‘Which does not mean we need dilly-dally on the inside,’
Max warned.
Jed guffawed. ‘Dilly what?’
‘Can we get on with this, please?’
Jed grinned. ‘OK. Giddy up. Let’s rock and roll.’ Jed moved out from behind the gatehouse, then paused and turned to them. He grinned. ‘Oh, and fellas, just relax.’
The building’s facade rose forty metres above the wide pink forecourt. It was easily another fifty metres across.
Didn’t have a porch so much as an awning that reached all the way to the roof, and looked like an amalgam of an old cinema and the prow of an ocean liner built after the First World War. The walls around it were an ice-cream-pink stone.
Where they appeared across the three storeys, the windows were circular and nautical in design, but darkened with whatever was blacking them out from the inside. The building 490
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reminded Kyle of many things, a high-camp tomb amongst them.
‘The windows on every floor
are
sealed with metal shutters.’ Max said this like he hoped it wasn’t true, because he’d spent a bit of time in the dark with the Blood Friends. The old producer was also breathless, and they were still only moving towards the front of the building. Kyle considered begging Jed for the spare handgun.
Jed was unfazed. ‘We don’t get to see the roof, but I heard it’s a metal deck. Painted white. Like on a ship. Where they used to throw parties. Imagine the pussy that was up there.’
Max mopped at his forehead. ‘Katherine saw it as a magnet for rich donors. For wealthy acolytes. She bought it with our money.’
Kyle gaped. From a side angle it looked like an Aztec temple, the roof ascended in a ziggurat pattern to the distant railings, hung with the life rings. Built between the portholes on the third storey were polished aluminium bas-reliefs de -
picting Grecian scenes of willowy women in long gowns and what looked like swimming caps. Geometric surrounds of metal bordered the occasional door at ground level. Embossed with a peacock and the initials R.F., the iron doors seemed intended for tall, thin people who lived on pink champagne and cigarettes smoked through lacquer holders. Kyle broke out the camera. Jed grinned. Max nodded. ‘If you have to.’
The grounds at the back, though having seen better days, were still astonishing. Great curving tiers of stone radiated from the rear of the property like ripples on water, until they reached what was either a dance floor, an empty ice rink, or the world’s biggest tiled patio, guarded by chevron-patterned 491
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cornerstones. A gazebo with sides made from iron peacocks stood in the centre of the court. Beyond the court, grounds capable of housing a golf course flowed down to the per -
imeter wall of white stone and ivy.
‘You see that little house made from birds?’ Jed said, nodding out to where Kyle gawped. ‘That was a bar. Two outside bars here. Other one’s on the roof in a lifeboat.’
‘You’d think he could have stretched to a swimming pool.’
‘That’s inside,’ Jed said.
Six sets of patio doors at the back of the building were sealed from the sunlight by long funeral drapes. Steel grilles were locked in place between the drapery and glass in the door frames. It looked deserted, shut down after a season of frivolity had long concluded.
Jed broke out glass-cutters from his rucksack, then a set of lock-picking tools for the steel grilles. ‘Gimme some room here, boys.’
As Jed cut the beginning of a large circular hole in one of the patio doors, Max continued to sweat heavily, wiping at his scrawny orange neck with a white handkerchief. He peered at Kyle and tried to smile, but his lips quivered instead.
His eyes were wild with fear. ‘There won’t be any electric light. Not inside. Chet would have disabled the lights by now.
The rooms in the middle of the building don’t even have windows. And it’s the time of Ascent. I’m sure of it. So be prepared. It ends here. The bloodline.’
‘You know that for sure?’
‘Chet goes and Katherine goes with him. Trapped inside his remains. There is no other way. Katherine is the only earthly conduit for the Blood Friends. She calls them, maintains them. Always has done. The way of things must be 492
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re-established today, here. So know that this is a good thing we are about to do.’
Kyle could barely speak, was becoming breathless with fright again. ‘She brought Lorche, or whatever the fuck he was following back, Max. Someone else might.’
‘Who knows how to? Who’s left now? It takes years. Years of determination and belief, concentrated in the right places, with the right offerings. Different world now. One more transparent. It would be near impossible to achieve what she did back in the sixties. The history of their intrusions since 1969 ends with us. The family in Antwerp will keep a careful watch after our business is concluded here. And when the time comes, film them, you have to film them, Kyle. It’s our only security.’
