by Phil Rickman
'I'm sure you were.'
'Not here. I've not been very good here up to now.'
'Why did you come back? Or is that obvious, too?'
'I had to know.'
'Whether you could resist him?'
'Yes. Because I'd been celibate. The first time I'd been what you might naively call a free spirit. And therefore - you know - open to enslavement. Emotionally, sexually. And I thought I had a purity now. Arrogance, you see? I told you I'd been arrogant. And sooner or later, anyway, I was always going to have to find out the truth. About which of us had been the bad influence. About the nature of his ... conversion. But as soon as I got here, I realised how ambivalent all this can become. We're only human, Moira. There are no absolutes for us.'
'However,' Moira said. 'I think the nature of his conversion is now pretty obvious. When you publicly rejected him - it - the position was made painfully clear.'
'Like I said, it's a battle. This time yesterday I was convinced I'd broken through. That was the first time I defied him. On top of the other tower, above the mist line.'
'I could tell. It galvanised us all day. You brought the band together.'
'And look at me now.' He closed his eyes. 'That's what arrogance does for you.'
'Wasn't arrogance. You've no arrogance in you. What happened was, something liberated you. Or someone. A realisation maybe. A dawning?'
Simon opened his eyes and looked into hers. 'A woman. Can you believe that?'
'Oh, aye. I always could.'
'A crippled woman, in a wheelchair. A woman from the village who lost the use of her legs when she fell from the tower I was standing on yesterday. While making love with her boyfriend. He was killed. It was a long a time ago. Twenty-one years ago.'
'Well, well,' Moira said.
'Every seven years,' Simon said. 'Every seven years, the Abbey takes a life.'
'On December 8th, 1959, there was a terrible storm. Mother talks about it still. Apparently, we were almost flooded out next day.'
Isabel paused for a sip of tea.
'Anyway, a man called Reg Welsby was farming up at Stoney Ridge, back of the forestry. He had some sheep and they'd got loose in the Abbey grounds and he went over there to get them back in and was struck by lightning.'
'Dead?' Meryl asked.
'Instantaneous. They found him lying on a flat stone halfway up the nave, which was odd - not exactly the tallest target in a vast open space, was he? But you don't question lightning, do you? It strikes where it strikes.'
'Act of God,' Eddie said.
'I bet,' said Isabel. 'Want to hear the rest?'
Eddie shuddered. 'I don't want to.'
But Meryl did. She sat rapt, chilled, but so horribly thrilled by the idea of cyclical deaths in this ancient ruin that she knew she had to see the Abbey before the day was out.
'Let's see ...' Isabel counted on her fingers. '1966. When the Abbey was an outward bound hostel for maladjusted boys from Birmingham, and two of them became even more maladjusted and there was a very nasty fight in one of the sheds, with hatchets, apparently. One of them died in hospital from his injuries.'
'December?' Eddie asked.
'Almost certainly. I can't get the exact dates, unless we go to the local paper offices and look it up in their files.'
'No time,' Eddie said. 'What else?'
'Oh, there was a death in 1952 ... heart attack, I think, but I couldn't get much because old Mrs Collis was there last night and it was her brother, see. Well, it was getting fraught enough by then, me wheeling myself around with a bit of Cheddar on a stick and a glass of Chateau Pontrillas '93, asking discreet questions of different women and forgetting there's no such thing as discreet at the Women's Institute.'
'A tenacious girl, you are,' Eddie said admiringly.
'Anyway, at just about ten o'clock, I was asked to leave, could you believe? The first cripple in history to be ejected from the W.I... . and for gossiping! What's the W.I. for, except to manufacture gossip?'
Meryl laughed, feeling really comfortable with other people for the first time since she and the Lady Bluefoot had last prepared Martin's dinner at Hall Farm.
'What it is, see,' Isabel said, 'the older ones, who've seen it happen a few times, they know about the Abbey in their hearts of hearts. But will they talk about it? No way. Not lucky. Tempting fate. Fate, see. It has to be fate. Anything people can't explain, it's fate. This seven-year business ... I doubt if anybody's really worked that out before.'
'Hard to believe,' Eddie said.
'No. It's not. Very stoical, country people, very unquestioning. I tell you what I've noticed, though - and I never questioned it either until I started talking to Simon and you. But when it's happened and it's not a local person who's dead, there's an enormous feeling of relief, a lightening of the atmosphere in Ystrad Ddu.'
