The Triforium Read online

  As had happened so many times during his career as an architect, Butterfield felt compelled to clasp his head in his hands and question his sanity and that of his late father’s for choosing such a frustrating profession.

  He stroked his temples to try to ease his tension. His face felt flush. He knew that with his fair coloring he must have been turning red. Just above him, his ghost looked down at the computer screen and sneered.

  ***

  A few streets down from the office of Butterfield and Son Architects, a white limo pulled alongside the curbing. The limousine door opened and long legs stretched down to get firm footing for a pair of black patent leather pumps with 14 cm stiletto heels. A slender yet shapely woman in a short sea-green dress with small silver polka dots began walking down the sidewalk. At first her stride was determined and purposeful. She was a woman on a mission, a woman who was not going to brook any interference. The heels of her shoes announced this as they clattered on the concrete. But when she caught a glimpse of a white gold-leaf sign that announced the place of business of her quarry, the clipped staccato sound of her footfall slowed to a gentle dolce. Her movements became exaggeratedly feminine. Her body swayed tenderly. The small purse that she had been dangling at her side was now raised and perched by her left breast.

  Her normal scent of alcohol and wormwood had been doctored. That was because Artemisia had doused her with a special perfume. It was a pheromone-based concoction containing vomodors and androstenone. Potions were Artemisia’s specialty. She had made this one specifically for Maeva Wolusky’s undertaking; it contained a quantity of pine pollen, some sow’s urine, and a little vaginal aliphatic acid from a couple of rhesus monkeys. But the main ingredient was axillary sweat, which Artemisia had collected from the armpits of some very over-worked Bulgarian whores in an East London knocking shop. Of course, all of these malodorous scents had been masked with the sweet fragrances of vanilla bean and tonka bean infused in ambergris. Maeva was primed for the kill.

  As she approached the door to the office, she could see a young man with red hair engrossed with an image on a computer terminal. She stopped for a second to examine him. Butterfield was a fidgety sort of person. He was banging the sides of his head with his hands, first with the left then with the right. He alternated this pattern back and forth as he hunched forward. This was the man that Hecuba had described; there was no doubt. She stared for a few seconds. It was amazing. What an odd-looking soul this Butterfield had and it was truly unstuck — or rather partially unstuck — more like its head had gotten caught in a door that life had slammed shut before the body could decompose.

  Maeva was walking a fine line. She hadn’t wanted to drink too much of her Green Man’s Own. Too much and she’d be looped. Too much and no matter how powerful Artemisia’s musk concoction was, she would never get the job. Maeva was traveling in the silver chair side of her psyche. She had had just enough absinthe to guarantee her mental clarity but not enough to deaden her own ghost’s influence upon her frontal lobes.

  Butterfield was banging out “Shave and a Haircut Two Bits” upon the sides of his cranium when Maeva pounced.

  The door to Butterfield and Son’s opened with a decided creak. “Porn?”

  “What? Excuse me?” Wallace was taken aback.

  “Just kidding, do forgive me. I can’t ever pass on a joke. I’m your three o’clock appointment, Maeva Wolusky.”

  “No, no just dealing with some plans.” He felt a need to declare his innocence. “Oh yes, Ms. Wolusky. Do come in here. Please sit down.” Wallace moved a second-hand office chair forward as Maeva extended a hand.

  Butterfield clasped it in politeness, still concerned that she might think he had been googling naked women.

  Maeva held his hand firm. She wanted him close enough so that this whole interviewing process would be swayed by Artemisia’s pheromone-based love potion. As she clutched Butterfield’s hand, she looked up briefly at his ghost. She wasn’t playing coy with Butterfield, but with his ghost.

  This unsettled Butterfield’s ghost, for it liked being the thing hovering in the periphery, liked seeing but not being seen, liked influencing Butterfield through nightmares and shivers down his spine. Maeva apparently saw the ghost and knew it for what it was. There was no shriek. No “Oh my god! What is that? What is that?” No, there was just a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

  It was the second time that day that this had happened. And it was the third time in a week that the ghost had been confronted by something it had never seen before. In the 28 years he and Wallace had been together, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Now, all sorts of craziness… The ghost was growing very nervous.

  Maeva’s head was flashing on again, off again, indiscriminately, higgledy-piggledy, like a malfunctioning traffic signal. Her eyes were most peculiar too. The large blue bulging eye of her ghost would come and go, on and off. She was a freak!

  “So, Maeva please be seated.” Butterfield gestured to the chair, which Maeva pulled closer to him, so that her exposed knees were nearly touching his trousers. At first Wallace wished she hadn’t done that. It was awfully cheeky of her, Wallace thought.

  True, she was an exquisitely beautiful woman, but having perfect creamy white skin, lustrous dark hair, and deep dark brown eyes that smoldered with intense sexuality did not give her license to flirt her way into a job.

