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  Dark Echo

  F. G. Cottam

  Dark Echo is an unlucky boat. Despite this knowledge, Martin Stannard falls under her spell and prepares to sail her across the Atlantic with his wealthy father. But his lover Suzanne begins exploring the yacht's past. What she finds is terrifying.

  Because this boat isn't just unlucky, it's evil. It was built for Henry Spalding, a soldier and sorcerer who committed suicide yet still casts his malevolent spell nearly a century after his death. Suzanne must uncover his last, terrible secret before Dark Echo destroys the man she loves.

  From Publishers Weekly

  When businessman Magnus Stannard buys Dark Echo, a haunted yacht, at the start of Cottam's overstuffed occult thriller, it fulfills a dream from his impoverished childhood: to own the luxury boat he saw in one of his favorite books. But Dark Echo's American builder, WWI hero Harry Spalding, had an unsavory history of evil exploits, and everyone who's owned the ship since his suicide has suffered misfortune and a grim death. Magnus and his son, Martin, become the latest victims of the yacht's malignant legacy when, after setting out in it to cross the Atlantic, the ship reveals the malevolent mission it has chosen them to complete. Cottam (The House of Lost Souls) works up a byzantine backstory for his spook ship that's imaginatively complex, but that thwarts thrills with its confusing historical detail, digressions into Martin and Magnus's relationship, and shifts of narrative viewpoint. What could have been an exceptional tale of maritime terrors reads more like a horror story adrift at sea.

  From Booklist

  Can a haunted object continue to cast the spell created by its evil, long-dead creator? That may be the case of Dark Echo, the oceangoing yacht in this religious-suspense/horror blend spanning the better part of a decade. Cottam sets the scene with a stunning description of nonhuman malevolence embodied in the fog covering 1917 Rouen. Add five deeply buried corpses forming a five-pointed star, a pentagram used in rituals involving animal sacrifice, and a priceless and missing holy relic thought to have delivered the final death blow to the crucified Christ, and this is one compelling story. Along the way, readers will enjoy uncovering the secrets of the regatta-winning racing schooner and its owner, the dashing millionaire Harry Spalding, as Suzanne, a contemporary heroine with a knack for research and the determination to save the man she loves, delves deep and discovers a box filled with 80 years of darkness. A shivery and entertaining read for the beach or firelit evenings.

  Also by F. G. Cottam

  The House of Lost Souls

  Dark

  ECHO

  F. G. Cottam

  Thomas Dunne Books

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

  DARK ECHO. Copyright © 2008 by F. G. Cottam. All rights reserved.

  For my lovely sister, Kate

  Prologue

  Rouen, September 1917

  Captain Destain was with Sergeant Boulez on the steps at the western entrance to the cathedral when the mist came in. They were sharing coffee brewed at a stall in one of the warren of streets surrounding the great building. He was adamant that neither man had ever in their lives seen the like of this fog. It funnelled and unfurled through the cramped thoroughfares, obscuring detail and devouring space. Destain described it as roiling and impenetrable, worse than anything he had ever encountered before near the sea, in such ports it had been his experience to visit as Antwerp or Zeebrugge. It was palpable, this fog.

  Had his men not been such experienced fighters, he thought some of them might have slipped on their gas masks in panic, believing it a chemical attack launched from long range by the heavy German artillery. But they had not heard the whistle of shells that morning. There had been no bombardment from the German front, forty miles to the east. And as they were shortly to come to learn, it was not gas that was attacking them.

  Boulez was a mountain man. He had been born and grown up in a village high in the French Alps, where his father had taught him, hunting with an antique flintlock, the marksmanship for which he was so distinguished in the corps. He had an Alpine appreciation of weather, a mountain man’s caution and hard-earned expertise. He described the fog as something similar to the mantle of invisibility that descends sometimes at altitude. It was so sudden and impenetrable that your instinct, caught in it, was to drop on all fours like a frightened animal to the safety and security of the snow powdering the earth. Except that there was no snow on the steps of the cathedral in Rouen in September. And according to Boulez, what differed about this phenomenon of the weather was that it was not the familiar, goose-feather grey of the high Alps. It was black in its swirling origins.

