The romantic legend of the Holy Grail is almost without parallel in the stories of chivalry. It has about it a quality of inspiration and a standard of purity that transcends everyday life. It shines like a star through the darkness of the Dark Ages. But what if Satan has his own counterpart? What if - just as the Black Mass of the witches and wizards, is an abominable reversal of the Holy Communion Service of the Christian - what if, then, there is an Unholy grail? A sinister thing of death and terror. A glittering, golden chalice forged in the nethermost chasms of Hell, wrought by the hands of unholy craftsmen. Gilded by demons, decked with gems by jewellers who life with the Prince of Darkness.
A thing that originated below the dark hills where trolls dwell...
That, too, would be the object of many a quest. There would be dedicated heroes searching to destroy it. There would be unscrupulous men who wanted to employ its dark power for their own ends. There would be weak men unable to resist its call. There would be strong men whose wills clashed with the almost irresistible power of the Golden Goblet.
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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HARRY DAWLISH was reading the public notices column of his Sunday paper. Oddly enough, it was a thing which he very rarely did, and yet, to-day of all days, by some rather odd quirk of Fate, Harry Dawlish’s eyes were scanning that column. Normally, like most of his fellows in the bookmaking fraternity, once Harry had read the sports pages and particularly the racing information, there was no more information that interested him. He had only a cursory acquaintance with politics, both national and international; he had no particular interest in the lives, fortunes, or failings of the film or theatrical world. The Society page interested him not at all, except when it had a report in it on Ascot, and that left very little except the crime and the sport.
Harry Dawlish was a singularly cheerful individual, tall, slim, quite athletic, despite the fact that the red hair at his temples was beginning to tinge with grey.
His dark eyes suddenly riveted themselves on the surname ‘Dawlish’ It was not a particularly common name and he wondered why it was that the strange, long arm of coincidence had suggested to him, from some peculiar depth of his subconscious, that it would be advantageous for him to-day to read the public announcements column.
“Roderick Dawlish, deceased,” ran the heading. “The kith and kin of the late Roderick Dawlish of Long Barrow Hall Staffordshire are invited to contact Messrs. Dewsbury, Tiptree and Blenkinsopp, at the following address, where they will hear something to their advantage.”
He read the advert again.
“Roderick Dawlish, deceased … contact Dewsbury, Tiptree and Blenkinsopp, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, where they will hear something to their advantage.…”
Roderick Dawlish, deceased, of Long Barrow Hall, Staffordshire, had to be great-uncle Roderick. Harry’s mind went flashing back to his rather distant childhood. It had been well over thirty years since he had last seen great-uncle Roderick. The second World War had intervened and he had not been back to Staffordshire since. It had just been one of those things.… During the enforced separation of war the family had drifted apart and his father had lost touch with the Staffordshire branch.
Not that that was a particularly difficult thing to do, for the little that he remembered of great uncle Roderick was not by any means pleasant. Long Barrow Hall, he recalled—even allowing for the rather grim memories which childhood superimposed upon a place—had been far too big and far too cold, even at pre-war coal prices. It was not a place that ever could be heated. No matter how many fires roared up its gigantic chimneys, the cold of those enormous rooms seemed to mock the flames, as though the cold itself were a sentient, animate thing.
As he sat looking at those few stark lines of print he remembered all the stories his father had told of great-uncle Roderick. It was like allowing the film of memory to run through, while the advertisement “Roderick Dawlish, deceased,” superimposed itself upon the memory film, like the sub-titles at the cinema, when a continental offering is being shown. “Roderick Dawlish, deceased.” Great-uncle Roderick was dead. Harry tried hard to recall some of those childhood episodes. Great-uncle Roderick, very, very tall, and very, very thin; with beady eyes, and a great hooked hawk nose, and yellow discoloured teeth.
Harry remembered his father saying once that great-uncle Roderick only needed one white and he would have had a snooker set.
And his ears—there was something very odd about the lobes of his ears. They lay close to his head, and they were very, very long—unnatural lobes, appended to unusual ears. Wherever you went it seemed that great-uncle Roderick’s ears were following you. Whether you hid in the cellar or the attic, the kitchen or the lounge, the library or the billiard room, you felt that he could always hear whatever you said. When he was a child Harry had got the impression that great-uncle Roderick could hear what he was thinking, as well as what he was actually saying.
