‘How?’
Max stopped his slow progress down to the study; he crept more than walked. He looked up as a frightened child might.
‘They came. Right after you left for the airport. I nearly lost an ear.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I heard one inside the ceiling cavity. It got to the bloody cables. After the first time, I had them replaced and –’ Max winced from a sudden pang of agony issuing from somewhere about his body ‘– I opted for a railway grade. But it 408
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was only a matter of time before they killed the light again.
When they couldn’t chew through the wires, they tore them out of the main frame. The whole wing was in darkness when I was awoken.’ Max looked at Kyle and tried to smile, but it became a pathetic wince beneath eyes that welled with self-pity. ‘I’m living on borrowed time, my dear Kyle. A day of reckoning is at hand. One closer than I ever imagined. But I suggest we make it theirs, not ours.’
‘Ours?’
Max closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. But it’s too late for apologies. We need to act. Now.’
‘Dan’s gone.’
Max stopped moving. ‘God, no.’
‘God, yes. My mate is gone.’ Kyle jabbed his finger back at the front door. ‘I’ve just been to his flat! They left a saucer full of teeth in the kitchen.’
Max’s thoughts changed direction. He stared into the middle distance. ‘Three intrusions in one night. Dan. Me. And Gabriel. I’ve been checking in every morning to see if he . . .
well, you know, if Gabriel made it through the night. He never. So they came for three of us last night after you left.
Four if Malcolm Gonal was included, but I’m not in touch there.’ Max shook his head, then continued down the hall with more determination than he’d shown since opening the front door.
‘Max!’
As if to himself, Max spoke. ‘A concerted effort was made.
Be grateful you were travelling. The police are questioning Gabriel’s nurse. Can you believe it? They want to know how he bled to death. Through his stump.’ Max winced as if he’d bitten into rotten fruit. ‘They bled him where he lay.’
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Kyle stopped and held his head with both hands. Didn’t know where to begin or even what to say. Was speechless with fury, incomprehension, revulsion, grief, and confusion.
‘Police.’
Max laughed unpleasantly as if their involvement would be ludicrous. ‘Hopeless, I know.’
Kyle was upon him in two bounds. Turned him against the wall. The old man squealed with pain. ‘You bastard!’
Spittle from his mouth forced Max to blink. ‘Dan. Dan!’
Max tried to recover his composure within Kyle’s white knuckles. He stared at Kyle with distaste, and surprise. Didn’t seem to anticipate the wrath of those he had endangered through his self-interest.
‘I want my friend back. How?’ The volume of Kyle’s voice escalated until it echoed inside the hallway. ‘No more bullshit, Max. No more paintings, and hints, and—’
‘You saw them.
The Saints of Filth
. It’s why I wasted so much time sending you there. So you’d really know what we’re facing. So you can truly accept them.’
‘I don’t know anything. I saw some paintings of an atrocity. But what they suggest . . . isn’t possible. Can’t be.
It’s time for the police. Dan—’
‘Possible? The police?’ Max grinned. ‘What would you tell them?’
‘I could break your neck. I’d do the time. It’d be worth it.’
‘Kyle, you’re a smart man. Can you not work it out? Can you not accept what has happened? What is happening? Even after this? Gabriel. Martha. Susan. Poor Dan. And us if we don’t act. My dear boy, it’s time to do the unthinkable.’
‘The what?’
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‘You’ll understand. You must. It’s the only reason I’m still here. Waiting for you. So I can show you the rest. Like I promised. To give you a chance too.’
‘What bloody chance? What are you saying?’
‘There is a way to save yourself.’
In a flash of self-preservation that left him feeling reprehensible, Kyle released Max. Whatever could be done, if anything could be done, this poisonous old madman would know how.
Max smoothed out the lapels of his soiled robe. ‘This is not some ghost story for the masses, my boy. Some haunted house you can film and then speculate about on cable television. Some paranormal fantasy you can go and film with your friends. For the festivals and fans. The freaks.’ Max smirked and Kyle had no idea how he restrained himself from caving in his little skull like a ripe satsuma. ‘It’s more, much more. This is real. It always has been. Which is why you couldn’t walk away from it. You smelled authenticity. Smelled it! The genuine article. So blame yourself for your involvement. And you better start believing in what you have seen, if we are to act with purpose and without scruple.’
