‘Why?’ said Frannie. ‘Why would it want to carry on? Surely there – there’s no reason –’ her train of thought stumbled.
‘Evil is the corruption of good. That is its sole purpose: to corrupt, destroy, nullify. It requires no reason, only energy. The energy of a seance; the energy of a host body.’
‘Why would it harm everyone who was at the Ouija session?’
‘You know the expression “Let sleeping dogs lie”?’
‘Of course.’
‘A sleeping dog has no gratitude for being woken.’ He rested his hands on his lap and surveyed the room imperiously. ‘If the second Marquess was into numerology, the spirit probably finds it amusing to continue. Seven soldiers put him to death. Seven people bring him back into existence. Repeat the pattern.’ He parted
his hands. ‘Evil does not have to account to anyone for its actions.’
‘But how does that explain the friend of mine who went blind? She picked up a virus swimming – how could a spirit have made her do that?’
He flicked some tiny fleck off his cassock. ‘We understand very little about the body’s abilities to look after itself. The immune system is still largely a mystery. I should think most people don’t go blind from the virus your friend caught. Probably only a tiny percentage do. Was she unlucky? Or did something get channelled into her subconscious, blocking her immune system for her? To make her prophecy come true?’
Frannie felt as though a nerve had snapped inside her. ‘Is there nothing I can do?’
‘There’s only one thing we can do. We go to that cellar and we hold a requiem mass. And we go now.’
‘Who?’
‘Just you and me.’
She bit the back of her hand. ‘I don’t know if we can get in.’
‘We’ll worry about that when we get there.’
‘What – what happens in a requiem mass?’
‘We hold a simple communion service to lay the spirit to rest.’
‘And if that doesn’t work?’
He looked at her as if she was mad. The skin around his mouth tightened in determination, ‘We are going armed with the authority of the Church. The authority of God. That is stronger than anything belonging to Satan. You do understand that, don’t you?’
She could feel the hairs rising on her body and the goose-pimples creeping across her flesh. She had
hoped that in coming to the clergyman she would somehow find comfort. Instead she had found even greater fear.
Frannie walked with Benedict Spode across London Bridge, her mackintosh pocket weighted with the torch he had lent her. The clergyman carried a small vinyl holdall which he swung at his side in a deliberately carefree manner that did not reflect the anxiety in his face.
They waited for a stream of traffic to pass, then crossed into King William Street and walked down towards Bank. Over to their right, brightly lit against the night sky when Frannie looked down one of the side streets, was the Winston Churchill Tower. But she had to look away again.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘this could be the reason why Oliver and I met? That it was all manipulated, contrived – by – the – this –?’ She stopped, uncertain of the word she was searching for.
Spirit? Force?
‘I believe that there is order in disorder,’ Benedict Spode said tersely.
She remembered Oliver had said the same thing. ‘How do you mean?’
He did not reply until they had stopped to wait for the traffic lights at the end of the street. ‘I mean that there are patterns even in apparent chaos. Sometimes one is too close to them to see them.’
‘I’m not sure I understand; I –’
The lights changed and they crossed into Poultry. The air in her lungs felt heavier by the second. Ahead, up to the left, she could see the lights of the hoarding. She slowed her pace and the clergyman slowed his also.
‘I just want to say something before we –’ she said, and she saw the soft, baby-like skin of the clergyman’s cheek in the glare of a street light as he half turned towards her. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For all the grief I’ve brought to everyone. For being so bloody stupid.’
Benedict Spode turned further to face her full on. The anxiety had not left his face but his voice was calm. ‘Seven of you made the decision to play the Ouija, Frannie,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s not for you to take the blame alone. God will be the judge of that.’
A sharp blast of wind seized her hair and her clothes. The clergyman’s cassock billowed beneath his raincoat and his holdall swayed in his hand. The hoarding rocked; even from a hundred yards away Frannie could hear the loose boards banging and tarpaulins cracking like sails, metal chinking.
She looked back at Benedict Spode. ‘Can I ask you something really naïve? If people can do this – attract evil spirits – on their own, why does it need a priest to stop it? Couldn’t anyone stop it with prayers?’
