The Unhappy Medium Read online

  The Unhappy Medium

  T. J. Brow n

  Copyright © T. J. Brown (2014). All rights reserved.

  www.theunhappymedium.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real events, people or places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, places or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CON TENTS

  CHAPTER 1 – Museu m 4

  CHAPTER 2 – Christopher Baxte r 9

  CHAPTER 3 – Newton Barlo w 16

  CHAPTER 4 – Landfil l 25

  CHAPTER 5 – Needs mus t 32

  CHAPTER 6 – Ido l 35

  CHAPTER 7 – Burs t 38

  CHAPTER 8 – Something wicke d 42

  CHAPTER 9 – Viv123 4 45

  CHAPTER 10 – Sensitive developmen t 55

  CHAPTER 11 – Ghost walkin g 60

  CHAPTER 12 – A scientific metho d 73

  CHAPTER 13 – A suitable bo y 82

  CHAPTER 14 – An inconvenient trut h 90

  CHAPTER 15 – To die fo r 96

  CHAPTER 16 – Hospitalit y 108

  CHAPTER 17 – An unhappy mediu m 110

  CHAPTER 18 – Inductio n 117

  CHAPTER 19 – The Two Crown s 125

  CHAPTER 20 – Astrolog y 134

  CHAPTER 21 – Three ladie s 138

  CHAPTER 22 – Smoke and mirror s 142

  CHAPTER 23 – The faithfu l 149

  CHAPTER 24 – Promotio n 156

  CHAPTER 25 – Nine tenth s 162

  CHAPTER 26 – Cardinal La Senz a 168

  CHAPTER 27 – An ill win d 175

  CHAPTER 28 – Amongst u s 182

  CHAPTER 29 – Spai n 189

  CHAPTER 30 – El combat e 195

  CHAPTER 31 – Fast car s 204

  CHAPTER 32 – Funnel s 209

  CHAPTER 33 – The gatherin g 214

  CHAPTER 34 – Machin e 220

  CHAPTER 35 – Assaul t 235

  CHAPTER 36 – The end of the affai r 243

  CHAPTER 37 – After the fir e 253

  AUTHOR’S NOT E 255

  ABOUT THE AUTHO R 255

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S 256

  CHAPTER 1 – Museu m

  The curator of the Langton Hadlow village museum paused as he crossed the quiet market square and squinted up into the intense blue of the morning sky. Already, the air was filling with thin white contrails, trailing behind scores of charter jets heading south to the cheap beaches and predictable weather of the Mediterranean. He let out a long weary sigh of frustration and scurried on past the dusty, dead shops.

  In its heyday, Langton Hadlow had been everything you would have expected from an old English village. Beneath moss-covered slates, drunken half-timbered cottages leant sleepily against each other under the fragmented ruins of the castle, their weathered façades draped in wisteria, the gardens kept impossibly picturesque by the mostly retired population. The now-wild flower baskets, wobbly doors and panelled windows still defiantly lent the place the vision of a rural idyll, but the silent shops and closed, shuttered pubs told of a newer, more unfortunate era.

  As the old curator walked bow-backed down the High Street towards his small museum, he looked sadly up at the growing number of estate agent signs and narrowed his eyes; everything seemed to be changing. There were no market days anymore. The big supermarkets in Weymouth and Swanage had long since starved out the butcher, baker and greengrocer, while online shopping had comprehensively killed off the antique shop and the second-hand bookstore. The young families had all drifted off to Dorchester and Bournemouth in search of employment and homes in which you could stand upright. Langton Hadlow had begun to die.

  The village’s rather unspectacular castle only added to the general air of neglect. It had probably looked pretty shabby when it was first built; the foundations were lousy and it had leant to the west from the very beginning. One whole wing had fallen clean away during the reign of Edward the Third, taking with it half of what had up until that point been quite a successful banquet. It had been partially rebuilt during the reign of Henry the Fifth, but it was never really quite right and visiting noblemen were not infrequently killed by falling masonry and loose crenellations.

