A Gift from Father

There was a knock at the door. William rose from the old leather chair in the study carefully putting the book he had been reading back into its proper place. He walked past the conservatory and on toward the west wing taking a left onto the main corridor. Aside from the pressure of the wind against the windows his footfalls were the only sound. The less important servants had departed days ago on holiday leaving the old house mostly empty. Many others had gone on the previous day. He expected the majority of the help would be spending Christmas with their families although he had strong suspicions that the gardener and the cook’s assistant had other plans for their winter holiday. He had noticed their budding relationship some time ago but took little interest in it. He had far more important things occupying his mind and his time. He was a man of means with considerable wealth and power and the personal lives of the help were beneath his attention - save where they impacted the running of the estate. This year had been exceptionally difficult in many ways but he had managed to meet his responsibilities (fiscal and otherwise) and keep all of his promises but one. He was a practical man and knew perfectly well that meeting his responsibilities was essential to ongoing success and he had no intention of failing.

He made his way rapidly through the silence of the house, his footfalls quiet on the cold slate floors. He had a fondness for slate floors. They reminded him of the solidity of stone and its lasting quality. The mansion, his mansion, was built primarily of stone; stone quarried from the surrounding countryside, and from other places further afield. He had realized long ago that it was important to do things properly. Compromise was too often the language of weakness; the language of failure. Odd how his unwillingness to compromise was so much like his father’s. The only worthwhile thing the old man had given him to date.

The house had taken him less time than most people would have expected, especially given its size and its location. It was quite far from the nearest railway and that would normally have complicated things. But if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well. He had worked very hard to create his little empire, to build his alliances and amass his wealth. But he knew full well that nothing from the earth was eternal; not even the stone of the earth. But some things lasted longer than others.

As he passed the library he heard the sound of knocking. A wonderful sign. The time was right, but he would have to get the door himself with so many of the servants gone. It was no matter. He was perfectly capable of answering his own door. He had given the majority of the help this bit of time off for a reason. They put up with so much from him. They all deserved some time to travel and visit their relatives. Besides this was a family matter.

He approached the main entrance of the house as the last few rays of the afternoon sun pierced the stained glass windows over the doors. Colors painted the sculpture work of the tympanum with shafts of red, yellow and green giving the marble relief an even more disturbing look than usual. The work was an antique found at a remote dig in Turkey, and he was pleased with how well it had meshed with his own style and the stained glass he had commissioned.

A second round of knocking came from the other side of the door, harder than the first. This was the moment he had been waiting for. He had sent the invitation to his father some time ago in the hopes that the old man would come, but that was no guarantee. There was a lot of bad blood between the two of them and his father’s health had been poor the last few years. William opened the door as the last of the late afternoon sun slipped down past the line of the horizon beginning another cold winter night. “Hello, Father. I’m glad you made it.”

He took his fathers hat and coat and hung them on the coat rack next the door of the sitting room. “Come into the study and sit down. We have a little wait yet before dinner. The cook is running late so you night as well make yourself comfortable.”

“William”, the voice came at him cold and dry. “Why did you ask me here? You know that your mother and I, god rest her soul, never got along well with you or your friends. Why ask me to dinner now?”

He felt a small surge of fear rise up inside his head. He needed this to go well. He crossed to the cabinet on the far wall and took out a bottle. “I know you used to have a taste for this brand – though only on important days of course. Would you care for some brandy, Father?”

“Thank you William, but no. You know full well my feelings on vice, and the weakness of the flesh. I gave up the last of my intemperate habits several years ago. That’s something you could stand to think about.”

“A pity.” William said, and smiled at his father in the hopes that things would still go reasonably. He very much wanted a drink of brandy to steel him against the rest of the night but he knew after that last statement on ‘vice’ that his father would probably leave if he drank alcohol in the old mans presence. Instead he placed the bottle back in the cabinet, closing the stained oak doors. “You know, Father, I realize that we’ve never gotten along that well, especially because of our religious differences, and that’s why I invited you to dinner. I feel that we should know each other better. At the very least we should be able to be civil through a simple thing like a family dinner. The bond of family, of shared blood and bone, is an important one and I take it very seriously.”

A bell rang in the other room. “Ah, I see that cook has finished. All the other kitchen servants are on holiday right now, so it took her longer than she expected.”

“I’ll not eat with you.”

The words were cold and detached, just like the man himself. Cold, distant and incapable of normal humanity. Just as William remembered him.

“I was afraid of this.” William left his chair and crossed the room to his desk. “I am sorry if I have done anything to offend you, Father. Please stay for dinner. I do not want there to be any distance between us.”

“I said I will not eat with you. My beliefs are quite clear on this. There is no room for such things. Read it for yourself in first Corinthians 5, if you have a bible in your house. I only came because it was a matter of family responsibility to see if you could be persuaded back to the way of faith; the way of God. I know now that it was a fools errand. It is obvious that you will never be changed. You drink. I see tobacco on the desk. You surround yourself with all of this wealth and luxury without a thought to what you might give to the church. I can see the marks of a life of vice on your face, and so I will take my leave.”