‘Priests have no magic,’ he said. ‘Good is stronger than evil; but when evil becomes out of control, those who have the authority of the Church are stronger in dealing with it than anyone else. The Church acts on God’s behalf, with His authority. And God is stronger than Satan. God defeated Satan.’
A bus rumbled past. The door of a pub across the road opened and two men came out. Behind them the interior looked cheery, and Frannie felt a pang of envy.
‘I still find it hard to believe – with all that’s gone on – that just saying a few prayers will end it.’
Her companion stopped, ‘Why?’
‘It seems too simple.’
He rounded on her with logic. ‘Is it any less simple than the way it started? Just a bunch of drunken friends with an upturned wine glass and some scraps of paper?’
She smiled weakly, but Benedict Spode did not smile back. She looked at her watch. A quarter past eight. It was much brighter lit here than she had expected. The pavement, the hoarding, the site; they were all bathed in a milky-orange haze. Conspicuous. But towards the tops of the buildings that towered around them, the artificial light faded. And far above, only hard white stars pricked the oily blackness of the sky.
The landscape was as Frannie had seen it earlier that day: the jib of a crane towering over the alley; the silhouette of a massive lead demolition ball suspended beneath it like something hanging from the beak of a giant bird of prey. But the building that had been there at lunchtime was no longer standing. Shock ripped through her guts. She raced across the road towards the hoarding and peered through a viewing slit but could see nothing. She ran on to the next slit, which looked straight on to the remains of the corner building at the start of Poulterers’ Alley. It had been almost completely demolished, its facade torn off, its innards opened to the elements. But, on either side of the alley behind it, the rest of the buildings were still standing.
Part of her wished they weren’t; wanted to. pretend that it was too late. The clergyman wouldn’t know. Then Seb Holland’s face came into her mind. Then Tristram’s. Meredith’s coffin on the catafalque. Frannie shuddered. She imagined never seeing Oliver again. Nor her family. Being crippled, or dead or disfigured. She nodded at Benedict Spode and pointed.
He looked up at the hoarding. ‘Let’s see if we can find a gap,’ he said decisively.
They stopped outside the main gates, which were chained shut. She tested them, but there was no play in them. A taxi drove by, the knocking rattle of its engine echoing in the quietness, the fumes of its exhaust staying in their nostrils after it had gone. She walked on, leading the way down to the end of the block, then turned left and the pavement became a covered boardwalk as they followed the hoarding along a street that was quiet and less well lit. Benedict Spode pressed a section of hoarding on the join with the scaffolding and it gave, reluctantly, then sprung sharply back. He glanced around, rather shiftily, pushed hard and held it for Frannie, then followed her through, releasing it behind him with a fierce bang.
They stood on an unstable mound of rubble; the sounds of flapping and loose metal were much louder now. Frannie switched the torch on, and the beam jumped hungrily into the shadows beyond the haze of light from the street lamps. It struck the caterpillar tracks of a bulldozer. Then the cabin of a crane. She played it along the partially demolished terrace that housed the site office. The air was full of the oddly sweet smell of rotten wood and damp, and the harder, drier smell of old plaster. The beam slid over a stepladder, a skip, then flared off the windows of a Portakabin. She stepped forward nervously, picking her way past a broken supermarket trolley, then walked across rotten plasterboard which broke beneath her feet and on to a track of churned mud.
Benedict Spode walked on tiptoe, his cassock hitched up like a skirt. As they passed a Portakabin with ‘Supplies’ stencilled on the door, a van drove fast down the road and halted outside the gates, its engine
still running. Frannie snapped off the torch as footsteps and the crackle of a two-way radio were heard. Then a man’s voice.
‘City Fields. One nine five five. Site secure. Moving on to Docklands. Roger and out.’
A chain rattled and the vehicle sped away. Frannie switched on the torch, revealing the clergyman’s raised eyebrows. ‘Could have been a bit embarrassing,’ he said.
Frannie couldn’t raise a smile, and walked on until Poulterers’ Alley stretched out in front of them like a ghost town on a movie studio lot.
