by Phil Rickman
The comb lay in the Duchess's coffin. No redemption. On your own, hen. You gave it back.
On the unit, the kettle was making a noise like a death-rattle. She sat and watched the slow steam softening her face into a peachy fuzz.
Poor Davey.
Who would, this year, be exactly the same age as John Lennon when a fruitcake had flown in from Hawaii to blow him away.
Poor Davey, who'd believed in love and peace, etc., and that you could aspire to rearrange areas of your psyche that didn't conform to the natural, the reasonable, the acceptable, the known.
Who'd talked of taking the unwelcome, the burdensome aspects of himself and channelling them into creativity.
Who had, therefore, bought it, the whole Epidemic scam, accepting without question that the fusion of maverick minds would produce some great, immortal music. And didn't you believe it just the teeniest bit yourself?
Aw, hell... at that age you still think this is something you could learn to control, something you're bound to be able to discipline, given time.
And Jesus, this room was colder than the frozen food alley at Safeway.
Half of him was pitying her; the other half was increasingly in awe.
Papers were spread all over a trestle table, under an Anglepoise lamp. Bills and invoices and bank statements. A new- looking IBM computer.
'Do you do everyone's accounts round here?'
'Mostly,' Isabel Pugh said. 'The farmers like it if they don't have to go into Abergavenny or Hereford. And they trust you, when you're a cripple. They think you can't do a bunk.'
She was rather a pretty woman, a little overweight, as you'd expect with her disability. She wore gold-rimmed glasses on a chain. Her hair was brown, with gold highlights. 'I've got all the qualifications,' she said, as if he'd challenged her. 'Correspondence course.'
There was a tartan rug over her knees. She flung it aside, revealing a hand holding a carving knife.
'Jesus Christ.' Simon backed into the doorway.
Isabel Pugh tossed the knife on to a settee. 'Can never be too sure nowadays, can you? It sounded a bit like your voice, but ... I like to be in control.'
'Right.' He breathed out. 'Actually, I wasn't sure you'd be in. Thought you might have gone to the WI with your mother.'
She looked disgusted. 'Sorry,' Simon said. He moved into the room and closed the door behind him. It had a Yale lock and a double bolt half-way up, so they could be reached from a wheelchair.
'I'm thinking of having an electronic device put in, with a little two-way speaker thing,' she said. 'Why not? I can afford it. Going to take those sodden clothes off now, are you? I haven't seen a dick this close in twenty years.'
'No.' Simon smiled. 'But I'll sit by the stove and let them dry on me, if that's all right.'
'Soft bugger. Can't rape you, can I? And I don't think you'd want to touch me.'
'I'm a man of the cloth,' he said solemnly.
'And gay, too, isn't it?'
'You don't mess about, do you?' Simon said. Disabled people tended to be aggressive, he'd found, especially with vicars; they often blamed God. Part of a clergyman's job was taking the shit for all the things God allowed to happen.
'Good-looking man like you,' Isabel said. 'It's obvious. All alone and at your age. How old are you, forty-two, forty-three? Where do you do your cottaging, Abergavenny?'
'It's no bloody fun, either, on nights like this,' Simon said, no hint of a smile. 'I've been trying to persuade the council to build a public convenience at the top of the churchyard.'
Isabel laughed. It made her look younger. She couldn't have been more than fifteen when she fell from the south-west tower of the Abbey with her legs around a boy called Gareth Smith.
'Like a coffee, would you, Vicar?'
'Simon. You wouldn't have any Scotch in the house, would you? I'm perished.'
'Bottom cupboard, side of the fireplace. Glasses in the kitchen, ice in the fridge.'
He found an impressive selection of good single malts. The home-based accountancy business paid, then. 'You?'
'Why not. Southern Comfort. Neat. No ice.'
He went to look for glasses. The light oak-fitted kitchen had been extended into a conservatory with double-glazing. The rain was very loud in here.
'What've you come for then, Simon?' Isabel called out. 'Not the usual time for sympathy calls.'
