The Press: A Halloween Short Story by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

clashing orange coat.’” 
    “Well, girl, you give as good as you get,” John told her. “Are you going to be conducting us on a tour of these delightfully gloomy premises, then?” 
    The hallway was vast. Over a marble fireplace hung a dark oil portrait of Padraic Rossa himself, clutching his lapels as if he were trying to tear them off his jacket. He had a blocky-looking head, and he looked more like a bare-knuckle boxer than a writer. 
    “He was a sour-tempered man and no mistake,” said Fionnula. “I met him only the once. I came up here to make a valuation but he wouldn’t let me into the house. He said that he wouldn’t be dealing with an empty-headed young girl who knew nothing of the Celtic tradition.” 
    She showed us the drawing-room with its heavy velvet curtains and its strange paintings of pale men and women, peering out of the darkness with luminous eyes. Some of them had beaks like owls, while others had foxes’-claws instead of hands. 
    “You could well believe that Rossa was a close friend of his Satanic Majesty, now couldn’t you?” said John. The flashes from his camera seemed to make the people in the paintings jump, as if for a split-second he had brought them to life. 
    We toured the bedrooms. The ceilings were damp, and in some places the wallpaper was hanging down. In Rossa’s own bedroom, the mattress on the four-poster bed had a dark stain in the middle of it, and there was an overwhelming smell of urine and death. 
    At last we came back downstairs to take a look at the dining-room. At the far end of the room stood a huge mahogany cupboard, with carved pillars and bunches of grapes, which must have been used for storing china. In Ireland we would call a cupboard like this a press. 
    “That is a massive piece of joinery and no mistake,” said John, taking pictures of it. Its finial touched the ceiling, and it had a wide drawer underneath with handles in the shape of demons’ faces, with rings through their noses. 
    Fionnula turned the key in the lock and opened up the press so that we could look inside. It was completely empty, but it was unexpectedly large inside, almost three times as deep as it looked from the outside. It had that sour vinegary smell of old cupboards that have been closed up for years. 
    “You could almost live in this,” said John. “In fact I think it’s bigger than my flat. And look…what’s that written on the back?” 
    The back of the press was covered in lettering, faded black, with some gilded capitals. It looked like Gaelic. 
    “We’ll have a picture of this,” said John. “Here, bespectacled beauty from the auctioneers, do you think you could hold my light for me?” 
    He helped Fionnula to climb up into the press, and then he climbed in after her. He handed her his electronic strobe light and started to take pictures of the lettering at the back. “Now I recognize some of the words here,” he said. “ Beó duine d’éis a anma …that means ‘a man may live after his death.’” 
    He peered at the lettering even more closely. “This is some kind of Celtic incantation…a summoning-up of dead souls. It must be connected with Rossa’s book on All Hallows’ Eve.” 
    As his fingers traced the words, however, I heard an extraordinary noise. A slow, mechanical ticking, like a very loud clock, but punctuated by the clicking of levers and tumblers, and the flat donk sound of expanding springs. 
    “What the hell’s that?” asked John, turning around. But before any of us could do anything, the huge doors to the press swung silently shut, and locked themselves, trapping John and Fionnula inside. 
    “Will you open the effing doors, Michael?” shouted John. “This isn’t a joke!” 
    “For God’s sake, let us out!” said Fionnula. She sounded panicky already. “I can’t stand enclosed spaces!” 
    I turned the key, but the doors wouldn’t budge. I went to the sideboard and pulled open the drawers. One of them was