Cindy leans forward, and you can see the shadow of his arm, making the sawing motion, up and down.
‘A slow and rhythmic sawing in the little stone workshop across the yard. And a
light
in there. Well, the first time he hears it – little more than a boy, he is – up he gets and down the stairs he goes and makes a tentative journey through the summer night towards the window of the workshop, where a small light gleams – the softest white light.
Well
…’
Ashley Palk is sitting in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, hands clasped around a knee. She’s enjoying this.
Cindy opens up his hands.
‘… no one there, of course. And when he reaches the window there’s no light. And the sound of the sawing has ceased. Gone. And the workshop door, of course, is locked. And so he returns – rather troubled as you might imagine – to his bed. And the next time he’s awakened it’s by an urgent banging on the farmhouse door. Samuel Jones, it is, the farrier, with the news of the sudden death of his father in the night.’
He leans back.
‘In the course of one summer I would be told many such stories. Mostly by the Fychans themselves. A long-ago summer. It was only the second day of our holiday in the caravan when my father decided we should walk out over the hills to Staylittle. Not a particularly difficult walk on a fine summer morning, but here’s Idris Fychan at the gate – a big man, grey beard and a very old cap like a broken slate. And Idris is moving the air with his hands. “Not the day for it, Mr Lewis.” And my mother, who has made up a special picnic, laughs him away, and Idris sniffs and shrugs and looks a little sad. And, of course, my mother it is who slips down a crag, smooth as glass, and breaks an ankle, and me who is sent running back to the farm to summon an ambulance from Machynlleth.’
He tells them how the holiday came to a premature end – for his parents, at least. How his mother who, he later learned, was pregnant at the time with his sister Carys, was taken home to Merthyr by his father. Travelling without Sydney, as he was then. His father, worried he would not be able to cope, had accepted the offer by the wife of Idris Fychan to look after the boy for a few days until things were organized.
‘Well, the few days turned into a few weeks. Until the end of the school holidays, in fact. I was twelve years old and learned more in those weeks than in all the rest of my schooling. And years later went back to the Fychans for more advanced tuition.’
‘In what?’ Rhys Sebold asks. ‘The telling of tall stories?’
‘Learning to be what I am. For my sins. And they are many.’
The camera lingers in the honey light, exploring the wooden panels, the lofty inglenook and a solid chess table for the drinks. A nice shot of five silhouettes grouped around the monkish man as he rises and straightens his tweed skirt.
‘What I am,’ he says sadly, again.
Grayle’s alone in her micro-cabin with a TV.
No multi-views tonight. She’s been thrown out of the stable. A live broadcast needs too many people, working like a machine.
They’ll come for her if and when they need her. It’s strange watching alone on a single screen in a prefabricated cupboard in a low-lit village above the house, the dirty lantern. Which is in here now. Odd how a single screen, after so many, concentrates the mind.
The phone rings on the desk.
‘He was a little sod,’ Paul Swinton says. ‘Got beaten up a few times for it, but he couldn’t stop himself. Smart remarks, you know? He could always hurt big kids with his tongue more than they could hurt him with their fists.’
‘That’s talent,’ Grayle says.
She tried to get Swinton earlier, before the programme started, but his phone was engaged and she ended up leaving her number on his machine. Is he calling back now, nearly ten thirty, just to show he’s not watching Ozzy?
‘We used to be big mates. I went to his wedding. I was almost his best man, but then he got Neil Gill, instead, who he used to write comedy scripts with, and we drifted apart. He was a big star, and I was just a maths teacher at his old school. He always hated maths.’
‘Mr Swinton,’ Grayle says, ‘we were very disturbed to read your email.’
‘I didn’t want to write it, but Dave Turner was a good man. One of the best, and there’s no way he liked little boys, not in that way. Not in any way, now I come to think of it, he was an old-fashioned teacher.’
‘You know why Ozzy Ahmed might’ve made that up about him?’
‘Like I say, I’ve had nothing to do with Austin for years.’
‘Anybody you can think of who might shed some light on it? See, we rely on the residents to tell the truth.’
‘He
did
lie. Quite a lot, no doubt about that. If he thought a lie was funnier than the truth, he’d lie.’
‘That kind of figures. But doesn’t make me happy.’