‘You little fuck—’
Max swept his cane through the air. Pointed the tip at the generator. ‘Come on, while the battery lasts.’ Max checked his watch. ‘We need to be long gone before it runs out.’
Sat in a huge leather chair, Kyle was numb. Strengthless. His head was a flotsam of thoughts adrift. He merely sat and waited and stared at the blank screen on the desk in Max’s study. In one hand he held a tumbler of the brandy he’d shared with Max in better times, if you could call them that.
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And he considered his still being awake an impossible state of affairs; how many hours had he slept since their last night in America? Five tops in the back of cabs and on Max’s sofa.
One shock after another had kept him jumpy, but heavy-headed, wading through treacle, listless and lethargic if he sat down. And so saturated with fear, sleep had never been much of an option anyway.
But if he just lay down, how long before
they
took him?
He imagined his cat sniffing at a black jawbone on the floor of his kitchen. Then killed the thought before he screamed.
Max leaned across the laptop. ‘You need to pay attention, Kyle. I’m leaving the moment this concludes.’
‘You’re going nowhere. Until I’m satisfied every grain of truth has been shaken from what’s left of your miserable body.’
‘You will be sated. I assure you.’ Max looked at the screen as it lit up, and grinned until it hurt his ghastly bruised face.
‘I recently prepared this insert for our film. To add direction to your
discoveries
.’
Kyle spat the brandy back into his glass. ‘Insert!’ But what did it matter now? He should have been too tired and witless to feel any ire about interference and ownership, but he wasn’t. Had anyone, in the entire history of film-making, been more ill-treated than he had been by Maximillian Solomon?
Probably
.
The screen filled with faces in photographs taken decades before; they had the fuzzy grain of scans. Some were black and white. Max cleared his throat. ‘Thirty-two. All dead or missing. All core members of The Last Gathering in London and France. I knew them all. See here.’ Max pointed at one murky picture on the screen: a man with a thin face and long 412
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dark hair. ‘Brother Gabriel.’ Kyle leaned forward, squinted, detected a vague resemblance. ‘And here. Sister Isis.’ She’d once been pretty, blonde, petite. ‘The others, of course, you don’t know. They were gone before you came on board.’
On board?
Kyle opened his mouth to speak.
Max was not to be interrupted, and picked up a fountain pen to use as a pointer. ‘Brother Marcian died of blood poisoning. From a wound, believed to have been a bite. He was found in a commune in Brighton in 1973.’ Max’s pen moved to another picture. ‘Sister Juno, septicaemia, 1973. Sister Athena, heroin overdose, 1973. Brother Anno was found dead in Aston, Birmingham, in 1974. After the ice melted on a canal. Wounded fatally by an unknown assailant. He’d lost a great deal of blood before he fell in. The police assumed there had been a fight. Anno was an alcoholic: case closed.
Sister Selene, barbiturate overdose in St Tropez, 1975. Sister Devota, murdered in Liverpool, also in 1975, case unsolved.
Brother Placid’s body was washed ashore in Morocco, 1975.
The corpse was in a terrible state. Cause of death unknown.
‘And then we jump forward in time after a hiatus. Sister Zita suicide, 2010. Sister Elinid, heart failure, 2011. Brother Ethan, massive stroke, 2011. And most recently, Brother Heron: blood poisoning from an unknown animal bite, 2011.
One of my oldest friends.’
‘The one you said died of cancer when we did the London shoot. More bullshit.’
‘I lied. But I do not lie when I tell you that the remaining eighteen are missing. Have never been found. I spent a great deal of money looking. Serapis, Belus, Orcus, Ades, Azazel, Katherine’s former favourites of The Seven, and poor Brother Abraham were never seen again after the schism at the 413
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Norman farm. Three of them had their children with them when they disappeared. Katherine had tried to use them all in France for something unpleasant and the adults revolted.
At the mine in Arizona her intention was just as crude, but her execution was more artful, as you will soon see.
‘The other key missing European members walked out of their lives within the last two years. But I’ve come to believe they were
taken
out of their lives. They were all old, so where could they go?’
‘So you’re the last man standing from the European group?’