  Its sole attempt at being a real castle came during the English Civil War, when supporters of the King were forced to dash inside to avoid a rampaging parliamentarian army coming up the road from Swanage. The defending Royalists were well stocked with cakes, pastries and a range of complementary table wines, enough to keep them from surrender for a good day and a half. And so, after a last cathartic binge in the great hall, they walked out with crumbs in their beards and their hands in the air.

  The victors elected then to deny the castle to future tourist guide books, and with a pathetically small amount of explosives – one or two kegs at most – they blew it up. The modest blast eviscerated the shoddy structure in one fell swoop, leaving nothing but a toothy inebriated ruin perched upon an unstable mound. This spectacular result astounded the sappers to such an extent that they excitedly rushed in to inspect their efforts, only to lose fourteen of their number when the master bedroom fell on them.

  In addition to its castle, Langton Hadlow once boasted five public houses around its beautiful old centre – not bad for a village with only forty six buildings. The ivy-covered Tugger’s Arms had been the biggest of the pubs, and every inch the picture-perfect English country inn. The Green Man was a more formal affair, its elegant rooms once frequented by visiting squires and traders. The Old Cock, by contrast, was a classic spit-and-sawdust pub, which the old curator could remember from his first youthful ales. Back then it had been jammed to the rafters with ruddy-faced farmers and sheepdogs. Then there was the oddly named The Piece of String, which had been unique amongst the county’s pubs for being very, very small. Its three notoriously rude staff normally outnumbered the customers, and on market days they once served burnt sausages and thin watery ales out of a hatch direct onto the pavement of Duck Street. Finally, there was The Turk’s Head, nestling into the castle wall itself. It had been a mass of flowers and justifiably famous for ploughman’s lunches with pickled onions so strong that once you’d even just smelt them, you’d cry for days afterwards. Sadly however, The Turk’s Head spent more than half its time closed, falling masonry from the castle above rendering the premises too dangerous even for the most hardened of Langton Hadlow’s drinkers .

  These grand old pubs had survived virtually intact into the 20th century, and as a result, in their time they had seen many passing faces: Tudor bowmen practising on the heathlands to the north, Georgian wool traders heading to London from Devon and Cornwall to the west, and British and American tank crews, billeted in the area in the lead-up to the D-Day invasion.

  Post-war, the market square played host to beaming day trippers, sports cars containing spivs and cocktail waitresses, and healthy young couples on bicycles. Coach parties would briefly swamp the small post office for postcards and ice cream then tear away again towards the coast.

  Due to the fresh sea breezes, ill-informed Victorian medical theorists had also deemed the local climate convivial to the insane and, as a result of their endorsement, a series of large institutes sprung up in the surrounding landscape. The mad, deluded and just plain misunderstood had been shipped down wholesale from London, where they had until then been deemed a source of entertainment in a strange foretaste of modern television.

  Not that any of this really impacted much upon old Langton Hadlow itself. For the most part, the village remained a quiet unchanging place, beloved of painters and ramblers, but still retaining its old beating heart in agriculture, community and ale.


  ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ thought the curator as he turned the corner into Mire Street, the empty, boarded-up shell of The Old Cock to his left and the dusty windows of the Langton tearooms to his right, dead wasps hanging despondently in the webs between the curtains. With a plastic clatter, a sudden breeze fluttered the estate agent signs, their brash typography clashing unsympathetically with the rural aesthetic still limping on around them.

  Of course, it hadn’t helped when the castle started falling down again, this time on top of its own gift shop. Luckily it had been empty at the time due to staff illness, but all the same, it was hardly good publicity. Then the big stores opened in the county towns and suddenly you could get Dorset clotted cream flown in from Peru in two-litre tubs for half the price of the local stuff. Cheap flights carted sun-loving holidaymakers out of England and away to where there was never any rain, the hotels were brand new and you could eat all the paella you could stomach for five Euros.

  Pretty soon the old village just withered. The quaint post office went to the wall first. Then, one by one, the pubs went belly up. Eventually, following accusations of malpractice, even the Gothic psychiatric institute nearby at Hadlow Grange shut down, its inmates released back into the community by reforming politicians, with mixed results, and the vast bleak building sold to developers.