Max looked at the sky for a moment, then back at Kyle with as much remorse as he could summon to his twitchy face. ‘But I’m afraid it’s why the film can never be shown to a soul. It cannot be risked. Because fools will try to speak with the old friends again, as she once did. Your work has been invaluable. But no one can go through what we have, Kyle. Not again.’ Max nodded at his bag. ‘So we’ll need that camera when it’s over. And all copies of the rushes.’ Max nodded at Jed’s back as the man worked at the glass. ‘Please don’t force me to have the material
collected
from your colleagues. It would be a very foolish thing to broadcast so much as a clip, my dear Kyle. There would be serious repercussions.’
‘This is my surprised face. There never was a film, Max.
What I was forced to take part in was probably going to prevent me from finishing, let alone broadcasting anything.
You knew that.’ Kyle nodded at the patio windows. ‘But give 493
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me your word now that you’re not going to leave me inside there.’
‘Of course. Without question. I’m surprised you would think that of me.’
Kyle shook his head. ‘For sure, Max. For sure.’
Jed carefully extracted a ring of intact glass, leaving a hole they could step through. He placed the glass circle on the concrete patio. Reached inside and unlocked the steel grille.
Concertinaed it to the side to clear a route, then withdrew and said, ‘Showtime, folks.’
Max opened his holdall and removed the pistol, his silver salt-shaker, night vision goggles and a torch, and pocketed them about his overalls. Kyle shuddered at the very sight of the gun. ‘You even know how to use that, Max?’
‘Pray I won’t need it, but Jed was good enough to give me lessons.’
Jed fitted his weapon onto a black canvas utility belt. Hung bolt cutters upon it and a series of flares. He caught Kyle watching him. ‘Magnesium. In case of emergency. Light the place up like the fourth of July. You seen how much they like gettin’ burned too. Reminds them of the damnation they escaped in hell.’
Max looked at Kyle. ‘In every room we can, we open the curtains, to secure the area behind us. We need to return as much of this building to light as possible as we move through it.’ He looked up at the walls. ‘She’s up there. Somewhere.’
‘You don’t know which room?’
Jed chuckled. ‘Now where’s the fun in that, Spielberg?’
‘What, what if she’s, he’s, whatever it is, is behind a bloody iron door?’
‘Acetylene rig in my pack. Have a little faith, Spielberg.’
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‘The child? What do we do with it?’
Jed frowned. ‘Child? No one mentioned a child to me.’
‘The fucking kid he adopted?’
‘Now you sure that it’s a kid, Spielberg. ’Cus I ain’t.’
Kyle looked out at the terraces and court and was mo -
mentarily convinced he should run. Jed’s timely checking and cocking of his handgun kept him stationary.
‘Wait here.’ Jed slipped his night vision goggles down and ducked through the hole in the glass.
They came into a dining room worthy of the Queen Mary.
Golden light fell onto a broad floor of black and white chequerboard marble. Kyle stared about himself in astonishment, then remembered to resume filming. Max couldn’t get the curtains open fast enough to expose the room to the sun.
And there was something undignified in his haste to clear them back to the walls of the room, on either side of the hole they had ducked through.
Behind the giant bar of maple inlaid with chrome, on the right-hand side of the room, the peacock-tail motif was emblazoned across the wall in stainless steel. All of the tables were white and made from Bakelite, but bare and without chairs.
‘No chairs?’ Kyle said.
‘You ain’t here for
Home and Garden
,’ Jed said, and pushed his goggles on top of his baseball cap. He jogged across to Max, who said, ‘What next? I can’t remember. I can’t . . .’
Kyle moved to stand behind them. Filmed the conversation. Even if the footage was never going to win awards, if it fell into the hands of the authorities he wanted them to 495
ADAM NEVILL
acknowledge who was calling the shots here. Maybe then he would only need to serve most of his life behind bars, and not all of it.
‘We got the kitchen next door. Beyond that is a laundry.
Other side is a lounge and then a billiards room facing the back. We get the sun in there first. Then we know we can always fall back down here.’