  Destain had always maintained to his men that the cathedral was not a fortress. You could garrison a cathedral. But you could not make impregnable a building to which all were welcome by the very nature and purpose of its existence. The rich and the poor, the infant and the elderly, they were indiscriminately invited here to worship. In war even more than in peacetime, the role and symbolism of the cathedral as a place of spiritual solace had itself to be sacrosanct.

  Nevertheless, the cathedral was heavily fortified. Destain’s men were crack troops, well trained, vigilant. They were at company strength. There were eight men altogether at the western façade, two marksmen atop the Saint-Romain Tower to its right and two up in the Beurre Tower to its left. There were units of three guarding each of the north and south portals and there were a further two sentinels at the entrance to the cathedral vault. All were armed with a carbine and a heavy calibre cavalry pistol issued to them because their fighting might have to be done at close quarters. Each man was equipped with a bayonet and a fighting knife. They were not complacent. And they were contented in their duty. The men had been hand-picked for their piety as well as their prowess in combat. They believed the thing they protected was worth the fighting and, if necessary, the dying for.

  But you cannot turn a cathedral into a fortress, as Destain kept repeating afterwards in his grief and shock, as the gangrene slowly devoured him in his hospital bed. And you should not be expected to fortify such a place against men wearing the uniform of your own allies in battle.

  The Americans came grinning through the mist. The defenders of Rouen cathedral and the sacred relic it housed smelled before they saw the Americans. They smelled the cloying sweetness on their breath of the gum the Americans habitually chewed on their marches. This clue to them was all the roiling mist at first allowed. But then, at last, the French defenders saw them.

  They came on in their doughboy uniforms with the short coats worn over their britches and their spats and shiny leather boots and their stubby Garand rifles carried at port arms. The mist did not seem to disorient or discomfit them in the slightest. They glided through it and only when they were within whispering distance of the French troops guarding the cathedral did they raise their rifles and begin with deadly nonchalance to squeeze off rounds aimed squarely at their brothers in arms.

  The fog had deadened the sound as well as the sight of their approach, Destain said. It muffled the reports of their bullets exploding from the barrels of their weapons when the ambush began and they started to shoot. It deadened the sound of rounds ricocheting off the cathedral’s ancient masonry. It did not stop us firing back. The return fire, from the top of the towers in particular, was immediate and deliberate and murderous. The men at the portals quickly redeployed to reinforce their comrades. We established a withering field of fire. We were shooting at shadows, of course, but the very air was alive with the hum and screech of lethal projectiles. Nothing could have lived through such a sustained storm of assault. We fought the men of the fog with a blizzard of steel.

  But the mutinous Americans came on. Incredibly, they ambled forward casual, alive. At their centre was a man taller than the
rest of them and bare-headed. His white-blond hair picked him out in the wreaths of gloom with the haze of cordite thickening it even further in the firefight. He was a glimpse, a phantom. He was, said Destain, the pale, smiling rumour of a man. Destain took the cavalry pistol from the holster on his belt, aimed carefully and fired a round at the American. One was all he had time for. He pulled the stiff trigger once and felt the crash of recoil jerk through his wrist and forearm.

  I had never been surer of a shot in my life. And I could shoot. And at that range, the weapon was always accurate. But I must have missed, he said. I must have missed. Because the American just grinned through the fog and raised his rifle and shot me through the shoulder with an impact that put me breathless and bleeding on my back on the cathedral steps. I began to lose consciousness. Sound, already dampened by the fog, became sluggish and indistinct and dim. A scarlet curtain descended over my sight. And then I smelled the mingling, pungent scents of cologne and Turkish tobacco as someone knelt beside me to whisper in my ear. And I knew it was the American renegade, invulnerable to our weapons, come to gloat. I understood English well enough. Of course I did. I had been listening to it spoken in France through three long years of war.

