magruser,’ he said, his voice full of suspicion. ‘Who is speaking?’
“‘Oh, I think you know me, Sturm Magruser,’ I answered. ‘‘Even as I know you!’”
V
“There was a sharp intake of breath. Then: ‘Mr. Titus Crow,’ he said. ‘You are a most resourceful man. Where are you?’
“‘On my way to see you, Magruser,’ I answered.
“‘And when may I expect you?’
“‘Sooner than you think. I have your number!’
“At that he gasped again and slammed the phone down; and now I would discover whether or not my preliminary investigation stood me in good stead. Now, too, I faced the most danger-fraught moments of the entire business.
“Henri, if you had been Magruser, what would you do?”
“Me? Why, I’d stay put, surrounded by guards—and they’d have orders to shoot you on sight as a dangerous intruder.”
“And what if I should come with more armed men than you? And would your guards, if they were ordinary chaps, obey that sort of order in the first place? How could you be sure to avoid any encounter with me?”
I frowned and considered it. “I’d put distance between us, get out of the country, and—”
“Exactly!” Crow said. “Get out of the country.”
I saw his meaning. “The private airstrip inside his plant?”
“Of course,” Crow nodded. “Except I had ensured that I was closer to the plant than he was. It would take me fifteen to twenty minutes to get there by taxi. Magruser would need between five and ten minutes more than that…
“As for the plant itself—proudly displaying its sign, Magruser Systems, UK—it was large, set in expansive grounds and surrounded by a high, patrolled wire fence. The only entrance was from the main road and boasted an electrically operated barrier and a small guardroom sort of building to house the security man. All this I saw as I paid my taxi fare and approached the barrier.
“As I suspected, the guard came out to meet me, demanding to know my name and business. He was not armed that I could see, but he was big and heavy. I told him I was MOD and that I had to see Mr. Magruser.
“‘Sorry, sir,’ he answered. ‘There must be a bit of a flap on. I’ve just had orders to let no one in, not even pass-holders. Anyway, Mr. Magruser’s at home.’
“‘No, he’s not,’ I told him, ‘he’s on his way here right now, and I’m to meet him at the gate.’
“‘I suppose that’ll be all right then, sir,’ he answered, ‘just as long as you don’t want to go in.’
“I walked over to the guardroom with him. While we were talking, I kept covert watch on the open doors of a hangar spied between buildings and installations. Even as I watched, a light aircraft taxied into the open and mechanics began running to and fro, readying it for flight. I was also watching the road, plainly visible from the guardroom window, and at last was rewarded by the sight of Magruser’s car speeding into view a quarter mile away.
“Then I produced my handgun.”
“What?” I cried. “If all else failed you planned to shoot him?”
“Not at all. Oh, I might have tried it, I suppose, but I doubt if a bullet could have killed him. No, the gun had another purpose to serve, namely the control of any merely human adversary.”
“Such as the security man?”
“Correct. I quickly relieved him of his uniform jacket and hat, gagged him and locked him in a small back room. Then, to make absolutely certain, I drove the butt of my weapon through the barrier’s control panel, effectively ruining it. By this time Magruser’s car was turning off the road into the entrance, and of course it stopped at the lowered barrier. There was Magruser, sitting on my side and in the front passenger seat, and in the back a pair of large young men who were plainly bodyguards.
“I pulled my hat down over my eyes, went out of the guardroom and up to the car, and as I had prayed Magruser himself wound down his window. He stuck out his hand, made imperative, flapping motions, said, ‘Fool! I wish to be in. Get the barrier—’
“But at that moment I grabbed and held on to his arm, lowered my face to his, and said, ‘Sturm Magruser, I know you—and I know your number!’
“‘What? What?’ he whispered—and his eyes went wide in terror as he recognised me.
“Then I told him his number, and as his bodyguards leapt from the car and dragged me away from him, he waved them back. ‘Leave him be,’ he said, ‘for it’s too late now.’ And he favoured me with such a look as I shall never forget. Slowly he got out of the car, leaning heavily upon the door, facing me. ‘That is only half my number,’ he said, ‘but sufficient to destroy me. Do you know the rest of it?’
“And I told him the rest of it.
“What little colour he had drained completely from him and it was as if a light had gone out behind his eyes. He would have collapsed if his men hadn’t caught and supported him, seating him back in the car. And all the time his eyes were on my face, his pink and scarlet eyes which had started to bleed.
“‘A very resourceful man,’ he croaked then, and, ‘So little time.’ To his driver he said, ‘Take me home…’
“Even as they drove away I saw him slump down in his seat, saw his head fall on one side. He did not recover.”
After a long moment I asked, “And you got away from that place?” I could think of nothing else to say, and my mouth had gone very dry.