  Only the little museum kept going.

  Langton Hadlow’s village museum had never been a big affair. The curator’s grandfather had founded the collection way back in the 1890s when he’d finally come home to his family after an eternity criss-crossing the British Empire, spreading the doctrine of administration at the point of a quill pen. With him he’d brought back five huge shipping cases packed close to bursting with relics collected during a lifetime in the service to the Crown. There were masks from the jungles of Sumatra, spears from the Naga Hills and animal skins from the bazaars of Marrakech. These formed the nucleus of a collection that grew in time to take in many European curiosities and odd little trinkets from the Americas.

  The grandfather had been given an empty milliner’s shop to house the objects by the local old Earl, a one-time major in the Royal Tank Regiment. It was a surprisingly spacious series of rooms just opposite the recently created memorial to the dead of the Great War, which even in tiny Langton Hadlow had honoured some thirty five dead, mostly from the newly formed tank corps. Later, this simple cross had been replaced by the huge lozenge shape of a genuine World War One tank, donated from a regiment up the road at Bovington Camp. The Earl was a soft and sentimental old chap who’d done a fair bit of travelling himself, much of it in pursuit of argumentative indigenous peoples. Through him, the collection finally had a permanent home and the right to declare itself proudly a proper museum. No actual deeds had been signed, admittedly, but in those gentlemanly days, well, quite often people couldn’t be bothered. The arrangement had been duly toasted in ale at The Old Cock, which was the important thing. And so, in 1920, the museum opened for business.

  It was a great success.

  Old spinsters down from Salisbury for the air and touring clergymen from the Home Counties would poke gleefully about the glass cases, perfectly content that the items were grouped in no logical pattern whatsoever and none was accurately labelled. Inspired by the attention, the locals soon started turning up with curios they had acquired themselves and these were enthusiastically added to the collection. There were flint tools from the caves at Banghampton, arrowheads from Juggin’s Lump and oddly shaped fruit and vegetables fresh from the village allotments. Stuffed birds flew in through the door in flocks, followed immediately by the small moths that enjoyed eating them.

  The curator’s father inherited the museum when the old boy finally died, succumbing to something exotic he’d been carrying since he’d played truth or dare on a packet steamer bound for Madagascar in 1879. However, the curator’s father had never been that keen on his own father’s obsessions, preferring to think of himself as a bit of a playboy and spending much of his time away from Langton Hadlow in London. He’d squandered his days drinking gallons of Pimms with a notable ‘someone’ called Bunty, something that his long-suffering wife seemed to find perpetually annoying. Weighed down by these issues, she had let her young son play unsupervised in the museum while she sat seething on the front desk, selling tickets and reading Madame Bovary . The young boy, oblivious to these adult dramas, drew the stuffed birds, wore the dusty helmets and memorised every detail of every object with a child’s intensity. Although there was a gap where his philandering father ought to be, the boy filled it with history, nature and the collection of strange vegetables on the first floor.

  His father died in the Second World War, blown to atoms by the Luftwaffe in a nightclub just off Pall Mall. The curator, however, was lucky enough to have come of age in the immediate post-war generation that could enjoy the great universities, undisturbed by mechanised total warfare. He took a degree in history and passed with decent grades that should have seen him heading for a future in academia and corduroy.

  But the pull of the old village of Langton Hadlow was strong. With his mother ailing, his decision was made, and in 1949 he returned to the museum and settled down for a modest life as its curator, untroubled by the modern age.

  The years had flown gently past the curator like clouds. The 1960s, all self and sex, had barely imposed their tie-dyed fabrics upon his consciousness. In 1972 he’d finally sewn elbow patches on his old university jacket and in 1983, for the fourth time in ten years, he’d fully catalogued the museum on index cards. The decades passed, each as uneventful as the one preceding it.