  Not your day, sport, he said.

  He used the language of a man who had just beaten a fellow member of his own sporting club in a Sunday bicycle race.

  Not your day, old chum.

  You’ll burn in Hell, I told him. And I thought then he would take the pistol from his belt and finish me for the remark. But he merely laughed. It was a grim and callous sound, mirth echoing from an open crypt. It seemed barely human. It was a sound in utter contrast to the character of his words. Perhaps he was only impersonating a man. He was as unnatural, I think, as the fog that had announced and then delivered him. Last I heard the nailed soles of his boots, slick on the spilled blood of my comrades on the cobbles.

  Of course, I knew what he had come there for, Destain said.

  And the men at the captain’s hospital bedside, the grim deputation from the Vatican watching the infection kill him, lowered their eyes as he and some of them crossed themselves.

  And so I knew that he would, indeed, burn in Hell. One day and for ever, I knew that the smiling American would come to know damnation.

  Martin

  One

  It was wholly in character for my father to buy a thing cursed. He didn’t give a damn for dubious reputations. He believed in nothing he hadn’t seen for himself or could not prove. Price was never a consideration either, I don’t think, in determining what he chose to acquire, except when set very high. Then, his rapacious appetite for ownership could make a thing impossible to resist. Rarity tempted him. But he was a man, I think, without superstition and I’m sure, even thinking upon it now, devoid of remorse or even the subtler sentiment of regret. His famous nerve had enabled him to build his fortune. Every day that fortune swaggered and grew, his instinct gained a sort of strength and vindication. He was confident and fearless and his decisions were never reneged upon. Bidding at auction for the wreck of an unlucky boat was nothing to him and winning the auction was nothing short of what he would have expected. But what happened next surprised everyone. Perhaps it even surprised my father. I wish I had asked him. I fear I will not now ever get the opportunity. I don’t know, though. When I think about what has happened subsequently, maybe that’s actually a blessing.

  I inherited neither my father’s courage, nor his addiction to risk. And without his visceral need to make money, I have always been unproven in that accomplishment, too. By the age of seven or eight, I knew I was destined to be a disappointment to him. I did not share his reckless energy. I was a dreamy, reflective child. And so the precious hours away from business conquest that he devoted to his only son were understandably frustrating for him. In his time spent with me, he could transmit his will to compete to the arena of competitive games. He did it willingly, with relish and focus. But I never cared about who won our chess matches. He would murder me, across the board, and I would grin in goofy admiration. I can only imagine how it must have galled him.

  One day, when I was about eleven or twelve, he took off his jacket after another predictable whitewash over a game of Scrabble or dominoes and rolled his sleeve and planted his bristling forearm from the elbow on the table top. I was looking at the bulging strength and sinew of the limb, wondering afresh at where a business tycoon like my dad acquired the muscle, when he said, ‘Give me your hand.’

  Dutifully, I clasped his palm. It was hard and calloused and dry. And it was another massacre as he slammed my knuckles against the polished oak. He fixed me with eyes of ageing emerald green and said, ‘You’ve the strength of a butterfly, Martin. And about the commensurate will.’ He rose, tiredly for my father, slowly. He took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped the stain of my weakness from his palm. ‘When you can defeat me, you will have earned my respect,’ he said. ‘And who knows? Perhaps you will have earned your own.’

  My father had boxed as a boy. More accurately, he had fought. His had been the sort of childhood poverty that announces itself in shoes with composite cardboard soles and clothing sourced through charity and invigorated through flat-iron steam and repeated darning. His appearance did not wash at the educational establishments his brains and a subsequent scholarship achieved for him. He was duly picked on. He was bullied. Out of necessity, he discovered he was handy with his fists. From being jumped in school lavatories and the dark corridors of dormitories, he progressed to the crested vest and ringside cheers of organised bouts. His old trophies, cheap things of plate nickel, are now priceless treasures, holy relics of his fabled past, taken from their cabinet in the library of our family home and faithfully polished by his housekeeper every day.