Fear had returned to the clergyman’s face and she felt it infecting her, flowing into her. Had to keep going now; to somehow be brave. Had to keep going. Had to. She imagined two eyes watching them from behind the boarded windows. A small boy’s eyes. She felt her heart bang like a shuttle inside her chest, weaving a tapestry from the raw yarn of her nerves.
She almost walked right past it. What had once seemed such a very big place now looked so small. She swung the torch up above the door as if she needed to make sure:
SANDW CH S LUIGI CAFE
.
The windows were boarded like all the others, but the door still had its glass panels. She took her key-ring from her bag, separated the old Banham and pushed it into the lock. It slid in almost too easily, and allowed herself and Canon Spode to gain entry to the premises she’d known for most of her life.
Inside, the floor was a mess. Part of the ceiling had come down, leaving exposed beams. Frannie trod slowly, waited for Benedict Spode, and played the torchlight around, scooping the darkness out. A flesh-white rectangle indicated where the counter had stood. The old poster of Naples had fallen and lay on the
floor. The other, of Amalfi, was still on the back wall. And it was this one on which the clergyman had fixed his gaze, eyes widening. Frannie followed his stare.
The poster was moving, the top left-hand corner tearing as if an invisible hand were pulling it. The other corner was already free. She felt her own flesh tearing in sympathy, parting. The whole place felt as if it was charged with electricity as the poster carried on moving from the top downwards until it dropped to the floor, curled over on itself and lay still.
The effect was petrifying. Just the draught from opening the door, Frannie tried to convince herself, pushing her way through the darkness to the hoop of the trapdoor which she could see glinting dully. She laid the torch down, knelt and signalled to Spode to do the same.
The cold metal bit into her fingers like ice as she pulled. The bogeyman was down there beneath the hatch, waiting for her in his dark, silent lair. He lived in the cellar. The bogeyman who pricked every bone in her body now with sharp needles of terror. The second Marquess – Francis Edward Alwynne Halkin.
The hatch lifted a few inches and dropped back down. She had forgotten how heavy it was. She resisted the clergyman’s attempts to help and, bracing herself, lifted harder; it came away, pulling a stringy cobweb with it. A draught of air poured out, as cold as if she had opened the door of a freezer.
She pulled the hatch right back until it was resting against its hinges then shone the torch down the wooden steps into the darkness. Dark as a lift shaft. Frannie was shaking uncontrollably by now, as if she had convulsions. She rocked on her knees, staring down as darkness coiled like smoke around her.
The clergyman offered, ‘Shall I go first?’
‘I’ll go,’ she heard herself say, ‘and you can pass your bag down.’
Slowly she eased herself over, and grabbed the torch with one hand. She felt as if she were descending into a bottomless pit. But eventually her feet touched the hard flagstones. They felt unsteady, then she realized that it was herself, swaying in her fear.
‘OK,’ she called out, shining the torch back up. The word echoed back at her.
OK … OK … OK
.
Benedict Spode’s foot clumsily struck the top step. ‘Careful!’ she shouted out into the blackness.
CAREFUL … FUUULLLL
.
The cold of the flagstones seeped through her shoes. Her skin prickled and she felt the downy hairs on her arms, her legs, on the small of her back rising and her skin erupting into goose-pimples. She could hear the steady metallic drip … ping … ping … ping and remembered it from the last time she had been down here.
She raked the steps with the torch, too afraid to look around her, stretching for the bag which Spode was holding down to her.
The clergyman reached the bottom but stayed holding on to the rails with both hands, collecting his breath. ‘My bag,’ he said anxiously, as if he was frightened to be separated from it.
She handed it back to him to the accompaniment of a low, rumbling echo that came out of the darkness, growing deeper and louder, like a hundred boulders rolling towards them. She had heard the sound thousands of times but it always scared her. It began to fade as rapidly as it had started, becoming a distant hum, and then died completely. ‘Tube train,’ she said. ‘Central Line.’
Spode released his grip on the rail and walked a few
steps away from her as if drawn across the room. She watched him open his bag; he removed a small torch of his own then went over to one of several upright barrels, and using it as a table began to unpack. In the extra light of the second torch, she saw a packing-case with a candle stuck on the top, a pool of wax around the base. Scraps of paper lay on it. It was the packing-crate they had used as a table for the Ouija.