Long after leaving Long Barrow Hall for the last time young Harry had read George Orwell’s immortal science fiction classic ‘1984’. He recalled those sinister lines, ‘Big Brother is watching you—the secret police are everywhere.’ That was how it had been in his great-uncle’s hall. Great-uncle was watching you, and the secret police—great-uncle’s ears—were, literally, everywhere.
Old Roderick Dawlish had had a singularly odd habit of cropping up in the most unexpected places. You would see him go in at one door and vanish. He would reappear—very, very unexpectedly in a completely different direction, without there being a particularly simple, logical, rational reasonable explanation.
It was as though in some way he was able to defy the laws of space, time and relativity and travel through some weird, private fourth dimension of his own. Harry thought of the way in which his father had regarded his great-uncle. George Dawlish, Harry’s pater, had gone down in such a way during the Battle of Britain, that he had won himself, or rather had won his family, a posthumous D.F.C. He was not a man who ever knew the meaning of fear, and yet George had been somehow uneasy, in the presence of mad old uncle Roderick.
There was no doubt now in Harry’s mind as he looked back that uncle Roderick had been mad. He had been as mad as it is possible for a man to be outside an institution.
His eyes shone with a strange, sinister fire of their own. Harry had read somewhere that the eye was supposed to be the window of a man’s soul. Old Roderick’s soul had looked out of his eyes, and Harry had no particular wish to meet it for it had not been a pleasant thing, wild, dangerous, mysterious and somehow frighteningly evil. Yet it had been a powerful thing. To look at Roderick Dawlish in his last years had been like looking at a crumbling clay castle in which dark, eternal lights from some strange source burned and effervesced.
Sparks flew upwards from old Roderick Dawlish’s soul, as the sparks fly upwards when the trolls under the hill are plying their infernal craft.
What was to be done about it, thought Harry, as he looked at the advertisement again. The memory film had run out. The sub-titles lingered on. His memories of old Roderick had not been particularly happy ones. Should he just ‘write off’ his childhood losses, so to speak? And forget that great-uncle Roderick had ever existed, or——? The common sense of the adult man took over from the childhood memories of fear and strangeness—if there was anything to be had, and it appeared that there might be, now was a good chance to step in and have it. True, he was comfortably off, but no man is so comfortably off that he can say he has no use whatever for any extra money.
If the Hall was to be sold, and the proceeds divided between surviving relatives, and provided that land prices in Staffordshire were anything like land prices elsewhere, then the Hall and its grounds ought to fetch a tidy sum. Enough to enable Harry—an up-and-coming businessman—to open three or four extra branch offices in other boroughs. And no bookie could ever have too many branch offices. A branch office is an insurance policy—even if all the favourites won for a whole season, a man with enough branch offices would be able to keep going—provided he farmed out his bets intelligently, and didn’t try to carry more than he could comfortably cope with. But the niceties of his profession were outside the scope of his present train of thought, decided Harry.
It was his proud boast that he had never, at any time, failed to pay off in full, and as long as he had a ha’penny to his name he swore that he always would. Every man has his code, his standard of behaviour, his morals and his ethics. To Harry the Turf was an honourable, decent profession, and a man who ‘welshed’ on his bet was the lowest of the low. He always paid in full himself, he expected to be paid in full. To Harry, a debt of honour was more binding than a legal debt, because it was honour that counted.
The Dawlishes were an old and honourable family and Harry had certainly lost none of the family traits and traditions.
He looked at that paper again. What should he do about it? It was difficult to know what to do. Let the whole thing go, and pretend he hadn’t seen it? Or——?
The thought of opening a few more branch offices appealed to him immensely.
“I think I’ll go,” he said, half to the paper and half to the table upon which it was laying. “Yes, I definitely think I’ll go,” he announced to the reast of the appurtenances of the flat. “I’ll certainly go,” he said to his telephone as he picked it up, and made arrangements for his manager to hold the fort while he disappeared into Staffordshire for a few days.
He held the receiver to his ear and heard the familiar ‘brrp, brrp, brrp, brrp’ as his manager’s number was rung.
Alf Scanlow was inclined to be on the flashy side but he was a good manager, and Harry Dawlish had every confidence in his colleague.
“This is a nice time to be ringin’ me up, guv’nor,” said Alf in his Cockney accent “What’s on your mind then, Sunday afternoon and all?”
“I’ve just been reading a ‘Personal Column’—you know, public announcements and all that sort of thing,” said Harry.
“Yea—I saw that. That Dawlish bloke, is he any relation of yo. . .
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