  The curator had always been too shy to ask for state funding for the little establishment, but, with a small sum bequeathed by a neighbour in 2006, he bought a computer and learnt enough code to build the museum a modest website, turning the chaotic collection into an online gallery for who knows who, somewhere out there on the web.

  By now Langton Hadlow had begun its sad decline, however, and the curator had his first ominous thoughts about the future – a niggling sense of unease that left him sleepless way into the small hours. The old folk of the village had started to die off leaving vacant properties behind them. Inevitably, these were attracting flashy estate agents like blowflies, sniffing the scent of second-home bonanzas on the same ill wind that was killing poor Langton Hadlow.

  Nearing the tiny museum, the curator looked down the old street back towards the castle. The ‘Sold’ boards were dominating the scene so much that he barely recognised the street of his happy distant childhood. The same obnoxious name seemed to occur again and again.

  ‘Another purchase by McCauley Bros, developers. We sell – we buy – we change lives.’

  ‘Well you are not going to change mine,’ thought the curator, huffing, knowing at the same time that it was probably already too late. He fumbled sadly for his keys as he neared the small museum’s door. The floor behind the letterbox was as always a slippery mass of junk mail. The curator sighed and began flicking through the envelopes.

  All but one was from the McCauley Bros group, the local property developers who for months had been prowling all over the village like hyenas. The curator knew the contents off by heart – he’d been getting the letters for a year or so, offering him just enough to give up and call it a day. But how could he? The museum had been his life, his grandfather’s wonderful old things, such treasures. Why didn’t people care anymore? It was as if they only valued property and electronic gadgets; the whole world seemed to beep like a robot. Langton Hadlow used to be free from all that.

  He binned the letters one by one without opening a single one of them. He wasn’t sure if there was any fight left in his gentle heart, or so much anger he couldn’t hold it in; he just wasn’t sure anymore. Sighing, he sat back in his chair and looked up at the old tin signs and muskets above the butterfly case and remembered quietly for a while. Whatever happened, he’d have the memories – maybe that would be enough. But then, realistically,
he knew he’d no idea about life outside in the big bad world and he began to breathe hard and fast. A sense of panic and vertigo washed over him.

  He was busy hyperventilating like this when he noticed a rattling noise from the far room, almost as if an electric razor was lying switched on in one of the cases. Not having turned the lights on for the day, the room was still dark and as he edged around the corner of the door, he was struck at once by an odd purple glow. The light was emanating from inside a small glass case, the one housing peculiar Gothic curios that his grandfather had brought back from Germany after the First World War. Several medieval carvings, goblets and crosses sat in a corner case and every one of them was frankly a bit of a monstrosity – ugly faces, crude carvings and primitive metalwork. One particular object, the one now rattling in the case, was downright creepy.

  It was a caped figure the size of an ostrich egg, with claw-like hands held clenched and angry before it. A dark red painted hood hung fully over the face, revealing only a sharp diabolic chin. It knelt, twisting and agonised, above a dark octagonal box, a silver lock sealing its heavy base. There was a large letter ‘V’ on this box, carved deep and painted blood red and gold. The curator didn’t know what on earth it signified; sure, his playful grandfather had made up all sorts of scary stories about the contents of the box and the identity of the figure, but the curator himself had never got round to properly researching the horrid thing. But now, there it was, glowing like a bedside lamp and rattling like wind-up plastic teeth. A sulphurous smell began to fill the small room as the air noticeably chilled. The few remaining hairs on the curator’s coot-bald head started to rise, almost as if he was holding a Van de Graaff generator. He stared transfixed, his gaze locked upon the object as it danced and hopped in its case, the other curios falling and breaking as it bounced and whirled amongst them.

  Abruptly, it stopped.

  CHAPTER 2 – Christopher Baxte r

  Chris Baxter, senior sales director for the West Midlands area and a growing force in Henderson Applied Plastic Solutions, was in typically buoyant mood. His spotless Lexus GS executive-performance saloon in arctic pearl finish hummed and purred just like the advertising had said it would, pounding the sales beat down the M4 corridor, burning the tarmac from the Westway into the wild frontiers of England’s industrial estates and office parks.