Vanessa was looking up at her from her fluffy pouffe. Isabel put a hand on the girl's head.
'When Vanessa's mother died in that crash, I won't say there was rejoicing. But a sense of relief you could feel.'
Vanessa smiled.
'She knows me,' Isabel said. 'We've never met before, but we both nearly died at the Abbey, see. And we both came out ... damaged.'
Meryl was stunned. She stumbled to her feet. She had to get out of the room to absorb this. 'More tea. I'll make more tea.'
She stood filling the kettle at the sink, watching the water tumble from the tap until the kettle overflowed and the water ran over her wrists. After a period of bewilderment, anger and incomprehension, a feeling of being left out, she seemed suddenly to be at the centre of everything that was blessed and magical.
She turned off the tap, emptied some water from the kettle, put it on to boil and drifted numbly back into the living-room to hear Isabel saying,
'... one more, though, I got, before I was kicked out.'
'Good girl.' Eddie leaned forward eagerly in his chair.
'Nineteen forty-five, this is. Just after the war. Two cousins, from ... Leeds, I think it was, or Sheffield ... had been evacuated to the Grange Farm to stay with a Mrs Price, whose husband had died leaving her with the farm to manage and no sons - this is when it was a farm, with stock, not like now. The boys would be in their teens and most of their family were killed in the bombing. Sheffield, it must have been. Anyway, the boys stayed on, and one died.'
'How?'
'I had to leave before I could find out. An accident, I think. I do know the other one came to inherit the farm and owns it still, though he's hardly ever here, hence the rundown state of the place. He lives in London now. His name's Copeley ... Copesake ... ?'
Meryl said sharply, 'Say that again, the name.'
'Copesake?'
'I've heard it somewhere, recently. Oh my Lord, where was it?' Meryl grabbed her head from either side. 'It's hardly a common name, is it?'
'Don't think too hard,' Eddie said. 'It'll come to you.'
'And that's about it,' Isabel said. 'Didn't I do well?'
'I don't know what to say, my love. A wonder, you are. What we have to decide now is what to do with it. Should we tell our friend Gwyn Arthur, do you think?'
'That copper?' Isabel was aghast.
'Don't dismiss Gwyn Arthur. He has a most unusual mind.'
'Yes, well, we have enough of those, Eddie. What we also have is a situation where there are people we ... care about, in a place where all the statistics show they could come to real harm within the next twenty-four hours.'
'We should go over there now and tell them, you think?'
Isabel looked at him scornfully. 'You really think they don't know? Why else have they come?'
'Or we could go and ... be with them,' Meryl said tremulously.
'And what,' Eddie demanded, 'do you mean by that?'
Meryl hugged herself. 'I don't know. I don't know.'
Moira found Dave and Tom in the studio working on the Aelwyn arrangement.
'We're doing this tonight?'
Dave said, '
You ever feel you haven't got a choice?' He was tuning his Martin with a new self-adhesive chromatic tuner you could stick on the pick-guard and watch the flashing lights. 'I can't keep this instrument, you know.'
'I thought we'd dealt with all that,' Moira said.
'It's too good for me.'
'It isn't.'
''Tis.'
"Tisn't... aw, Davey!'
Dave smiled. 'How are your ... legs, this morning?'
'Shapely as ever, if horribly disfigured.'
'Bollocks,' said Dave. 'Where's Simon?'
'He's gonna lay in his room a while. He's a wee bit knackered, to be honest.'
'Not surprised,' said Tom. 'The boy done good last night, yeah?'
'Yeah, I was ... kind of proud of him,' Moira said.
'It's the right attitude,' said Tom. 'You gotta go in fighting. Me, I'm shit scared, as ever, but it don't pay to show it. He showed us all up for bleeding wimps. Don't you fink?'
'Well,' Moira said guardedly. 'Maybe. But I think whether we go for Aelwyn tonight, that should be a general agreement. A vote.'
Dave looked up from his tuning. 'You mean you'd vote against?'
'I don't know, Davey. It's kind of your big number, how do you feel?'
Dave laid the guitar gently on the carpet. 'Like I said, I don't think we have a choice. Aelwyn brought it to a head last time. This time we're on our own. Nobody like ... well, like Debbie. You know what I mean.'
