Authors: Phil Rickman

The Magus of Hay (30 page)

Poppet

‘E
ACH OF THEM
stationed in a chosen spot,’ Claudia said, ‘at a prearranged time.’

‘Physically?’

‘Initially, yes. Someone might, for example, stand at the confluence of the brook and the Wye, down on that little beach near the sewage works where the King was found.’

Here, on the edge of night, Hay-on-Wye reduced to a serrated silhouette against a band of fading red, it all sounded entirely logical, disturbingly persuasive. But Merrily, uncomfortable with it, found she’d put the cross back around her neck.

‘If you can have a group of people with the same focus,’ Claudia said, ‘working with perfect synchronicity in a sympathetic atmosphere, the results can be amazing. Think of the transcendent power of Gregorian chant in a cathedral.’

‘So you’d have a group of trained initiates, all focused on the creation of a successful economy founded on books?’

‘Nothing so simplistic. You don’t concentrate on making booksellers rich. You refine it to something which is, at once, more amorphous and more exact. Think of it in its purest form – illumination, a whole ethos founded upon
the word.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or Dan Brown. Knowledge begins with the word.’

‘Knowledge, enlightenment… books?’

The moon had come out, not far from full. Claudia’s broad face shone.

‘Because books were central to the aspiration, Peter liked to involve writers. They’d come individually to Hay and Peter, or one of his group, would introduce each of them to a particular spot, perhaps linked to their personality, and show them how to store the images – the sights, the sounds, the atmosphere of the place – in their imaginations. So that, even if they were hundreds of miles away, they’d be able to visualize and to project themselves into a location.’

‘That couldn’t’ve happened overnight.’

‘No. Some people, it would take a year, two years, of daily practice. And not everyone stayed the course. Using writers was not invariably a good idea. Bruce Chatwin dropped out quite quickly – more interested, I suspect, in what he could get out of it for a novel or a travel book. For something like this to work, it has to be separated from all personal desire. One must maintain a level of complete detachment from what one wants to achieve. That’s why most of the people involved were, as they say hereabouts, from Off.’

‘Is that why the Convoy were involved?’

‘Sorry? Oh, you mean the travellers? Before my time, I’m afraid. Yes, a very convenient human resource in the nineteen eighties. Introduced to Peter by… who was that chap?’

‘Jeremy Sandford?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Supporter of the homeless. Expert on travellers and magic mushrooms.’

‘Then it would have been. The mushrooms were never used in the actual working but seem to have been useful for pre-conditioning. Opening people’s minds to the limitless possibilities. The wider your horizons, strange as it may seem, the easier it is to sharpen your focus.’

‘I’ll work that out sometime. What about Beryl Bain-bridge?’

‘You’re very well informed.’

‘Psychic powers, Claudia.’

Claudia didn’t smile.

‘Beryl was… a natural. I met her once. Entrusted with the old marketplaces – the Buttermarket, which even looks like a temple, and the square below the castle. She was famous for liking a certain clutter – house like a Victorian museum, full of statues and icons and stuffed animals. Think of Beryl in the town on a market day, absorbing the atmosphere. Hay market representing commerce –
local
commerce. An unusual talent for projecting herself into a place and time and then condensing it into the essentials. Surrounded herself with chaos, yet her books were models of concise precision – like sigil-magic, where everything is reduced to a symbol.’

‘I kind of remember reading once that she was an atheist.’

‘May well have been. But when she died, in 2010, her funeral was at the church of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town – a service so High Church that some of the mourners didn’t realize it wasn’t very traditional Roman Catholic. No one has quite managed to explain that.’

Merrily stared at the moon. Miracles and magic.

‘Take me through this, would you, Claudia? On a particular night…’

‘Might be the night of the full moon or the equinox. But you have a group of people, all over the country, alerted these days by email, who go into some private place in their home at the appointed time… and are sent a specific phrase or a clearly defined concept or an image, and… begin.

‘There’s a temple. You’ll see. A proper temple. With a magic circle and cardinal points, all the necessary stuff. And sympathetic props. The most significant of which was a poppet. You know what that is?’

‘That’s a witchcraft thing, isn’t it? A doll.’

‘You take what you need for the purpose, from any tradition. It’s become known as chaos magic. Customized ritual, virtually nothing forbidden. Peter liked the idea, whilst believing it was terribly dangerous for a novice magician, on
the basis that you can’t break the rules with the necessary confidence if you’re not fully conversant with the rules you want to break.’

Merrily was thinking of what Athena had had to say about chaos magic.

‘So you can take the Christian tradition and marry it to something… else.’

From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse.

She was thinking of the figurines in the alcoves in Rector’s library: Isis and the Virgin.