'I came because your mother was out.'
'Ooo-er.'
Simon brought whisky glasses back. Poured Southern Comfort into hers until she nodded.
'To come straight to the point,' he said. 'I wanted to talk about the Abbey.'
Isabel lifted her glass, frowned. 'You really will have to get me pissed then.'
Moira flexed her shoulders. The kettle raised its tarnished lid and let out a thin whine, turning the mirror into mist, all white, white enough to write on. And because she couldn't see her face in it any more, her mind projected upon the mirror an image of what she'd been shoving to the back of her thoughts for some hours.
Dear Ms Cairns,
Keeping this brief - I should very much like to speak to you in connection with the masters, which have come into my possession, of album tracks recorded at the Abbey studio, Gwent, in the early days of December 1980. Perhaps you would contact me as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Case
Recordings Executive
The short message - ultimatum? - was already burnt into her mind, word for word, like a ghost image stencilled into a computer screen.
which have come into my possession.
OK. Let's work this one out. The decision to destroy the album was unanimous. That is, taken by Dave and Simon and me, in the absence only of Tom - who would hardly have objected and has never, to my knowledge, raised the issue since. And in the aftermath of Deborah's death, Russell Hornby, who might have resisted, just shrugged and handed over the reels.
But - this is the question - were these the actual masters? One reel of tape being just like another until you play it. Which, just wanting to forget, we never did.
So, did you double-cross us, Russell? Maybe thinking we were acting in haste, under stress, and would come around when the heat was off?
Are those tapes really still in existence? The sound - among other sounds - of the young, wildly over-confident, fucking stupid Moira Cairns allowing herself to be led like a lamb over Death's dark threshold?
There was no need to get her pissed. Isabel Pugh leaned back in her wheelchair, took off her glasses, let them fall to her breast on the chain.
'This may surprise you,' she said. 'But you're the first person who's ever asked me about the Abbey.'
Simon sat quietly, sipping his whisky, his cassock drying stiffly around him.
'When they got me out of the rubble it was the following morning and I was semi-conscious. Delirious, they said. They took me to hospital. A couple of days later the police took a statement to read at the inquest on Gareth. They kept it very discreet. We'd been ... "exploring". I was in various hospitals for about six months. Nobody mentioned the circumstances again, not when I was in hospital, not when I came home.'
'When was this? What year?'
'Nineteen seventy-three. I was sixteen. Just old enough. I'd lost my virginity - just - when it happened.' Isabel laughed without humour. 'When the earth moved. For the first time And the last. How about that for bitter irony? How about that for the wrath of God?'
'It wasn't God.'
'Well, pardon me, Vicar, but you would say that, wouldn't you?'
'Yes,' he said. 'I suppose I would. However ...'
He wanted to tell her now. All about the session inside the walls cemented with blood and the dark brown candles and the centuries of evil and the reason he'd come back. He said, 'You haven't even asked me why I wanted to know.'
'Because I don't care.' Isabel held out her glass for more Southern Comfort. 'Thanks. When I got out of hospital, see, people were quite nice to me. Peopl
e have always been quite nice. But there's no basic respect. I've always been the little whore who lured the Smith boy to the top of the tower and got him killed in the act. "Oh, she didn't deserve this'" - slapping her unresponsive denimed legs - "'but, well, it only goes to show, doesn't it?'"
Simon said, 'I'm ...'
'Yeah, terribly, terribly sorry. So am I. Hardly thought to be spending the rest of my life in Ystrad Ddu, with my mother, so chuffed to be collecting her official carer's allowance. Still, I'm doing all right, biggest earner in the village now. And nothing to spend it on except luxury domestic aids for Mother and fancy mail-order clothes for the top half of me.'
'Damn,' Simon said. 'And I could've brought my violin.'
At first she looked furious. Then she grinned, the firelight making little red coals in her brown eyes. 'Are you really queer?'
'Let's just call me celibate.'