“Who was to stop me?” Crow replied. “Yes, I got away, and returned here. Now you know it all.”
“I know it,” I answered, wetting my lips, “but I still don’t understand it. Not yet. You must tell me how you—”
“No, Henri.” He stretched and yawned mightily. “The rest is for you to find out. You know his name and you have the means to discover his number. The rest should be fairly simple. As for me: I shall sleep for two hours, then we shall take a drive in my car for one hour; following which we shall pay, as it were, our last respects to Sturm Magruser V.”
• • •
Crow was good as his word. He slept, awakened, breakfasted and drove—while I did nothing but rack my brains and pore over the problem he had set me. And by the time we approached our destination I believed I had most of the answers.
&n
bsp; Standing on the pavement outside the gardens of a quiet country crematorium between London and Oxford, we gazed in through spiked iron railings across plots and headstones at the pleasant-seeming, tall-chimneyed building which was the House of Repose, and I for one wondered what words had been spoken over Magruser. As we had arrived, Magruser’s cortege, a single hearse, had left. So far as we were aware, none had remained to join us in paying “our last respect”.
Now, while we waited, I told Crow, “I think I have the answers.”
Tilting his head on one side in that old-fashioned way of his, he said, “Go on.”
“First his name,” I began. “Sturm Magruser V. The name Sturm reveals something of the nature of his familiar winds, the dust devils you’ve mentioned as watching over his interests. Am I right?”
Crow nodded. “I have already allowed you that, yes,” he said.
“His full name stumped me for a little while, however,” I admitted, “for it has only thirteen letters. Then I remembered the V, symbolic for the figure five. That makes eighteen, a double nine. Now, you said Hitler had been a veritable Angel of Death with his 99999…which would seem to make Magruser the very Essence of Death itself!”
“Oh? How so?”
“His birth and death dates,” I reminded. “The 1st April 1921, and 4th March 1964. They, too, add up to forty-five, which, if you include the number of his name, gives Magruser 9999999. Seven nines!” And I gave myself a mental pat on the back.
After a little while Crow said, “Are you finished?’” And from the tone of his voice I knew there was a great deal I had overlooked.
VI
I sighed and admitted: “I can’t see what else there could be.”
“Look!” Crow said, causing me to start.
I followed his pointing finger to where a black-robed figure had stepped out onto the patio of the House of Repose. The bright wintry sun caught his white collar and made it a burning band about his neck. At chest height he carried a bowl, and began to march out through the garden with measured tread. I fancied I could hear the quiet murmur of his voice carrying on the still air, his words a chant or prayer.
“Magruser’s mortal remains,” said Crow, and he automatically doffed his hat. Bareheaded; I simply stood and watched.
“Well,” I said after a moment or two, “where did my calculations go astray?”
Crow shrugged. “You missed several important points, that’s all. Magruser was a ‘black magician’ of sorts, wouldn’t you say? With his demonic purpose on Earth and his ‘familiar winds’, as you call them? We may rightly suppose so; indeed the Persian word magu or magus means magician. Now, then, if you remove Magus from his name, what are you left with?”
“Why,” I quickly worked it out, “with R, E, R. Oh, yes and with V.”
“Let us rearrange them and say we are left with R, E, V and R,” said Crow. And he repeated, “R, E, V and R. Now, then, as you yourself pointed out, there are thirteen letters in the man’s name. Very well, let us look at—”
“Rev. 13!” I cut him off. “And the family Bible you had on your desk. But wait! You’ve ignored the other R.”
Crow stared at me in silence for a moment. “Not at all,” he finally said, “for R is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. And thus Magruser, when he changed his name by deed poll, revealed himself!”
Now I understood, and now I gasped in awe at this man I presumed to call friend, the vast intellect which was Titus Crow. For clear in my mind I could read it all in the eighteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations.
Crow saw knowledge written in my dumbfounded face and nodded. “His birthdate, Henri, adds up to eighteen—666, the Number of the Beast!”
“And his ten factories in seven countries,” I gasped. “The ten horns upon his seven heads! And the Beast in Revelations rose up out of the sea!”
“Those things, too,” Crow grimly nodded.
“And his death date, 999!”
Again, his nod and, when he saw that I was finished: “But most monstrous and frightening of all, my friend, his very name—which, if you read it in reverse order—”
“Wh-what?” I stammered. But in another moment my mind reeled and my mouth fell open.
“Resurgam!”
“Indeed,” and he gave his curt nod. “I shall rise again!”