  Butterfield’s ghost tried to amplify Butterfield’s concerns by flashing negative images into his cerebral cortex. First the ghost tried a depiction of Wallace in a wheelchair being pushed over a cliff by a scheming Maeva. Oddly, this didn’t work. Wallace had a fear of falling. It was a standard ingredient in the goulash of horrors that the ghost served up every evening as nightmares. Then, the ghost presented an image of Wallace dumping buckets of cash into a bathtub that the naked Maeva was bathing in. This proved to be a miscalculation on the ghost’s behalf. Wallace was pleasantly receptive to the vision of a naked Maeva: Maeva naked in the interview, Maeva naked in the shower, Maeva naked in bed. The ghost tried to counter the fantasies that it had inadvertently promoted: Maeva covered in spiders, Maeva with no hair, Maeva as a man, but it was to no avail.

  Wallace took in a deep breath and sighed, “Would 15 pounds an hour be sufficient to start you out on?”

  Chapter Eight

  A Haunting We Shall Go

  Only one of the five bedrooms of a Georgian townhouse near Belgrade Square was occupied. The Dean of Westminster enjoyed solitude. His days were always too filled with people. His duties brought him into contact with an endless procession of glad-handing politicians, overly pious parishioners, and irredeemable and recalcitrant staff. But here in his oasis of solitude, the only staff he dealt with were contractual. No need to worry about unfair dismissal claims, workplace grievances, or the interminable disciplinary hearings. At home, Upstairs Care on Wheels, Ltd. took on all his problems. The Dean only needed a cook and a cleaning lady and rented them by the hour through this admirable domestic workers service. So, his house was cleaned long before he came home, and dinner was left for him in a large well-stocked and air-purified refrigerator. There were no smoking issues here. If he ever suspected that even a whiff of burnt tobacco had made its way into his laundry room, he would be immediately on the phone with Upstairs Care: end of problem. No trade union grievances at 748 D Ipswich Mews.

  It had been a particularly bad week at the Abbey. It started with the West London Women’s Civic Association tour of the smoke-filled triforium and ended with an elderly woman in a walker sinking down to her hips in muck where a broken sewer main had erupted on the south lawn. The fire brigades and the ambulance service were called in on that one. It was mortifying. The old woman’s family had said that she was not all together there; they had apparently turned their backs on her for just a minute when she decided to bull her way through the yellow caution tape. Tourists and reporters snapped away on
their cameras, documenting every misstep, as the old girl struggled to inch her way up and out of the smelly ooze.

  But it was over. Another week of tumult had passed. Tomorrow was Tuesday, his day off. And now he was home, several miles from the Abbey, and safe within his retreat; his sanctum sanctorum, his cloister, an isle of sanity removed from all those cares of having good public relations. The cleaning lady had done her duty. There was a glass and an opened bottle of cream sherry on his bed stand. His bed sheets had been starched and ironed and the Dean slipped between them like a child exhausted from play and awaiting his mother’s goodnight kiss and a bedtime story. Then sleep would carry him away. On the bed stand was the bedtime story. The Dean sipped a little sherry from his glass and then opened to the first chapter of “A Lady Never Surrenders.”

  Well before midnight, the Dean dozed off. His half-frame reading glasses, in due course, inched down the bridge off his nose far enough to disturb his slumber. Mechanically, he removed them and placed them and his book next to the reading lamp, which he groggily switched off. Once again he was fast asleep. As he lay in his slumber, dreaming of scantily clad missionaries’ daughters converting the heathen tribes of Westchester County, New York, a strange sensation began to insinuate itself into his darkened room.

  At first it was only a vaporous substance suspended in the air. It thickened and began to coalesce into a faintly pulsating blue glow. The longcase clock down in the foyer began to strike twelve. As it did so, the temperature of the bedroom grew colder. The coverlet atop the bed frosted over with a thin layer of ice crystals. The glow intensified and an image flickered, a silhouette, gaining proportion and detail. As the Dean slept, static charges of electricity discharged about his room. Positive ions and free electrons spit and sparked above his head. A golden aura formed within the confines of a human shape. Then, through this cosmic fire, strode a king.

  He was a great and angry spirit. He tossed his long grey hair about as he jerked his head in agitation. His face was contorted with so much pain that he could have been wearing sackcloth and a crown of thorns instead of royal raiment. Upon his head he wore a crown of golden oak leaves, with white pearls and blue sapphires, yet this crown was less regal looking than the head it adorned. The king’s ermine robe heaved and expanded with each of his ghostly breaths, as the point of his broadsword twitched in the nap of the Dean of Westminster’s shag carpeting. Then the gauntleted hands that gripped tight the bejeweled hilt, lifted this sword high above his head.

  “O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on it fie! It is an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature!”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!” The Dean of Westminster had awoken.

  “No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!”

  With this, the king brought his broadsword down. It sliced through the coverlet, crashing into the box springs of the bed. The sword lodged, hilt gently swaying, between the dean’s knees.

  If the Dean of Westminster had had any illusions that all of this was part of some phantasmagorical dream, such misapprehensions had now been dispelled.

  He cried out again in absolute panic.

  “Silence!” the king bellowed. “Art thou not my servant? Dost thou not attend to our Lord’s flock at my sacred Abbey? Art thou not the guardian of my bones, steward of high tombs and warden of blessed sepulchers of those most worthy remains that have in their brief span made glorious the name England?”