Max nodded, took the film off pause. Another screen full of faces, mostly in black and white. ‘Seventeen core members of The Temple of the Last Days from the US period. They all spent a substantial period of time at the copper mine in Arizona.’ Max tapped the screen with the pen five times.
‘Here are those you know of: Brother Adonis, Brother Ariel, Sister Urania, Sister Hannah and Sister Priscilla. Their bodies have never been found. And I have no reason to disbelieve Martha Lake’s claims that they were murdered in 1975 by Katherine’s new elect.’
Max wafted the pen over the screen. ‘The fates of all of the others bear the hallmarks of what I call The Last Days murders. Brother Samuel, blood poisoning, California, 1974. Brother Renus, his body was discovered by hikers in Colorado, 1975. Believed to have been mostly eaten by scavengers. Sister Isadora, septicaemia attributed to dirty nee-dles, 1975. Another heroin addict. As were Brother Lucius, and Sister Cinnia. Both found dead in 1975; cause of death, septicaemia. What’s interesting here, is that their bodies had been partially eaten by rats, or dogs, or so the police reports stated. Though they never looked too closely. The other six 414
LAST DAYS
with the blue borders are all still missing. Four since the mid-seventies. The other two vanished within the last twelve months. And then, of course, we have Bridgette Clover and Martha Lake. One suicide, and one murder after an intrusion, in 2011.’
Max moved his pen to a press photo of Irvine Levine that Kyle recognized from the back cover of
Last Days
. ‘Missing since 2010. No trace. Nothing.’
Kyle swallowed. ‘You’ve been researching this for ages.’
Max shook his head. ‘No. This is the result of less than two years’ work. I put as much distance between myself and the organization as I possibly could. I was not lying to you, Kyle. But you will soon understand why the revelation of the facts about my renewed interest in the organization was selective.’
‘Two years ago I was approached by a man called Don Perez.
An academic who’d been looking for survivors of cults for a study. He tracked Brother Heron down, who led him to me. Perez discovered that many of the core Temple group who deserted the Arizona mine between 1974 and 1975
had either died in similar circumstances, or were listed as officially missing. Many of them were transients, addicts, alcoholics, manic depressives. You name it, they all had problems. Which encouraged Perez’s thesis on the effects of membership in a cult. Of course, many of the survivors, if not all of them, were so tainted and damaged by their association with the group at the mine, I was even willing to attribute their fates to Perez’s line of inquiry. But during our brief correspondence Mr Perez went missing. His where-abouts are unknown, as of February 2010.’
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Max released a long, tired sigh. ‘Then I found the same pattern among the original members who were present in Clarendon Road and the farm. But only those at the time of the vision, and the arrival of what were known as “the presences”, in each location. With the exception of myself, Heron, Isis and Gabriel were the only living members I traced from the two European temples. And think of the odds of this happening to nearly everyone from those key periods in both incarnations of the Temple. This is no coincidence, Kyle.
And Isis, Heron, Gabriel and myself had also become beset by unpleasant dreams. This year. A foreshadowing, I now believe. Of what was to come. It seems Katherine’s delight in devising slow torments had not abated. It appears she was making a comeback. Coming for the rest of us.’
‘Hang on. Katherine?’
Max held up a hand to silence him. ‘All in good time.
When I researched the actual temple locations, I found this.’
Max moved the slide onto a photograph of the house in Clarendon Road. ‘I chose the property. Others were against it from the start, because of the cost. But Katherine liked the grand gesture, the suggestion of status, and she was in control of our finances before we even set foot in the place. I chose it on account of its reputation. An infamy I believed to have lasted since the late-Victorian period. But it went much further back than that.’
The image on-screen changed to a woodcut or engraving of a man with a pointed beard and a wide-brimmed hat. ‘The charlatan occultist and mesmerist, Valentyne Prowd. Also known as Long Val. And an English member of Lorche’s Blood Friends during their brief stay in London to evade per-416
LAST DAYS
secution in the Netherlands. They lived in a caravan train like travelling actors, outside the city for no more than a year, in what was then a rural area. Somewhere between what is now known as Marble Arch and Shepherd’s Bush. I believe the Blood Friends chiefly resided in Holland Park on Prowd’s land before returning to the continent without Prowd, who ultimately could not offer the servility Lorche craved.