‘That’s a bit heavy-going, isn’t it? Sorry, Gideon, is there any more?’
‘It ends with:—
and with God’s good grace and your holy blessing we shall depart these shores before the onset of winter—
It’s signed
your servant in Christ, Brother Michael D’Argon.’
For a long while no one speaks, and it’s Lacey who breaks the silence. ‘So, putting that together with the finding of the buried stone wall at the schoolhouse site, that’s how the story of the dismantled church came about.’
‘But I still don’t understand what happened,’ says Triss. ‘What was all that about angels?’
‘I’m still trying to piece it together.’ Gideon is going through the notes again. ‘It would appear that they established some form of community, and during the building of the church some of them started seeing angels. This Michael D’Argon is arguing that, as more than one of them experienced the visions, they must have had some form of objective reality.’
‘More or less what I was saying earlier,’ says Lacey. ‘If we both saw it, it can’t be imagination. But I thought that was the whole idea, you know, all that isolation and prayer and meditation, weren’t they supposed to have some sort of spiritual experience? So why would visions of angels be so awful as to cause them to decamp and run back to France?’
‘As the writer points out, not all angels are good. Angels in pre-Christian religions were often powerful and fearsome creatures. The visions here seem to have caused a series of major problems. And at least one of the brothers became adversely affected by it, to the extent
that they had to get him away from there. But not before pulling down the church that had just been built. It says something about—wait a moment—ah, here it is:
to be the cause of such devastation among the peoples of this region and to bring fear upon them.’
‘This is all starting to sound very familiar.’ Lacey reaches for Drew’s hand.
‘But why pull the wall down? Abolished, it said. Why did it have to be abolished?’
Again Gideon reads from the notes. ‘—
which duty it is upon us to remove all signs and symbols of such beings.
They must have done something to the walls. The inside walls of early religious buildings were often decorated with murals, usually biblical scenes. Most people couldn’t read, you see, and—’
‘Oh shit. Sorry, this sounds crazy but…what do angels look like?’ Drew looks genuinely troubled. ‘I mean, they’re supposed to have wings and halos, right?’
‘No, not necessarily. In many of the ancient religions the messengers of the gods, even the gods themselves, had wings. But in the old testament of the Hebrews, God’s messengers were indistinguishable from ordinary men, as were the early Christian angels. The images we’re familiar with in Christian art were developed by the artists themselves to communicate the concept of an angelic being by the depiction of commonly understood symbols. A sort of code, if you like. When we see a being with a halo we know we’re not looking at any common mortal. Add the wings and we have an angel.’
‘So, what exactly are angels and why would anyone see them?’
‘Why, Drew? Have you seen something?’ Lacey knows him well enough to know that this is not a joke.
‘Not me, no. Hardly likely. But has anyone been in Tom’s place recently? This mural he’s been painting—people walking all over the walls and ceiling—he reckons they’re angels.’
‘What? Tom’s painting angels on the walls of his house?’ Lacey turns to face him, alarm in her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’
‘Well I didn’t know it was important, did I? I thought he’d just gone a bit weird. I mean, he’s an artist and stoned out of his head most of
the time. What was I supposed to think?’
‘Has anyone else seen this painting?’ asks Gideon. The others shake their heads. ‘Or noticed anything else? I’ve heard him moving about at night. Audrey, you live the other side of him, are you aware of anything?’
‘No, apart from hearing him working all hours. Modern painting’s not really my thing.’
‘Well, I must say I’ve been concerned about him. He looks exhausted and possibly manic,’ says Gideon. ‘And after what happened to Fletcher…But this letter throws a different light on everything. Right—’ Gideon hands the notebook back to Audrey, ‘—I think we ought to pay young Tom a visit as soon as possible. In fact, right now would be a good time.’
G
IDEON STEPS OUT
along the row of cottages, not waiting for the others to follow him. He raps sharply on Tom’s door. Lacey is a pace behind him and comes to a halt at his shoulder, leaving Drew to observe from his own doorstep. The evening is closing in around them, light from Tom’s window casting a yellow pool on the ground. An edge of wind ruffles Lacey’s hair and she shivers, hugging her body and rubbing her arms.
‘You can feel it, too? The temperature dropping?’ Gideon looks around, seeing the sun’s afterglow against the horizon and the first hesitant stars begin to flicker overhead.
Lacey looks back at Drew. With his hands thrust in the pockets of his jeans and his wild, corkscrew hair, he looks so vulnerable.
He shouldn’t be here,
she thinks.
He ought to be down the pub having a pint, dissecting the last runs of the cricket match.
Triss and Audrey have stayed inside, unsure of their role in this sudden development. Lacey can picture Audrey reaching for the wine bottle, draining the last drops. Then Gideon tries the door again, hammering hard this time.