William sighed audibly, leaning his hand on a bookend on his desk. It was a curio that he had picked up a few years ago while in Egypt. A piece of old stonework. He absentmindedly ran his fingers over the eroded stone shape beneath his hand. The stone was ancient and weathered. It had a smooth feeling under his fingers. The erosion of the ages was one thing that could not be successfully simulated by modern methods. People in the art trade, antiquities and the tourist trade had tried to match the real thing, but they never managed to reproduce the patina of true antiquity, or the fine smooth texture of the stone.

“Now I’ll have to do this the hard way.” “You know father, it would have been so much easier if you had simply drunk the brandy, or eaten a few bites of the entrée.”

William took the stone in his hand and hit his father on the head. It struck with a dull thud, sending a small spray of crimson across the room. The old man screamed in pain, shielding his head with his hands as the second blow fell. He slowly tumbled to the ground, and then there was nothing but darkness.

A cold winter December wind blew across the small clearing in the woods. Torches ringed the area. The limp figure on the block of stone slowly began to move, breath rattling in his chest. He coughed, straining against the chains that held him fast. “Oh my head! William what have you done to me?”

“I’m glad to see that you’re awake, Father. It will be better this way.” The robed figure of William approached the rectangular block of stone that sat at the base of a tall black monolith. Strange carvings, partially hidden by the night and distorted by the shifting light, could be seen on a black weathered stone that pointed to the sky. Dark trees swayed in the wind, casting twisted shadows across the bare flesh of his fathers body. Torch light flickered in the small clearing.

The naked old man on the block winced in pain, his manacled arms tried, and failed, to clutch at his throbbing head. He began to shake with the cold. The cold of the night. The cold of the winter. The cold of the stone beneath him, the cold that filled him and which had stiffened his old joints. He stared at the once familiar face above his own. The face was his sons, yet not. The visage seemed somehow twisted and wrong. He also knew what must have happened, in the house the blows his son had struck him, but he could not understand the meaning behind it.

William drew the hood back from his head and looked down at the withered old body on the stone block. Everything was where it should be.

“For a moment I though that I’d killed you too soon. It took a bit of doing to stop the blood. A messy bandaging job, but it will hold long enough. Don’t tell me that you are surprised? You shouldn’t be. I am not a wealthy man by accident you know. I worked for it all, and the price has been high.” Williams’ voice sounded distant somehow, but the old man held onto the words, as if it was the only sensible thing in the midst of this nightmare.

“I’ve always had certain interests, as you well know. At first it was my dreams, and then the seances and foolish tricksters, but unlike most of my friends I was serious. I did research and I found a few kindred people. I eventually learned the true ways; the old ways. I found, as one would expect, that there were rewards for the faithful. It’s all so very unfortunate from your standpoint. I understand that, but that is the way of things. Promises must be kept. The lion takes and the gazelle dies.”

The chant rose slowly as his son stood over him. Through the haze of his pounding head he saw them; William near his head, and the others. The dark figures that were capering in the firelight, moving to the sound of the words. Moving slowly closer. Their chanted discordant chorus of words, if they were words, were meaningless to him, yet they filled his marrow with cold fear. They twisted within his mind and railed against reason and goodness. There was something to them that did not seem human. He turned his head, peering at the figures in the shadows. Their voices were odd; harsh, strained, primordial, guttural. He saw the ring as they danced around him, passing within the torches, crowding around his son and around the old black stone that rose over all of them. He saw the robed figures crowding around him, peering at his body on the black rock that held him. Blood trickled down from the bandage on his head and stung his eyes. The figures surrounding him became a nightmare of pain and fear and sound.

And then they were silent.

Strange guttural words began to come from his sons mouth.

“Ei Ei Yogsoth”

Again and again the words came, rising above the sound of the wind. The earth began to shake beneath him and the wind rose to a strange discordant howl. Then for a moment the whole world shook, as if a deep crack of thunder had rent the earth itself into pieces. Rain fell suddenly from the sky in pounding torrents. The black stone knife in his son’s hands plunged deeply into his. An old man died in a fountain of blood. The priest and his followers feasted. The promise was fulfilled. The gatekeeper entered and spoke to them.

A translation from the Arabic of Abdul Al Hazrad

“Many magicians who would attain more knowledge and power, beg favours of the keeper of the gate. Woe to those who do not keep their promises.”

“In all of the most powerful and blackest ceremonies there is the sacrifice of an innocent, especially those that would summon and speak with those beyond that should not be named. The innocent is not one pure of flesh, but one devoid of the knowledge of the great evils . . . “

“In the worst and most accursed of these the victim should be one who the slayer knows by blood, and more abominable than this, those who would speak with the key often choose to know the flesh of their sacrifice at their feasting.”