Kyle went and filmed the enormous fireplace, tiled in pink and aquamarine, on the opposite side of the dining room to the bar.
‘Spielberg!’
Kyle looked over his shoulder.
Jed grinned. ‘Stay away from the chimneys. Real dark in there. Don’t know what might come down.’
Kyle stepped well away, and turned instead to the elegant arch leading out of the dining room. Zoomed in on it. But couldn’t see beyond a lightless space that seemed to offer the end of existence as they knew it, for anyone foolish enough to step through.
Jed’s voice came back to him. ‘Up front we got the swimming pool, a library, drawing room, morning room and boot room. Oh, yeah, and the lift we ain’t going anywhere near.’
‘That’s right. That’s right,’ Max said, gulping at the cool air, and Kyle was absolutely certain that Jed should disarm the old man now and hand his Gloch over.
‘Max. Swap you the camera for the gun?’ No one
answered him.
They approached the arch: Jed first; Kyle in the middle; Max shuffled in the rear, panting with fear and nerves. Before they even switched on the little Maglites on their handguns, the stench hit them. ‘They’re here,’ Max said, coughing in 496
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the miasma of dead birds, stagnant water, and ancient clothing contained in what had been a sealed building. The smell seemed to drop directly from the enormous mausoleum rearing above them, from upstairs.
They came to a wary standstill in the middle of a vast reception, the floor continuing the chequerboard theme. A great marble staircase on the right side rose into darkness.
Torch beams and the camera’s spot raked around the space designed like a grand theatre lobby, and briefly illumined the lightless arches leading out of it. The giant porthole windows beside the front door that they’d seen from outside were barred and sealed behind black drapes long as royal flags.
All four walls were patterned with tall light-panels of green glass, inset between long strips of red crushed velvet that reached the vaulted ceiling. There was a candy machine, a popcorn machine, even a little box office beside the front doors, its chrome grille resplendent like the front of an old car; a shuttered and locked cloakroom for guests long gone.
Jed ran across the lobby in a crouch to the front doors, looking towards the stairs on his right as he moved. Max hobbled after him. Between them they raked the recalcitrant noisy drapes aside to reveal locked steel security grilles. Shafts of dusty light, barred by shadows, shot through the portholes and illumined the lobby floor. But even with the sudden comfort of sunlight, there was no way out of the building save going back through the hole in the French doors. Kyle was about to suggest creating other points of egress when Jed whispered tensely, ‘Move out. On me.’ And did his crouching run back across the lobby to the doors beside the dining room.
Kyle was happy to see him enter the enormous kitchen 497
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first, pistol out forward, one hand in support of the fingers that held the gun.
‘Kitchen clear!’
And they moved in a huddle through arches or doors of patterned glass, room by room on the ground floor, as if exploring the hull of some forgotten
Titanic
, preserved and undisturbed in black waters for the best part of a century.
Hazy spheres of their lights, in those first few terrifying seconds on entering each room, moved like desperate eyes, cast from their torches to strike distant walls. Jed always out front.
Art deco lamps and strange furniture had a habit of suddenly rearing into sharp focus, to the soundtrack of Kyle’s
‘Shit. Shit. What’s that?’ Max’s sharp inhalations acted as percussion. Glimmers of aluminium, stainless steel, lacquer, and Bakelite were thrown back from fittings, fixtures and furniture hiding in the dark. Chevron patterns, ziggurats, a fountain of chrome, and mirror tiles glared out of the enforced dusk. The peacock spread its tail-feather motif on every wall.
In the larger rooms the darkness was at first so dense it emitted a tangible gravity, that pressed them from all sides, additionally loaded with their terror, until they tore the curtains open, and sometimes even tore the drapes from the rails with both hands when they stubbornly resisted drawing.
They lit the place up with California sunshine. Revealed its sealed treasures. Poured the sun’s gold through the French doors of the lounge bar; doors longing to be opened again to the stately vista beyond. Sweeping curves came back to the world. A step pyramid rose to a rectangular fireplace.
Brass-framed screens featuring nouveau fairy mermaids, 498
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encased an elegant gathering of polished maple chairs, each upholstered with satin and fur, positioned about glossy lacquer coffee tables, but appearing mournful at the absence of guests.