  The Dean no longer had a scream in him but sat at the far side of the bed, huddled up and hyperventilating. He could not even look in the direction of the king. He just moaned as the king watched patiently. But in due time the Dean’s breaths became less labored. He gripped his arms around his knees tightly and then stole a furtive glance in the direction of his spectral visitor.

  The king took this as an overture to renew their acquaintance. “Oh I have watched thee in thy daily course presiding over the affairs of thy congregation. Thou art a good man. A true man of God and I crave thy service.”

  “Whooo are you? Ah, what are you?” the Dean said with the little strength he had left.

  “Why come hither man and know me better. For I am the king who had laid the foundation of thy Abbey.”

  The words took a while to find a resting place within the Dean’s brain. The fact that he was a minister of the Church of England had momentarily escaped him. The fact that he was the 41 st Dean of Westminster Abbey was nowhere to be found. But things began to drift back into place.

  “You … you are saying that you are King Edward — Saint Edward — Saint Edward the Confessor?”

  King Edward indicated his assent with a slow and gracious tilt of his head.

  The Dean’s mood now swiftly changed from abject despair to sublime exhilaration. He was not losing his mind or being haunted by some devilish monarch. Oh no, he had been blessed by a holy visitation. He was experiencing a miracle.

  “Oh, my lord. What have I done to deserve such trust for you to come to me?” The Dean scrambled off his bed and knelt before the pulsating blue feet of the king. He raised his hands in prayer.

  “Come now rise up. Greet me as a fellow Christian for we are both in the service of God and equal unto his eyes.” He grabbed the Dean about his shoulder and helped lift him to his feet.

  “Please tell me how I may be of assistance my Lord?”

  “I need thee to help right an ancient wrong.”

  “How? How?”

  King Edward stepped backwards, turning away. In a moment he faced back again, sweeping his ermine robe before him with a flourish, and pointed to heaven.

  “Time has unfolded what plaited cunning hides. Harken, there was this priest, a false mendicant, who swore to renounce all worldly possessions, but in due course perjured that oath and robbed our Abbey of its greatest possession. There is no more faith than in a stewed prune than was in this perfidious priest. Thou hast heard of the martyred saint, Saint Cyriacus?”

  “Saint C-y-riacus. Oh yes, the Roman Christian nobleman who gave away his wealth and ministered to the needs of the slaves in Diocletian’s bath. As I recall, the Romans had burning pitch poured upon his head.”

  “Aye! Tis true. Tis true. His soul now rests in the bosom of our Lord, but not his arm. That magical arm, wrought with silver and gold, transformed into a reliquary, fashioned with such art and cunning that like the living limb it did so appear. Nuns from far off Strasburg brought this divine appendage to Westminster upon the day of the Abbey’s sacred consecration and placed it upon the high altar. There it abided for over 500 years, a sacred arm clothed in precious metals uplifted toward the heavens in a benediction for all mankind. Lepers were cured by its touch, evil blood was purified, demons were driven out, and sight restored by it. But then that accursed priest, Father Benedictus, stole it!”

  “Father Benedictus?”

  “Aye, thou hast heard of the knave?”

  “Well, there’s a silly ghost story…” The Dean checked himself and began again. “Yes, I’ve heard tales of a ghost named Benedictus. They say he floats about the Abbey and chats up visitors.”

  “Truly this is the same Benedictus. The wretch must be looking for accomplices.”

  “Accomplices?”

  “During the Reformation, one of those regrettable times when the Abbey was being sacked and looted, this dissembling cur, Benedictus, grabbed the reliquary, telling all that Saint Cyriacus had just spoken unto him and commanded that he hide the sacred arm lest it be stolen. None could stop him. He dashed forth from the Abbey with it and was never seen — that is, as a living priest — again. Benedictus was murdered that day while attempting to sell the arm to some thieves.

  “He had been too coy with th
em and they’d resorted to torture, hoping that he would tell them where he had hidden his treasure. But Benedictus showed resolve and died silently, his greed worth more than his own life. That very greed still liveth in his spirit and still doth covet the reliquary. But alas, he needs corporeal aid to dig it up — a living accomplice. But such a fool is hard to come by, for our Lord reveals to all that are tempted a vision of their lives in hell!”

  “Torments of hell? Saint Edward, my own soul is very dear to me!”

  The Dean was again close to hyperventilating himself into a swoon.

  “Calm thyself. The fiery pit is not for you, but to be shoulder-to-shoulder for all eternity with the angels up above. Nay, God shall be heartily pleased with thee for thy labors this eve. For I have found where Benedictus hast buried the sacred relic and we shall restore it unto his church.”

  “It’s been buried? You’ve found it?”

  “Aye. For over 400 years my eyes have searched from beyond my crypt, beyond where I lie within my chapel within my great Abbey. Here I have seen many doings and the doings of Benedictus have never escaped me.”

  “And what have you found, uhh, good king?”

  “A broken sewer main! A broken sewer main has rewarded my vigil! When it cracked, Benedictus fell into a panic. His specter flew to it, fretted over it, hovered over it and would not be content till the main had been patched and the work crews had gone. Thou know what that means?”

  The Dean shook his head.