‘I didn’t think you’d find that terribly acceptable. I’m just telling you how it was. The concept’s credited to the artist and magician, Austin Osman Spare, whose images you might have seen—’

‘In the library, here?’

‘The library has drawings by Spare and Eric Gill, who was at Capel-y-ffin.’

‘An obsessive Catholic with a taste for breaking taboos,’ Merrily said. ‘I believe incest was a favourite.’

‘I can only assure you…’ Claudia was now little more than a shadow ‘… that however much you might reject his methodology, Peter Rector’s intentions towards Hay were entirely positive.’

‘Odd, though, how the kind of occultism favoured by neo-Nazi groups like the Order of the Sun in Shadow seems to have absorbed some of the principles of chaos magic.’

Merrily was shaken. There was a tightrope here between good and evil, and the rope was woven from strands of a disturbingly convincing madness.

‘He’d left all that behind,’ Claudia said coldly. ‘As you keep being told.’

‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t still being followed by people inspired by Rector. Do you know anything about Jerrold Adrian Brace?’

‘No. Who is he?’

‘Forget it. What was your role in the last redemptive project?’

‘I was never directly involved. As I’ve indicated, he still considered me a student. He’d tightened up a lot on the people he used. The days of the Convoy were long over. It was all very clandestine – the chosen few. I’ve been mainly the help. The one who helped his solicitor handle his affairs, managed his money, went to his bank, made sure David Hambling and Peter Rector lived safely and happily apart. But he trusted me with knowledge of what was happening. All vibrantly exciting. At first.’

Headlights in the lane.

‘Go on,’ Merrily said.

‘Quite dizzying, seeing Hay mushrooming from a forlorn farming town to somewhere known all over the world. I was here when Clinton came to speak in a huge marquee on the green behind the castle. Thousands of people… a limo with smoked glass windows… the world’s media. Businesses booming all over town, you could almost hear property prices blasting through the roof.’

‘And Rector actually thought he was responsible, in essence, for all of that?’

‘And who’s to say he wasn’t? Who can ever say that?’

‘That’s a very dangerous time, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘That explosion of fame and wealth. When all kinds of people come in with their own agendas. When cherished ideals can tumble in the scramble for bigger and bigger profits. People can go temporarily mental. Look at the banking industry.’

‘That’s when the creative, energetic role becomes a guardian role. More serious.’

Headlights turning in.

‘So I’m taking it that what you call the poppet was the effigy of the King of Hay.’

‘Life-size. Seated on a throne in the circle. So that he was
always part of what was happening. Sometimes the focus was purely on the King, if he hadn’t been well or had financial problems.’

‘Didn’t manage to stop him having to sell the castle.’

Claudia didn’t reply.

‘So how did he end up in the Wye?’

‘Merrily, I don’t know. When I saw the effigy on the TV, I was aghast. Which is why we’re here. Why I’m telling you all this.’

‘Where would they have to go to get the effigy, the poppet?’

‘That’s the burglary aspect. The King lives in the temple. In a magical vacuum.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

The car braked, a red glow, headlights rapidly extinguished.

‘Why would someone take him out and throw him in the river?’

‘Or, more likely, in the Dulas Brook, swollen by the rain. The poppet flushed down the brook and washed into the Wye. I don’t know.’

Merrily saw Bliss getting out into the deep dusk, quietly closing the car door. He had some thin packages under each arm, the moon glinting on cellophane. Bliss was walking steadily, better in the dark.

‘Evening, girls. Do we have consensus on this? I don’t want to hang around.’

‘Let’s assume we do,’ Merrily said.

Suddenly very insecure, in this place where imaginary worlds were built and broken.

Bliss gave each of them one of the plastic packages, keeping one back.

‘Durex suits,’ he said. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t ask. I hope this is nothing. I hope Claudia’s brought us here on a pure whim. What’s a doll in a river, after all?’

Claudia said nothing, but her breathing was audibly rapid as she led them beyond the house towards the outbuildings and the engine room.

Out of blood

‘N
AME
’
S
S
EYMOUR
L
OFTUS
,’ Robin said to Jones. ‘How’d’ya like that?’

Pretty dark now. Beer-bottle lights on shelves of books, face-out, displaying photos of brooms, pentagrams, the Tree of Life and Stonehenge at dawn. Jones had told him about two missing girls, who would be middle-aged women now.

‘You’re saying you think they’re dead?’

‘I’m making no assumptions.’

‘Like… detritus?’

‘People living outside society disappear all the time. They may be dead, they may be living under different identities.’

‘Right.’

Robin was starting to connect with the mindset, and it was both ridiculous and frightening, and it made him mad that there were people like this haunting the beloved British countryside.

Betty was making more tea. Kapoor was on the road to Brecon to pick up a reconditioned Betacam VCR. Robin picked up the mobile, prepared to go to work, like the stupid cops who’d gone to work on him on the edge of the scenic parking lot.

