Figures of Fear by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780105994
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

SPIRITS OF THE AGE

Michael was sitting in Prince Albert’s writing room when he thought that he could hear a woman sobbing. He sat up straight and listened. It was very faint, as if she had her face buried in a pillow, and after a few seconds it died away altogether, so that he couldn’t be sure that he had heard it at all.

Outside, it was a blustery day, and for all its opulence Osborne House was notoriously drafty, especially when there were North Easterlies blowing across the Solent.

It could have been nothing but the wind, whining down one of the chimneys. It could have been water, quietly gurgling through the miles of elaborate nineteenth-century plumbing. But he stayed quite still, listening, and in the gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace his reflection listened, too – pale-faced, his glass tilted and his hair sticking up at the back.

After a long pause he went back to tapping at his laptop. It didn’t take much to distract him. He was working as a research assistant for Buller & Haig, the art publishers, who were planning to bring out a lavish coffee-table book on all of Prince Albert’s gardens. It wasn’t the kind of job that Michael had ever wanted to do. He had left Middlesex University with a second-class English degree and ambitions of being a magazine journalist, the new Tom Wolfe, all coruscating adjectives and supercilious satire. But as one rejection followed another, it began to dawn on him that his entire university career had left him over-educated and out of touch. Magazines didn’t want literary wasps any more. They wanted New Lads who told it like it was, with F in every other sentence.

The morning that his rejection letter from Vanity Fair arrived in the post, his girlfriend Sam called him to say that she was sorry, but she was leaving him for a Nigerian actor called Osibi with tribal scars on his face.

‘He understands my aura,’ she said, as if that explained everything, and put the phone down. He hadn’t been to the Isle of Wight since he was eight. All he could remember was catching tiny green crabs in a bucket and peeing in the sea. But when his university friend Richard Buller had offered him this small research job at Osborne House, he had realized that it was just what he needed. Although the island was only a twenty-minute ferry journey away from Portsmouth, and was actually in sight of the mainland, it was strangely dislocated from the rest of England. It didn’t just belong in the sixties, it belonged in some version of the sixties that had never happened anywhere else, except within the imaginations of retired folk who wore beige cardigans and lived in pebble-dashed bungalows called ‘Meadhurst’, as well as a few hippies with odd burring accents and mongrels on the end of a string. A community with a tenuous grip on reality.

But Michael badly needed to convalesce, and to concentrate on something other than his

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