'Oh God, that's even worse.'
'We all have our cross to bear,' Simon said.
Isabel's eyebrows rose. 'And you really are a clergyman, aren't you? You wouldn't be having us all on?'
Simon spread his hands. 'And I really have got a violin. Isabel...' He leaned forward, hesitated.
'Go on,' she said. 'Ask me. Whatever it is, you've earned it. You've made me laugh, loosened me up a bit. That's worth a lot.'
Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped. A trail of singing reached them. 'The WI choir,' Isabel said. 'They're a good crowd, really. Keep themselves entertained.'
Simon said, 'You've skipped over a few things: what really happened at the Abbey, and what happened afterwards. You said you were delirious.'
'No. I didn't say that. They said I was delirious.'
How could she stand this life? What advantage was there in living in the country if you couldn't stride out on the hills, seeing the Skirrid rising in the east like a giant's nose, lie in the grass and watch buzzards swoop?
Isabel stared into the bright embers behind the glass doors of the stove. 'Simon, it's been fun tonight. Don't spoil it.'
'I don't understand,' he said. But of course, he did.
'This isn't what I wanted to go into.'
'Listen,' he said. 'Whatever they said about what happened that night being ... delirium, I'm not going to think that.'
'No?'
'No, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you what nobody else here knows, though Eddie Edwards possibly suspects.'
And he told her about the Philosopher's Stone and the Black Album.
'My God,' Isabel said. 'The vicar's a rock star? I'm sorry - go on.'
And he told her - not in any great detail - about the last night at the Abbey. The end of which, of course, she knew.
'Tom Storey's wife. I remember being woken up by the ambulance racing through the village. Everyone was out in the lane, you could see the flames, I got them to push me ...'
She stopped. He couldn't tell whether her face was flushed by remembered excitement or by the deepening glow from the stove. Or by embarrassment because she and the other villagers had been animated by someone else's tragedy.
'Keep it to yourself,' he said. 'For the present.'
Isabel put both hands to her cheeks, knowing they were red.
'Why?' she said. 'I mean, what the hell are you doing here, Simon?'
'Good question. Never wanted to see the fucking place again.' Simon paused. 'But what's the point of being a clergyman if you're aware of something deeply spiritually amiss in a remote part of South Wales and you just shrug your shoulders and bugger off to organise vicarage garden parties in Buckinghamshire?'
He stood up. 'Look, it'll be chucking out time at the WI in a few minutes. I'll be back. I'll call in some time while your mum's Hoovering my bedroom. Just one last question, OK?'
Isabel picked up her tartan rug and arranged it across her knees to see him to the door.
'Have there been other ... accidents, like yours? At the Abbey? I mean, over the years?'
'We don't keep records of that kind of thing,' Isabel said, suddenly guarded, and Simon knew he was going too far, too fast. He pulled open the door. The night was calm enough now for him to hear a barn owl's screech from across the valley.
'Goodnight,' he said.
'Simon ...'
He turned to look at her at the door of her prison: Isabel Pugh, thirty-seven, accountant, spinster of this parish, but not a virgin - just.
'One thing. I'll tell you one thing. When Deborah Storey died in that crash, everybody here was very sorry, for her and for her husband and the poor baby '
'They're compassionate people,' Simon said. 'Thrifty, as Eddie Edwards put it. But no less compassionate for that'
'They were sorry, yes. And yet they were also glad. In some awful way that they would never admit even to each other, they were glad.'
He was still standing there, lips slightly parted, when it began to rain again and the door closed gently in his face.
The kettle's whine had been squeezed into a thin scream. Moira hit the red and black switch to cut it off.
And are they proposing to release this horror, the album that we used to call, in our innocence, the Black Album, because of the name of the Abbey?
Well, they couldn't, surely; insufficient material - five tracks? Six?
Whatever, of course, we have to stop this. All those Gothic heavy-metal albums made by brain-dead fascists in leather-studded wristbands, those albums the tabloids are always claiming drive fans to suicide, they're kidstuff.
