Authors: Phil Rickman
Clues which we cannot possibly be expected, and certainly can't
be
meant
, to decipher ... until it's
too late.
Being 'psychic' is a
son-et
-lumière
of superficial special
effects, so glamorous, and then you realise that it's really just a sick joke.
That it isn't going to help you or anybody. Except maybe materially, and sooner
or later that has to be paid for.
The great shadow-arches of the black Abbey of Ystrad Ddu are
gathering like locked horns over her head as she walks into what used to be the
nave.
Taking a last look back towards the north-west tower, wedged
in mist the colour of wet concrete; even if there was a light up there, the top
of the tower would still be invisible in this.
Up there: Simon and Aelwyn and Dave. Dave's guitar case, fragments
of Aelwyn's skull. All seriously symbolic.
And they could just as easily be false symbols. That one small
crucial element could be either wrong or missing. It's all anyone can think of
to do, to take Aelwyn and Dave into the night, and it's really such a feeble
gesture against a tradition of hard evil going back eight hundred years.
She feels helpless and hopeless. What the hell are you doing here,
hen? You directed them to the deathoak and that's your part over, huh?
It would probably be the best thing for all of them if she gathered
up her things and left.
And dwell on it for another seven years? And then?
This is when Moira literally stumbles upon the body in the wheelchair.
Tom and Prof wind up in a
corner of the canteen without much hope between them, only a pot of tea.
Prof rubs his eyes. 'I used to be an engineer. A month ago, I was
just an engineer.'
He looks around. 'All this. All this money, all these wages, canteen
staff, admin staff. And at the end of it, they haven't even got an album. Just
a decent man dead, after fourteen years of torturing himself. Dead at the
appropriate time, in the appropriate place. The smug, bloody Abbey getting its
seven-year dues. This is all sick and sad and deeply crazy, Tom.'
'It's rock and roll,' Tom says.
'It's only rock and roll. What we always used to say.'
'Rock and roll ain't as powerful as it used to be. But it can
still make you fink you're superhuman. All music can do that - your classical
composers, your Beethoven and your Mozart, all those geezers reckoned they was
close to summink your average punter couldn't reach in a couple of dozen
lifetimes. The Messianic Freshold ... the point where music makes you fink you
got God worrying about his future.'
'And drugs,' Prof says. 'Drugs took a lot of people to the threshold
of something.'
'Yeah, well, some people uses drugs to get 'em there - to the
freshold - and some need the coke and the junk and stuff to
live
wiv it once they get there. And some
can't live wiv it at all … like that geezer Cobain, topped himself. But this is
it ... real musicians don't harm nobody but themselves. It's the other bastards,
the businessmen and the conmen and the posers and the
hangers-on and the outsiders who want in. The people who, for them, the music
comes
second
.'
'Copesake,' Prof says.
'Copesake, yeah. And guys like Manson - wanted to be a rock
star, reckons the music's telling him to kill ... to take sacrifices, right?
"Helter Skelter" - overnight, a song about sex wiv fairground images
and stuff, becomes evil. Musta scared McCartney, that - finks, Jesus what did I
put
in that song to inspire this
nutter? And this geezer ...'
Lee Gibson has come in.
'... Just another session-drummer, and now he's a superstar, and
he don't know why ... except it come frew Sile And he's hooked, even if he
don't know it, and he'll keep coming back, and he'll get more and more eaten up
and corrupt, and he'll spread it, like a disease.'
Prof shudders. 'You sound like you lost all faith in anything good.
Like we can't do anything to stop it. Can we?'
'Not a lot,' Tom admits.
Prof says, 'What happened to all
you need is love?'
'Evening gents.' Lee sits down.
'Rough night, eh? Where's the kid?'
'No kids here,' Prof says. 'This seem to you like a suitable
place for kids?'
'No, the kid. Tom's kid.'
Tom's cup clatters into its saucer. 'What you on about?'
'Your kid. I found your kid wandering
in the trees. She said she was your kid. Little... er... handicapped girl, with
thick specs.'
Tom's out of his seat, skin as yellow-white as his hair. Lee's
leaning back, making stay-cool gestures with both hands. 'Hey, it's OK man,
she's in good hands. She was in here just five minutes ago.'
'Hands? Who's hands? Who brung her here?'
'He's looking for you, man.'
'Who?'
'Sile.'
Tom had him by the front of his suede shirt, hauling him out of
his chair. '
Copesake's got my kid?'
Lee, shakes him off, looks annoyed. 'Fuck you, man, what's wrong
with that?'
There's actually frost in her
hair. Her face is almost blue. Her eyes are almost closed. She's slumped in the
chair under a dark- coloured cape, and the cloth is stiffening around her.
'Holy Christ,' Moira whispers.
She doesn't know what to do, how to handle this. She looks around;
no one in sight, only the obscenely sentient stones of the Abbey.