  When I was twelve years old, he dragged the old priest who had trained him out of his seminary and devout retirement to train me too. Had he wanted a champion pugilist for a son, he could have afforded the greatest boxing trainer who ever lived. He could have got Brendan Ingle from Sheffield or Enzo Calzaghe from Wales. He could have gone to America, lured Angelo Dundee out of Los Angeles or sent to Boston for the Petronelli brothers, for Christ’s sake. But though the old man wanted me competing, it was even more imperative to him that I would do so on the same terms as he had. So by virtue of the fact that he was still alive, of course, my own coach had to be Father O’Hanlon.

  The priest appeared very old and impossibly grey, cajoled by my father back into his elderly tracksuit. The collar was frayed and the elastic perished at the wrists and ankles. The canvas of his plimsolls was the same parchment grey as his complexion. He looked fraught and reluctant under his threadbare, combed-over hair. I was dutiful on the hook and jab pads, half-hearted on the heavy bag and downright sloppy on the speedball. And at the end of the floorwork he put me through I sat next to Father O’Hanlon on a bench as steam expired off my shoulders through a blanket he’d given me against the cold in the empty gym one Cumbrian night.

  A wizened hand clapped me on the shoulder. Its fingers gave the meat of me a squeeze. ‘If your old man had possessed a fraction of your talent, son, he’d never have earned a penny on the markets,’ O’Hanlon said.

  I was intrigued by this claim. ‘Why, Father?’

  O’Hanlon slapped me on the thigh. ‘Because he wouldn’t have needed to. Because he’d have earned his fucking fortune in the prize ring.’

  But things are never that simple. Life is not the movie we all wish in our most ardent and secret dreams it should turn out to be. I trained hard and scrupulously under O’Hanlon. And beneath his impoverished gym attire, I still hold he was as shrewd and thorough a trainer as any fighter could wish for. Under his fastidious tutelage, I reached the national finals of the ABAs. And, modesty aside, I did it without engaging in wars. I reached the final probably the hottest favourite to take the middleweight title for a decade. My father was ringside that night of course, his arm adorned by his most recent wife. He winked and she
glittered at me as the opening bell sounded. And for two rounds everything followed my script as I creamed a switch-hitter from West Ham by the name of Winston Cory.

  The haymaker from Cory that broke my nose and dumped me on the canvas on my backside in the third was the first punch I never saw and the last I ever took in an honest fight. I made the count, though. I was back on steady legs at the count of four. I knew already, from all my rounds of sparring with bigger boys, I could take a decent punch. I felt far more indignant than hurt. But I was haemorrhaging blood and they had no choice but to stop the bout. So I’d lost. Cory had won. I turned to my corner, to Father O’Hanlon, who looked at me the way a saviour must look when losing a promising soul to damnation.

  In the movie version of this story, I know, of course, what happens next. The old man, unable to endure the taint of loss, shuns entirely his defeated son. He leaves his gorgeous floozie shivering at the kerbside waiting for their limo while he bursts into the winner’s dressing room full of bonhomie and boisterous congratulation. He slaps backs and proffers cigars. Manly and magnanimous, he is the life and soul of the sweaty little victory celebration.

  But it didn’t happen like that in life. In fact, my father came in to me as my corner people struggled to staunch the bleeding and splint my nose. He took off his coat and dabbed at the damage with a towel. Blood from me sprayed and flecked at the starched white of his dress shirt. He did not seem to notice, or mind. His touch was so tender and solicitous that I almost wept at the unexpected intimacy of him there.

  ‘You did your best, son,’ he said, rising to go once the bleeding had stopped. ‘You did your best. You lost only because he wanted it more.’