He stopped the tape.
‘Mass,’ she said. ‘He’s reciting the canon of the mass backwards.’ She walked across the room and put her hand on the cold ribbed radiator beneath the window. The ghost of her face stared back from the glass. She turned and faced Oliver. ‘Mass isn’t – isn’t held in Latin – in this country –’ She faltered. ‘Backwards. I –’ She stopped and suddenly thought of the plants he had reeled off in Latin. And the animals.
He spoke in Latin to you?
Oliver had said when they were in bed in this room last Saturday, sounding surprised, but not commenting further. The way he had not probed deeply when Edward had started reeling off Latin names in the car on Sunday night going back to London.
‘Isn’t saying mass backwards something to do with black magic?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘I looked it up after the first time he did it.’
‘He’s done it before?’
‘He’s been doing it at school for years. Three and a half years, to be precise,’ he said, giving her a strange look.
‘And the windows? Did that happen?’
‘No.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘That hasn’t happened before. He’ll calm down. And in the morning he won’t remember anything.’
‘Where’s it coming from?’
Oliver said nothing.
‘The doctors and shrinks you’ve taken him to – did you tell them about this?’
‘I’ve played them tapes.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘That it’s not uncommon. Apparently, disturbed children often speak strange languages or gibberish in their sleep.’
Frannie felt trapped between the light of the room and the darkness outside, the darkness that pressed against the glass, trying to push through it and to crush her up against the light. She shuddered, her skin absorbing the coldness like blotting-paper.
Oliver stopped the machine, then pulled another tape out of the drawer of his bedside table and slotted it into place. ‘Last Saturday when we slept together,
Frannie, you began talking in your sleep. It woke me up. I thought you’d stop, but you kept going on, talking complete mumbo-jumbo. I couldn’t work out what the hell you were saying. I recorded a bit of it because I thought it might amuse you; then I realized it might embarrass you so I didn’t say anything about it.’ He stared at the floor, then back at her.
She remembered now, being woken by a click in the middle of the night and wondering what it was.
‘Then I suddenly realized on Sunday night when Edward started his chanting that it was the same sound. I knew there had to be a connection – it couldn’t be coincidence.’ He started the tape.
‘
Muem suproc mine tse coh senmo coh xe etacudman te etipicca snecid sius silupicsid euqtided tigerf tixid eneb snega saitarg ibit metnetopinmo muus mertap mued et da mulaec ni siluco sitavele te …
’
Frannie listened, transfixed, to the chanting sound of her own voice.
Oliver pressed the stop button. ‘I don’t know what gave me the idea to play it backwards.’ She watched Oliver’s finger hover, hunting for the reverse play button, then push down on it, and she listened to her words again, mechanically translating the Latin into English as she did:
‘… and looking up to Heaven to thee, God, his almighty Father, giving thanks to thee, he blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take and eat of this, all of you. For this is my Body –’
Oliver stopped the tape abruptly, leaving the house in silence. She was numb.
‘You asked me where it’s coming from.’ Oliver’s face was tight. ‘The first time it happened was that night after we had seen you at your parents’ café – although we didn’t know you then.’
The cold air in the room was now burrowing deep into her veins, into her bones. She felt as cold as dead flesh.
‘It’s you, Frannie,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s where it’s coming from.’
Frannie sat in silence whilst Oliver’s words sank through her, dissolving like chemicals, paralysing her. As long as she did not believe it, she would be all right. She could cope with what he had said as long as she knew he was making it up.
She stared at the chromium-plated grilles of the speakers at each end of the ghetto-blaster, and the shiny red plastic casing. She wondered, irrelevantly, why he owned such an ugly thing. Perhaps it belonged to Edward. Or to Oliver’s late wife. Perhaps Sarah Henrietta Louise Halkin had liked music blaring wherever she went. Perhaps she had played it loudly to keep out the silence of the house that was now closing around Frannie herself and entering into her.