They hear a shuffling from inside, then the rattle of the door catch and Tom’s form is silhouetted against the window. ‘All right, I hear you. Just give me a second.’ The door judders and slowly jerks open
as boxes and tins are kicked out of the way. As he steps back to let them in, light falls on Tom’s face. This is a very different man to the wide-eyed, manic young artist Gideon encountered a few days ago. Skin grey and drawn, his eyes are black pits under a clump of matted hair, his body hanging exhausted and spent from shoulders that have carried too much weight. He looks near to collapse.
‘Tom, my friend, you don’t look well.’ Gideon steps inside before Tom has a chance to turn him away. Lacey slips in behind him.
‘I’ll be OK when I’ve had a few hours’ sleep.’
‘When was the last time you had a meal?’ asks Lacey. She turns to Gideon. ‘I don’t think he’s eaten properly for days.’
‘Or washed,’ Tom laughs. The effort nearly sends him off balance, and he leans a steadying hand on the doorpost. ‘Sorry about the mess. I’ve been working late.’
‘So I gather. I’ve come to have a look, if that’s all right?’ Sliding around Tom, who makes no attempt to move and possibly hasn’t heard, Gideon steps into the centre of the room and turns to gaze at the landscape and the giant figures striding across the walls and ceiling. A moment of silence, then a gasp. His features slacken as if suddenly emptied of all animation, and he stands as still as stone.
Outside again and only minutes later, Lacey tries to explain it to Drew. ‘I swear I saw the blood drain from his face. I don’t know what happened. He just stood there, staring at the wall.’
‘And what did Tom do?’
‘He was still holding the door, as if he hadn’t the strength to move. I thought Gideon was going to stay like that all night. I was waiting for him to say something. It seemed like ages, then suddenly he turned and rushed past us and out the door. I don’t think he even saw me. By the time I’d pulled myself together and looked out, he was gone.’ Lacey pulls the ends of her hair, twisting it around her fingers. ‘So what happened outside?’
‘Nothing. Like you said, he rushed out of Tom’s door and went
straight into his own. It must have been unlocked, because he just crashed inside and slammed the door behind him. And now he won’t answer us.’
‘Do you think we ought to call him again? Or we could try going around the back. Haven’t you got a spare key?’
‘I have, but don’t you think he’s trying to tell us something? Like, he wants to be left alone?’
‘But he could be ill or…or something.’
Drew sighs, exasperated. ‘Well, go on then, try once more.’ He’s aware of Triss and Audrey, still in his sitting room and watching from the window.
Lacey steps up to Gideon’s door. ‘I can hear him moving about,’ she mouths to Drew, then raps on the window and calls out: ‘Gideon, are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine.’ His voice is a rasping whisper which seems to come from behind the door.
‘No, you’re not.’ Lacey moves nearer to where she thinks he’s standing. ‘What’s wrong? Is there anything we can do to help?’
‘I need to be on my own for a while. I have to think.’
Lacey looks at Drew, who shrugs his shoulders. ‘If you’re sure, then…Knock on the wall if you need us.’ No answer. There’s nothing more they can do, so reluctantly they go back to Audrey and Triss and try to explain what has happened.
‘Must have been something in the painting that spooked him,’ says Drew. ‘I thought he was supposed to be in charge. I know it’s pretty weird stuff and I’ll understand if Tom’s aunt hits the roof when she sees the state of her cottage, but I wasn’t expecting our illustrious leader to freak out over it. Anyway, I think Tom’s the one who needs priority help. I’m going to take over some sandwiches and make him a mug of tea.’
‘OK.’ Lacey smiles. ‘Talk him into having a shower if you can, and he needs to get some sleep.’
‘I think Triss and I had better get back home, too,’ says Audrey. ‘There seems little more we can achieve tonight. We’ll see you both in the morning.’
Lacey is left alone. She tells herself it’s against all her principles to eavesdrop, even in her professional capacity. Besides, she can’t hear a thing, even with her ear pressed firmly against the adjoining wall.
Gideon sits in his chair, gripping the arms as if they are the only solid thing left to him. The stable base of understanding on which he has shaped his reality has caved in, leaving him to fall, spinning through space. Everything he’s believed about his life, about himself, is tumbling away at the speed of light.