‘I’m glad you’re taking it seriously.’
‘More seriously than you know. If he’s lying about this, he could be lying about other things.’
She has his confidence.
‘Have you spoken to Neil Gill? They don’t work together much any more, but I think they’re still mates.’
‘You know that for sure?’
‘I’m still in touch with Neil. He was at school with us. He should’ve been with us and the skull that night, but he had a cold. At least he said he had a cold. I think he just didn’t want to do it. He never liked that skull.’
*
Grayle notes that Ashley Palk is now regarding Cindy with what looks almost like affection.
‘Tell me, Mr Lewis. Are you on a retainer with the Welsh Tourist Board, or is it more informal?’
The reply takes a while to come.
‘Ms Palk. All too clear, it is, that your knowledge of the new Wales is distressingly scant. In my experience, the Wales Tourist Board is wary of such primitive throwbacks as the Fychan brothers. Does not invite people to Wales to be intimidated. Wrongly, in my view, mind – a certain kind of English visitor relishes the sinister. But there we are.’
He looks around.
‘The Fychans’ parlour was not unlike this room, in age, at least, though much smaller and more rudimentary. Walls of rubble stone, an ancient, faded rug over cracked flags. The house was reached by an old and twisty lane. Some say that spirit-paths are straight, but the Fychans found that it Often helps to disorient them.’
‘Who?’ Roger Herridge asks. ‘The spirits?’
‘The ashen husks of the departed are rarely to be welcomed.’
‘This is
such
bullshit,’ Rhys Sebold says.
‘But, Rhys, it’s why we’re
here
.’ Helen Parrish is on her cushion on the edge of the ingle with a small glass of white wine, distantly amused. ‘As nobody’s given us a clue about what’s supposed to haunt this house—’
‘NOTHING haunts this house except us.’
‘—should we not be not be trying to find out? Earning our money?’
‘Come on then.’ Rhys is up on his long legs. ‘Come on, then, spirits. Bring green bile from my lips. Spin my head.
Possess
me.’
‘Let’s not descend to the juvenile.’ Ashley uncrosses her legs, sits up, thoughtful. ‘Cindy, tell me, if your friends the Fychans were here now, what might they do to contact the spirits?’
‘But they wouldn’t, see. The shaman is not a medium. Consider it presumptuous, he would. Let the individual dead lie.’
‘Bullshit,’ Rhys says irritably. ‘So much incredible bullshit.’
‘Let’s not condemn it all out of hand,’ Ashley says.
‘Oh, sorry.’ Helen looks up, perhaps just slightly tipsy. ‘I thought you’d been condemning it all out of hand for over a decade.’
‘I’m always open to correction.’
‘
Ashley
,’ Ozzy Ahmed says silkily, ‘I didn’t know you were into
correction
. I myself—’
Ashley raises hands for hush, looks around, face to face, ending at Cindy’s.
‘
Should
we make an effort?’
‘Never claimed to be a medium.’ Cindy straightens his skirt. ‘A little too cosy for me. Too
drawing room
.’
‘Table turning?’ Ashley turns her chair to face his. ‘Ectoplasm? Didn’t you once produce ectoplasm through the beak of… what’s his name?’
‘Kelvyn Kite. Left him in his box, up in my room. Has a tendency to be confrontational. That was comedy, Ashley. Not always useful in our situation.’
‘Well, let’s see what we can find.’
Ashley comes elegantly to her feet and into the ingle, prodding a smouldering log to one side, a camera closing in on her hands reaching for the handle of a small iron door in the stone. Grayle doesn’t even remember a door in there.
‘I noticed when we came in from the dining room tonight…’ Ashley’s voice crisp from the personal mic as she messes with a metal latch, ‘… that the wee cupboard in here, the door was open. I think one of us was meant to notice, don’t you? Here we are.’
As Ashley emerges, arms full, Grayle’s getting a sense of sequence, almost scripted drama. Which is not possible.
Helen says, ‘God, what the hell is
that
?’
Ashley brings it out, lowers it to the chess table.
‘Oh, that
is
a rather lovely one,’ Cindy murmurs.
It fills Grayle’s screen: a wheel of what looks like grey stone, covered in glass or perspex. A pentagram in its centre. Curly letters around its perimeter. Isolated words.