She wondered how long she had been talking in her sleep. A few months? A year? Six years? All her life? A memory released itself, rose, like a bubble detaching itself from the floor of the ocean, to the surface of her mind. Her father yesterday morning.
You scared us, your mama and I … Not like you talking … Like someone else is a talking through you
.
Who else had heard her? The bubble of memory expanded. Tom Dufferin, her last boyfriend, had said she mumbled in her sleep. So had Elliot Dumas before him. And on the dig in Iraq after leaving university, when she had shared a tent with three others, they had commented then that she woke them sometimes with her mumbling. The end of her last year at university. She thought back harder; no one had commented before then; no one at home, where she had shared a
bedroom with her kid sister. Maria-Angela would have said something. The many previous occasions when she had shared tents on digs; others would have commented. She had shared a room in her second year at university with Meredith; she had not said anything. The end of her third year was when it had started. From worry about her exams?
Or –? She tried to dismiss the thought, but it persisted. The Ouija. They had done the Ouija at the end of that last year. Only days before the end of term. They had all been so happy that night; most of the term’s coursework was over and they were winding down for the breather of the Easter holiday before the onslaught of finals. So innocent then. Unaware of what lay ahead; of the spirit they had attracted, angered, the thing that had come after them, pursued them.
Possessed her.
She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Oliver’s gaze. She studied her nails; the tips of the fingers went blue after death; she remembered seeing her grandmother’s fingernails in an open coffin in Naples; almost black.
Edward in the library came back to her.
I have this bad thing, Frannie. I don’t want it … It makes things happen when I just think about them
.
Edward influencing people. Surely it was coming from him. She spoke to Oliver. ‘Edward said –’ she stopped.
He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to continue. But confusion swirled in her brain, because it might begin with herself, not Edward, in which case it was she who was making Edward will bad things on other people. It couldn’t be.
‘Why do you say it’s coming from me?’ she said.
‘How do you know that Edward’s picking it up from me, and not the other way round?’
‘It’s inconceivable from pure chance that you would both say mass backwards in your sleep, isn’t it?’
She said nothing.
‘You told me you’d heard about what Jung called Synchronicity; well, that’s what I believe. That one of the explanations for what people call chance is unconscious telepathy between them. Channelling of thoughts.’
She watched him blankly.
‘I think that one of you is instigating it, the other picking it up.’ He uncrossed his legs, folded his arms and leaned forwards. ‘Edward had never done this before he met you.’
You’re wrong
, she wanted to say.
You’re wrong!
But she did not have the conviction.
‘It’s not you, Frannie, not your conscious self, any more than Edward knows what he’s doing when he suddenly drifts off into those silences of his in the daytime. There’s something else causing it. You’re just the channel for it.’
‘For what?’
He stood up and walked across to rest his hands on her shoulders. He squeezed them gently. She felt his warm, whisky-laced breath, saw the shadow of stubble that had begun to form, emphasizing his harrowed expression, his drained complexion. She became aware of the tears that were trickling down her own cheeks, and pressed her face into his chest, nestling against the skin of his neck and the soft wool of his pullover.
‘Have you ever done the Ouija?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘I did, once.’
‘What happened?’
Frannie told him everything and he listened carefully, leaning on the window-sill. When she had finished, his first reaction was, ‘Have you checked on any of your other fellow students? Ones who weren’t at the Ouija session?’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure you have the right causal connection. You’re assuming it’s the Ouija session, but it could be something else.’ He flexed his toes inside his ancient plimsoles, studied them for a moment then went on. ‘If odd things have been happening to other students who weren’t at that Ouija session, that would put a different light on things.’
‘You mean contact every student who was at London University during the three years I was there?’
‘Yes. It wouldn’t be impossible.’
‘It would in the time,’ she said quietly. ‘And what would I say?’
Hello, just wondering if you’re still alive?
Oliver was silent for a while, deep in thought again. ‘Do you have a tame priest?’ he said finally.
‘No. Not any more.’