He had stood in Tom’s sitting room, amid the mess and the smell of paint and stale sweat. Around him, filling the walls and ceiling, the night sky buzzed with planets and shooting stars. His awareness was immediately drawn to the walls. There lay a familiar landscape; familiar in its strangeness: the blue-tinged leaves, the spice-coloured earth. But it was the figures that confounded him. Tom’s angels. They all appeared larger than life, but he knew that was only the artist’s interpretation, his means of signifying their magnificence and supremacy. His gaze rested on one angel and he felt his own life force rock within him. Gideon knew that the woman should be slightly smaller than him, slim and light. Her hair was a long, dark sheet, and he knew the way it would shimmer as the wind lifted it. Her skin was pale and would be smooth to the touch, her hands long. He knew how his grip could encircle her wrist, how fragile it would feel, as if it could be easily broken. The violet of her eyes was unmistakable, yet not quite dark enough. And her jaw was slightly too heavy, her mouth a little too straight. No, it was not Cassandra. But it might easily have been her sister, her mother. And those other men and women, those angels striding out from the stars, they were all her kin.
Time, now, like everything else, is irrelevant. It might be minutes or days since he’d blundered back into the sanctuary of this room. Through the window he can see the schoolhouse, the edge of the roof and the weather vane silhouetted against darkness. The air around the building is quivering; a force field re-awakened. An energy centre
that may have lain dormant here for centuries, occasionally rousing itself into activity, like some mythical beast stirring in its sleep. That’s when things happened, when people disappeared, and when there were sounds in the night and the weather vane twisted without a breath of wind. What had those monks seen that sent them running back to France?…
to be the cause of such devastation among the peoples of this region and to bring fear upon them,
that’s what the letter said. Whatever was going on then could have been a preview of what’s happening now.
He remembers something else in that letter:
the Scriptures tell of angels so apparent as to be seen by all present. Such apparitions were beheld by mortal eyes. That being so their reality exists beyond the beholder.
If more than one person could see them, then they must have some form of objective reality. Tom has seen them, or at least experienced them at a mental or emotional level. They were not—she was not—an invention of Gideon’s mind.
Cassandra exists.
But where and as what? A shared memory? A trace on the aether, like that apparition he and Lacey had witnessed? No, it can’t be that simple. Cassandra has an awareness of events that are happening in the present, like the photograph she showed him of Matthew Caxton, even though that, too, could have arisen from his own subconscious. The landscape on Tom’s walls is the same as that in his own dreams. If they were dreams. But if she’s real, and if her world exists, then it must have been more than dreaming. This is too complex, too contradictory, he can’t get a grasp on any of it. Reality is slipping and sliding around him, nowhere is safe and solid any more. Just the one thought that overrides all else: Cassandra exists.
He must have fallen asleep. He had not moved from his armchair, yet now he is inside the schoolhouse, sitting at the kitchen table. Green lightning flares outside the window, momentarily illuminating the room. It should be dark in here, but the air itself is iridescent. He can
feel it flowing all around him, crackling and sparking along his skin. His fingers tingle, the hairs on his arms and hands rising as if he were bathed in static electricity.
‘You can sense it, can’t you, Gideon?’ Cassandra is opposite him, reaching across the table for his hand. ‘What does it feel like?’
‘Who are you? Why are we here?’
‘Soon, Gideon, soon. But now you must concentrate. What can you feel? What does it remind you of?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t care! You owe me some answers.’ He tries to pull away from her. But she’s right, he does know.
‘You can feel the tension surrounding the house. Where have you felt this before?’
It is the same force he felt when they wrestled for mental control of the shapes they had created; he pulling one way, she another. ‘In the paper,’ he says, even though he doesn’t want to answer her. ‘There is an area of weakness where the two forms cross and conflict. Is that what is happening here? Two forms competing for the same time and space?’
‘Take hold of it, Gideon. Think of the energy field as a sheet of paper bending under external pressure, just as if I were trying to pull it from you. Take control. That’s right. You must hold it steady—everything depends on this.’
And although he tries to ignore her instructions and instead demand answers, his mind, so expertly trained, instinctively reaches out and takes a firm grip in the manner he has been taught. And he can do it. In spite of his anguish and turmoil, he can do it. Gradually the energy flow in the room around them begins to steady and settle, the atmosphere seems to slow down and become calm.
She takes his hand again. This time he does not pull away. ‘Well done, Gideon.’ She smiles, and, even through the darkness, he can see the glow of tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, well done. I think, now, we are ready.’
He wakes up, still in the armchair. The room is grey with pre-dawn light. He rouses himself, feeling suddenly thirsty, and goes to the kitchen. So, if Cassandra is real, there is some purpose to them all being here. And if so, is it Cassandra who is in control of these events? He turns on the tap, watching the water splash and bubbles rise in the glass as it clears. Perhaps he has no choice but to trust her a little longer.
No, that’s not true: there is always a choice. He could walk away. He could pack his few belongings and be out of here before the others wake. He could go back to his flat, collect his passport and by midday be flying over Europe or on his way to South America. But he knows he won’t do any of those things.