One says, NO.
Another says, GOODBYE.
‘I want to smash it already,’ Rhys Sebold says.
56
The haunted
THE GLIDING TRIANGLE
on which you place your forefinger – the planchette – has a hole through which a captive letter or symbol can be viewed.
Cindy watches little Ashley, so pert in her black knitted dress, touching it with an ovalled nail.
‘I’d say five people, maximum, can fit a fingertip on here.’
‘Making me the sixth,’ Rhys Sebold says. ‘How thoughtful of it.’
‘I’d be happy to stand down for you, Rhys,’ Ashley says.
‘You will not, Ms Palk. This was your idea. If you simply want to prove that it doesn’t work, well, fine. I’ll watch.’
If, Cindy thinks, Mr Sebold can detach his gaze from her breasts.
‘There
is
actually a simple way to prove it doesn’t work,’ Ashley says. ‘Unfortunately, it only applies where you have the wee bits of paper in a circle, with a letter inscribed on each one. If the letters are visible to the participants, it will indeed begin to spell out credible messages. Turn the pieces of paper over, letters facing down, and its literacy is out the window.’
‘All
that
proves, lovely,’ Cindy tells her, ‘is that spirits don’t have X-ray eyes. Why should we assume that they acquire higher senses? Or even a higher intelligence. I tend to think of the earthbound dead as rather dim, and basic in their desires.’
‘Or if we’re all blindfolded,’ Ashley says. ‘That would also work.’
‘Tedious, though, lovely, and the viewers would be deprived of the expression in the eyes of whichever of us is told that he or she has only two weeks to live.’
‘That happen often?’ Helen Parrish asks.
‘Only to those foolish enough to ask when they’re scheduled to depart this world. Spirits can never resist ruining someone’s night, the scamps.’
Cindy watches them peering and prodding, as if the device might light up.
He’s noticed this before with live television; it generates its own nervous energy, a feverish need to
do something
. There can be no editing. Each moment of inactivity is a moment lost for ever. The air is electric with possibility.
Only a matter of time before this thing appeared. He wonders how long it’s been there, in that discreet cupboard. High quality, it is, for all its vulgarity. A superior toy, doubtless the best Leo Defford’s people could find on the Internet outside of the antiques trade. For all his professed disdain for psychic programmes, Defford can’t afford to let two hours of live television pass without incident. Cindy remembers what he said when they were motoring towards what would prove to be the cooling corpse of Harry Ansell.
You know how to work a ouija board, Cindy?
He actually knew less then than he does now after some hurried research which has left him rather more respectful of the so-called ‘talking board’ than he expected.
Five chairs are arranged now in a circle around the chess table away from the fire. Cindy hesitates before sitting down.
‘Physical contact is recommended. Usually suggested, it is, that our knees should be touching under the table.’
Ozzy Ahmed looks stern.
‘Steady on, Cindy.’
‘Also, some groups begin with a communal prayer.’
Rhys, it is, who advises dispensing with this futile formality, leaving Cindy to suggest that those who wish to might pray silently. Roger Herridge nods, then loosens his tie, tosses back his hair and sits down, flashing his cuffs as if preparing to deal cards.
‘How do we start?’
‘I always imagine two verses of “Abide With Me”,’ Helen says. ‘Was that in an old film?’
If it was, nobody else seems to have seen it. Ashley Palk positions the chess table directly under the candle hoop.
‘I think we should formally decide what we’re hoping to achieve by this. I’m assuming… contact with whatever haunts this house?’
‘That,’ Cindy says, ‘presents another dilemma of which we should be aware. Normally, an outlet is offered to whoever or whatever might seek one…
if
its intentions are positive. If it wants to help us.’
‘In other words,’ Herridge says, ‘discourage the demonic?’
‘A time-honoured preliminary, Roger, in ritual magic. Which – make no mistake – this undoubtedly is. The first ouija boards known by that inexplicably silly name were apparently manufactured in America during the spiritualist boom of the early 1900s. But the principle goes back into the mists. Pythagoras, I believe, used something similar.’
And dangerous are they? Well, yes, even if the worst it can do is unlock doors to the subconscious. Who knows what inner-plane connections the subconscious might make? Poke a forefinger through the veil and you may have difficulty withdrawing it.