He looked at her with heavy eyes. ‘I think we need to find one.’
They made love because they each needed solace, but afterwards Frannie lay in Oliver’s bed unable to sleep. The booze had worn off and she was troubled by her thoughts. She started to picture her own funeral, wondered which of her old boyfriends would turn up. Perhaps they’d feel guilty for not having loved her enough. Then she wondered whether she should phone Directory Enquiries to see if there was a Ouija helpline. Like Alcoholics Anonymous.
Beside her, Oliver’s breathing deepened: strong, deep intakes of air. Physical strength, all the privileges
of his birth and yet he still had his fears. Scared of coincidence.
Twenty-six
.
She opened her eyes in a cold sweat. The hieroglyphics on the wall. And the number twenty-six inside the concentric circles! The tragedy with Tristram had knocked her out and because of that she still hadn’t asked Oliver about what she’d seen in his own library. Now, suddenly, she couldn’t wait.
Oliver moved; the bed clanked as he slipped out, and she heard him pulling something on, then treading carefully across the floor. The click of the door then another click as he closed it quietly behind him. She switched on her bedside light and sat up a little. A lavatory flushed, then Oliver returned.
‘Hi,’ he said.
She gave him a tired, strained smile, then the words poured out. ‘In the library you’ve got charts on the walls with calculations all over them. What are they?’
He sat on the edge of the bed hunched in his paisley dressing-gown. ‘Numerology,’ he said simply.
‘What is that?’
He yawned. ‘Part of it is a theory that numbers provide the clues to understanding – I suppose – the underlying mysteries of the universe.’
‘What sort of numbers?’ She had to understand.
‘All numbers have significance.’
‘How are they worked out?’
He remained on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s a combination of metaphysics and religion. There are numbers in the Bible. Aristotle was very into them. Pythagoras. It all stems from a very logical base. Numbers provide a principle of order in a seemingly chaotic universe.’
‘And how do you get the numbers?’
‘Do you know what a palimpsest is?’
Frannie reached for her glass of water beside the bed. ‘Yes – you get them a lot on parchment used by the old monks. When a text is erased and a new one written over it, you can still read the imprint of the old writing if you look hard enough, or in the right light.’
Oliver nodded. ‘Numbers are in everything if you look hard enough. In the atomic molecules of everything we see and touch. In the Bible, there are hundreds of codes, messages. In our names and dates of birth.’
‘How did you get interested in this?’
He leaned back against the headboard. ‘Part of what mathematics is all about is order; patterns; trying to make sense out of chaos.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘The universe is chaotic, but our solar system is ordered – we have life on this planet because we happen to be exactly the right distance from the sun, the moon. Just a bit further away from the sun and it would be too cold to exist; a bit closer and it would be too hot. Is that chance? Or design?’ He gave her a half smile. ‘Human life is chaotic, yet we create ordered society, of a sort. We divide our planet into countries, establish governments, laws, education, codes of behaviour. All from random evolution? Natural selection? Or some greater design?’
She watched him, wondering where it was all leading. The despair in his eyes gave him the look of a man who has stared into the pit of Hell and cannot get the image from his mind. He seemed to be talking to himself, rambling almost, as if in doing so he might stumble across the answer. His bewilderment frightened her; she needed him to be strong. In the darkness beyond the undrawn curtains the stable clock was striking two.
‘When Sarah died, for a long time I just couldn’t
accept it; and when I finally did, I wanted to die too. I loved her so much, and I couldn’t believe that I could ever –’ He fell silent and Frannie drank some water. ‘It was only Edward who kept me going. I had to be there for him; so I buried myself in work during the week, and I made myself a project down here for the weekends, to give me a focus on something. I was handling the theme of connected coincidence in my work at the bank and I thought it would be interesting to look back through my family to see whether coincidence ran through our history in any way.’
‘Do you mean genetically?’
‘No, not specifically.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Just one very odd coincidence. About a number.’
‘What number?’