Beyond the spiked iron railings the priest gave a sharp little cry and dropped the bowl, which shattered and spilled its contents. Spiralling winds, coming from nowhere, took up the ashes and bore them away…
Recognition
By January 1977 my military career had moved on somewhat. Into my last four years, I had become the Initial Training Sergeant-Major—the DI—at the Royal Military Police HQ in Chichester, Sussex; an establishment which has only recently relocated all these years later. While my work didn’t leave me a great deal of spare time, still I managed to write a few stories in the evenings. Recognition was one of them, and four years later it saw print in W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook 15. In the next half decade Paul would become the most regular of my very few literary outlets; for by then my agent in the US, Kirby McCauley, was more or less obliged to concentrate his efforts on a guy called Stephen King. Perhaps it’s a good job I was in the Army and didn’t have to support my family with my writing! The narrator of this story could easily be mistaken for a psychic investigator similar to Titus Crow; in fact I almost made it a Crow story. But no, that wasn’t to be, for Crow’s nature was far more bold, daring and… inquisitive? I’m sure that you’ll understand my meaning at the story’s very end.
I
As to why I asked you all to join me here, and why I’m making it worth your while by paying each of you five hundred pounds for your time and trouble, the answer is simple. The place appears to be haunted, and I want rid of the ghost.”
The speaker was young, his voice cultured, his features fine and aristocratic. He was Lord David Marriot, and the place of which he spoke was a Marriot property: a large, ungainly, mongrel architecture of dim and doubtful origins, standing gaunt and gloomily atmospheric in an acre of brooding oaks. The wood itself stood central in nine acres of otherwise barren moors borderland.
Lord Marriot’s audience numbered four: the sprightly octogenarian Lawrence Danford, a retired man of the cloth; by contrast the so-called “mediums” Jonathan Turnbull and Jason Lavery, each a “specialist” in his own right; and myself, an old friend of the family whose name does not really matter since I had no special part to play. I was simply there as an observer—an adviser, if you like—in a matter for which, from the beginning, I had no great liking.
Waiting on the arrival of the others, I had been with David Marriot at the old house all afternoon. I had long known something of the history of the place…and a little of its legend. There I now sat, comfortable and warm as our host addressed the other three, with an excellent sherry in my hand while logs crackled away in the massive fireplace. And yet suddenly, as he spoke, I felt chill and uneasy.
“You two gentlemen,” David smiled at the mediums, “will employ your special talents to discover and define the malignancy, if indeed such an element exists; and you, sir,” he spoke to the elderly cleric, “will attempt to exorcise the unhappy—creature?—once we know who or what it is.” Attracted by my involuntary agitation, frowning, he paused and turned to me. “Is something troubling you, my friend…?”
“I”m sorry to have to stop you almost before you’ve started, David,” I apologised, “but I’ve given it some thought and—well, this plan of yours
worries me.”
Lord Marriot’s guests looked at me in some surprise, seeming to notice me for the first time, although of course we had been introduced; for after all they were the experts while I was merely an observer. Nevertheless, and while I was never endowed with any special psychic talent that I know of (and while certainly, if ever I had been, I never would have dabbled), I did know a little of my subject and had always been interested in such things
.
And who knows?—perhaps I do have some sort of sixth sense, for as I have said, I was suddenly and quite inexplicably chilled with a sensation of foreboding that I knew had nothing at all to do with the temperature of the library. The others, for all their much-vaunted special talents, apparently felt nothing.
“My plan worries you?” Lord Marriot finally repeated. “You didn’t mention this before.”
“I didn’t know before just how you meant to go about it. Oh, I agree that the house requires some sort of exorcism, that something is quite definitely wrong with the place, but I’m not at all sure that you should concern yourself with finding out exactly what it is you’re exorcising.”
“Hmm, yes, I think I might agree,” Old Danford nodded his grey head. “Surely the essence of the, harumph, matter, is to be rid of the thing—whatever it is. Er, not,” he hastily added, “that I would want to do these two gentlemen out of a job—however much I disagree with, harumph, spiritualism and its trappings.” He turned to Turnbull and Lavery.
“Not at all, sir,” Lavery assured him, smiling thinly. “We’ve been paid in advance, as you yourself have been paid, regardless of results. We will therefore—perform—as Lord Marriot sees fit. We are not, however, spiritualists. But in any case, should our services no longer be required…” He shrugged.
“No, no question of that,” the owner of the house spoke up at once. “The advice of my good friend here has been greatly valued by my family for many years, in all manner of problems, but he would be the first to admit that he’s no expert in matters such as these. I, however, am even less of an authority, and my time is extremely short; I never have enough time for anything! That is why I commissioned him to find out all he could about the history of the house, in order to be able to offer you gentlemen something of an insight into its background.
“And I assure you that it’s not just idle curiosity than prompts me to seek out the source of the trouble here. I wish to dispose of the property, and prospective buyers just will not stay in it long enough to appreciate its many good features! And so, if we are to lay something to rest here, something which ought perhaps to have been laid to rest long ago, then I want to know what it is. Damn me, the thing’s caused me enough trouble!