So it has to be stopped, no question about that.
Who? Who's gonna stop it?
Maybe I'll call up this Case and say: Look, I think you should consider the ethics of what you have in mind.
Ethics? A record company?
Damage to repair, the Duchess said one time. You have damage to repair. Never making it clear what she meant ... 'What the hell is wrong with this antique?'
The kettle carrying on screaming and wobbling on the dresser, bubbles fizzing around the lid. She hit the red knob again; damn thing was stuck. She reached through the hot vapour - ow, Jesus - to switch it off at the plug, and remembered there wasn't a switch; it was so old even the plug was round-pin. 'Fuck you!' She grabbed hold of the cracked, brown, Bakelite plug and let go at once, gasping at the heat in it.
We're the band that should never've been. A toxic cocktail. We can't even see each other again. Ever.
Did I say that?
The kettle was just about going berserk, the whole room filling up now with grey steam. In its midst, the mirror was a luminous grey screen, like when you switched off the room lights and the TV was still radiating a dead glow.
Above her the ceiling bulb sputtered in its drab shade.
You too. Huh?
Moira went still inside. Even around the kettle, the room was unpleasantly cold, especially around the kettle, and that was wrong. That was wrong.
She thought, I'm not gonna run from this. I'm gonna sit here and wait it out. Wait until the kettle boils dry.
She saw her own face in the mirror and as she watched, the lips of this face - not me, not my face, this doesn't scare me any more, it doesn't, no way - stretched quite perceptibly into a rictus, revealing teeth and gums. The eyes were widening in helpless terror.
She was aware that the ceiling light had gone out and behind her, in the darkness of the faded bedroom, the steam was playing games; it had made its own pallid light and within this light it wreathed and spun like skeins of grey wool.
Please, she thought, but could not speak, forced into accepting ownership of the stricken face in the glass. Please, no.
And even as the thought escaped, the swirling steam became, as she knew it would, the dead face of the Duchess, long white hair uncoiling, eyelids sprung back ... the Duchess rising in the greyness of her shroud, thin fingers splayed above the shoulders of the reflected image of her daughter in the mirror.
And in the condensation on the mirror, in a stricken, spidery hand, the Duchess's thin forefinger bega
n to inscribe
In the glass, Moira saw her own mouth form into an O of explicit revulsion, and she threw herself around, hauling on the damp flex so hard that the wires were jerked out of the plug and she and the Duchess were suddenly wrapped together inside a wildly crackling electric sheet of glorious delphinium blue
VIII
Predator
'Open up, please, sir.'
'Who is it?'
'It's the police, sir. We've had reports of a disturbance, if you wouldn't mind ...'
He struggled with the top bolt, jammed it back, which sounded like a car-crash in his head. One of the coppers was right up against the door; he was in the flat faster than the hard night air.
'Dunno what this is about, officer, but I think you got the wrong place.'
'Won't mind if we take a look around then, sir.'
'Why the f—? No. No, sure. Go ahead.'
The two of them were in by now, young blokes, dead keen. One stayed between him and the door, the other searched the flat; took about a minute, came back, quickly shook his head.
What were they expecting, bodies?
'You had the TV on, sir?'
'I was in bed, son. Asleep. And ... and dreaming.' Yeah.
This time the first one stayed with him while the other had a look around.
'According to our information, Mr—'
'Levin.'
'According to our information, Mr Levin, someone was screaming and yelling in here shortly before five a.m. You're saying you've been here alone for ...'
'Several years, officer.'
'Tonight, sir.'
'Since about eleven.'
'Where were you before that?'
I... went for a drink.'
'Which pub?'
'A couple. The Sheridan, that was the last.'
'A couple. I see. Did you hear anything suspicious in the last hour?'
'I was asleep. No. I didn't. Only you two trying to batter my bloody door down.'
'You live alone here?'
'I live alone. I'm happily divorced.'
'You don't look very well, sir.'