No hands are visible; she doesn't know, anyway, where to find
the pulse. She starts to rub the woman's cheeks, gently at first and then
harder. When she steps back, the eyelids raise a fraction.
The woman mumbles. 'Not flying, am I?'
'Oh, Jesus, you're alive. Let's get you ...'
She pushes at the chair; it won't
move.
'Stuck,' the woman says. 'Legs
smashed.'
The chair is wedged up against a
stone.
'Hold on.' Moira gets behind the
chair and tugs, hard as she can, and the chair suddenly jerks free and nearly
has her over.
'OK, now, I'm gonna get you into
the warm.'
That's a laugh.
'Police.'
'You took your time. Got any ID?"
Gwyn Arthur opens his wallet. The
security man opens the gate. 'Just the two of you, is it?'
'That's right. Come on. Sergeant.'
Shelley stares at him. 'Oh. Right.'
'Saves explanations,' Gwyn Arthur tells her. 'Now, Mrs Storey.
I take it you haven't been here before.'
'No.'
'Me neither. Don't like these places. Now, before we go any
further, a few ground rules. The impression I get is that relations with your
husband are not what they might be. If it turns out the little girl is with
him, that's where my role in the affair ends. Custody battles are not the police's
problem, and if she's his natural daughter, but not yours, you may have to ...'
'I understand,' Shelley almost shouts. Thinking, come on, come
on.
'If she's with Tom I'll save my
anger until I've got over being relieved.'
The main source of any relief, Shelley is thinking, will be if
Tom is not the victim of the accident, the electrocution. Oh please, please ...
'Good girl.' Gwyn pats her arm. 'Very sensible. Now, I do have
other enquiries to make. They're not your problem, but if you can bear with me.
Now, what's the set-up here?'
'What are those lights.'
'Looks like caravans. Temporary buildings, anyway. Let's check
that out first. And don't forget, I don't know what your husband looks like, so
as soon as you see him, ID him for me, would you?'
'Yes. Oh ...'
As they reach the Portakabin, they see the door is wide open,
warm light softening the mist, and the outline of a man in the entrance.
'This him?'
'No, this is the bastard who brought him here. Case. Stephen Case,
works for the record company.'
'Mrs Storey!' Case's face registers first astonishment and then
a kind of relief.
'Where is he?'
'Mrs Storey, we've got a problem ...'
'Is he dead?'
'Dead?' Case nearly smiles. 'No, he's fine. I mean he's not
dead,
he's just gone berserk.'
Not the same place.
Not the same at all, by night.
Simon licks blood from the corner of his mouth. It's been
running quite freely from the cut Sile Copesake made in his face, and it's all
over his hands now from trying to wipe it away from his cheek, and over the
guitar case. Blood all over him and Dave and Aelwyn.
What made him think - this is the stupidest thing - he would
be above the mist-line? .
He knows what fooled him into coming up here. It was the image
of the other morning, the remembered exultation of a coppery dawn.
It's a different place before the dawn, if the dawn ever comes
again. The mist, if anything, is even denser up here, like the sediment rising
to the
top
of the bottle. The mist is
soggy and clinging and soot-black and it clogs his thoughts and stifles his prayers.
'
Oh God... let me in.'
Simon kneeling on frozen stone, hands clasped together in the
time-honoured fashion. Telling himself, think soft lights and white linen,
stained glass and the scent of polish. Think
cathedral.
A droplet of blood rolls down his lips. His tongue instinctively
laps at it. The blood tastes salty and somehow nourishing.
What did Sile mean,
that should fetch him,
slicing into his
face.
As if he doesn't know.
He tries to imagine the sky above the mist, with stars and a
sliver of moon, tries to summon
clarity
.
But close by his ear, something laughs. A grainy, lascivious laugh.
He stalks the misty ruins
like an avenging angel.
Well ...
If angels had stubble two days beyond the 'designer' stage. It
angels wore T-shirts a couple of sizes too small, revealing their hairy navels
and unsightly, sagging paunches ... If angels had accidentally killed their
first wives and lived with fourteen years of guilt and remorse and become
reclusive and suspicious ...
... angels would maybe look like this.
'
Copesake
...' the angel bawls from inside the blackened medieval
ribcage.
'I'm gonna tear your head off...'
Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones is leaning under an archway,
lighting his pipe. 'Over to you, I think, Mrs Storey.'
'Yes.' Shelley shakes her blonde hair free of her coat collar.
She's thinking of the years of struggle, of convincing Tom it was an
accident
, that Vanessa is a delightful
little girl, with a delicacy and a gentleness and a beauty of her own ... and
was
not
retribution, divine or any other
kind. That it doesn't have to be like this for the rest of his life. That if he
goes out into the world again, it isn't a foregone conclusion that someone's
going to get hurt.
As she walks towards the stricken angel, she's thinking also
of charming, kindly Martin Broadbank, who had it all, who thought he could go
anywhere with impunity. Seeing the final picture of Martin also stricken,
sobbing his heart out into a dying woman's breast.