‘Where did you get my name?’

‘Seymour… that
is
you?’

‘Who did you say you were?’

Loftus had one of those downbeat Midlands accents.

‘My name’s Robin Thorogood. I’m a PF member and also a bookseller. Thorogood Pagan Books, of Hay-on-Wye?’

‘Not heard of them.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have. We only just started up. We were in the Radnor Valley, we had a bust-up with an evangelical priest.’

‘I remember that. It was in the papers. That was you, was it?’

‘And now we took over a bookstore that once belonged to one of your members.’

‘My
members?’

‘Order of the Sun in Shadow?’

‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘Seymour… get real.’

What you learned about these guys, through all the years of moots and gatherings, was that no matter how they sounded in a ritual, how sinister they looked in a temple, some of the time they were just people, with insecurities, money worries, marriage problems and fears of the past catching up with them.

‘That was years ago,’ Seymour said. ‘I don’t do that any more. I don’t even talk about it any more. We started something we couldn’t control. It’s over.’

‘His name was Jerrold Brace.’

‘He wasn’t a member.’

Oh, too fast, Seymour, just a little too fast.

‘And how does it concern you?’

‘We have… found signs of his habitation. Cut in stone.’

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Robin.’

Not only failed to conceal his number, he’d given the guy his name and address. But it would be crazy to treat him like you believed all the bullshit.

Seymour said very quietly, ‘Robin. I was pretty young when I was doing that, had extreme views about the way the country was going, and I wrote some stuff I wouldn’t like to be associated with now. I’ve got kids. I’m on the council.’

‘British National Party?’

‘No! Green Party, if you must know.’

‘And like, do the Green Party know about your roots?’

‘Some of them do. And they know I’m not the same person. Half the Labour Party started out as rabid Trots. We all go through these phases.’

‘You sure Jerry Brace wasn’t a member?’

‘I’m still not getting your angle on this.’

‘Seymour, I may have to talk to the cops.’

‘Why do I care who the hell you talk to?’

‘You’d care plenty when they showed up on your suburban front porch with a warrant for your ass.’

‘Are you trying to blackmail me? Because I make a point of recording all my calls.’

‘Don’t do blackmail, Seymour, though I will admit to the occasional death-threat.’

Robin saw Jones smile, looking up from scribbling in a notebook. Remember the main aim is to unsettle this man, Jones had said.

‘This is a small town, Seymour, and people have long memories, and your guy, Jerry Brace—’

‘He’s dead! He’s been dead years and years. He was a damaged man. And he was
not
my guy.’

‘So you did know him?’

‘I knew him by reputation. I can’t talk about this, it’s futile.’

‘And I’m guessing you also know about two girls he used to hang out with who went missing?’

‘You’re making no sense. I think I’m going to have to end this call. Come back to me when you know what you’re talking about.’

Robin stood up.

‘Seymour…’ He was in pain ‘… it’s not too far for me to drive up there, and if I have to I will. And, boy, am I
loud
on a doorstep.’

Pause.

‘He was full of shit,’ Seymour said. ‘He said he wanted to join
the Order. I didn’t particularly like the sound of him, and we knew he was doing hard drugs. We said come back when you’re clean. Clean and cold. When you can deal with your emotions. When you can prove to us you’re ready to move up.
Move up.
That was how we talked, back then.’

‘You ever talk to Brace in person?’

‘He rang one night. You could tell he was on something. He offered me…’

‘Keep going.’

‘He was offering the town. He said the town had been magically separated from the rest of Britain and was somewhere we could… establish ourselves. Through him.’

‘How?’

‘Let me finish. He talked about a remarkable vibe being wasted by useless hippies and if the new aeon was going to start anywhere it was there, and it would start around him because it was his destiny, and we could help each other achieve our mutual aims.’

Jones had pushed the notebook in front of Robin.

ASK HIM IF STILL ANY OSIS-LINKED FARMS OR COMMUNES. SAY IF CO-OPERATES MIGHT LEAVE HIM ALONE.

‘… how he’d chosen his place of habitation with great care,’ Seymour was saying. ‘All the border strife, all the killing it must have seen. How it had grown out of blood and fire. He said he…’

Jones pulled the notebook back.

‘What did?’ Robin said. ‘What grew out of blood and fire? Hay?’

‘Its castle.’

‘What?’

Jones pushed the notebook back in front of him.

ASK HIM ABOUT THE BOY. WHO WAS LOOKING AFTER THE BOY?

‘Brace is long dead,’ Seymour said. ‘None of this matters.’

‘Then you might as well talk about it.’

‘He said it was his home. His ancestral home.’

‘What was?’

‘Work it out.’

‘Who was looking after the boy, Seymour?’