'No need to tread eggshells, Dave,' said Tom. 'I can talk about it. You mean it's, like, us and them, and no ...'
'Innocent bystanders,' Dave said. 'But Aelwyn's at the core of it.'
'Aye,' Moira said. 'I guess that's right.'
'I don't think 1 understood him last time. What he represented. I mean, I know I didn't.'
'And you do now?'
'No. But ... I dunno, I think it can come to you. Like Simon last night, with Holy Light. A complete reworking, right? He reworked it in the light of his experience. And in the end it wasn't holy light at all, quite the reverse. And now we know. And you know what I think?'
Dave walked into the centre of the studio. 'I think this place probably the oldest recording studio in the world. Cemented in blood? You remember they said that about the stones?'
He moved over to a painted stone wall. 'Whitewash. But it's darker underneath. Last night, Simon brought the truth out of the stones.'
And the bloody stones didn't like that one bit, Moira thought.
Tom said, 'We used to fink this was holy ground, right, back in 'eighty. We was trusting. We fought we was protected. We was bleeding stupid. And now we know.'
But do you? Moira thought. Do you really?
'I was pretty fazed, gotta admit,' Tom said, 'when I seen Simon in his dog-collar the first time. But he's learned fings, ain't he? He was just this classical geezer, before, the one who knew what all the notes was called and what you could do wiv a treble clef. But he was really firing from the hip last night. And he hit the target, dead centre.'
'Aye,' said Moira, feeling the deepest trepidation, 'didn't he just.'
Part Five
I
Spirit
It takes a while to find it in the dark, even with a hand lamp, for so much has changed.
For instance, the line of the wood has altered, so the tree is no longer on the edge - there are fourteen years' worth of untrimmed bushes to get through now.
Once, apparently, when the Abbey was a hotel, everything up to the woods was lawn. And then, when it was a hostel for antisocial kids, it was a playing field.
When Max Goff created a studio here, he let the grass grow a little, turning it into something approaching a meadow, on the basis that prestige bands liked to think they were out in the wilds but it wasn't so wild that a stroll after lunch would destroy your Calvin Klein jeans.
But the tree's still here. The same tree, with the same view through the lower branches to the lights of the Abbey. Not so many lights now, because some of the rooms are still closed, due to the effects of damp and cold, the ravages of fourteen years.
It was a mild night last time, but Dave was cold because he was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt. Tonight he has on a sweater and his white scarf and he reckons he feels about the same. Cold. There have been snow flurries on the hills.
It was a mild night in New York too, on 8 December, 1980. Mild for New Yorkers, anyway; it must have felt very cold to Mark David Chapman who came all the way from sunny Hawaii, bringing darkness. Yeah, his middle name is Dave; put that down on the charge sheet, too.
This tree - there's something different about it. Same branches, same angles. But something's changed.
Dave doesn't know much about nature.
The reason he's come out here now, at close to six p.m., is that he doesn't plan to return. No matter what happens tonight, what horrors manifest, he is not going to run out on Simon and Tom and Moira. He will not see this tree again.
Moira.
Things really haven't worked out, have they?
He remembers last month, being at Ma's bungalow in Hoylake, writing the letter which will turn out to be his first ever fax. Remembers wondering if it was still love, if it had ever been love or was maybe just a subconscious plea for empathy.
No, he decides. It was love.
He doesn't ask himself if it's still love. He can't bear to give himself a formal reply, for the record. It will only make him think of lonely shores and white sand, of wind and spray.
And black bonnets.
He looks up at the tree. This tree is not the same.
Damn it, Reilly, why can't you even admit to yourself why you came out here? You came here to be alone and to consider what to do. Maybe seek some advice (you out here, John?).
Dave shuts his eyes and lets go of his thoughts.
And nothing happens, inside or outside.
He's not here. He was never here. You've been inventing conversations with John Lennon for so long that sometimes you just know what he's going to say before you can get around to writing him a script.
Dave touches the tree. What kind of tree are you, anyway, apart from not being an oak?
This is the eighth of December. It's fourteen - twice seven years since John Lennon was shot and Debbie died. He remembers - the most vibrantly shocking memory of his life - Tom staggering from the wreckage, the sudden explosion, the swollen black thing that was Debbie being thrown out of Tom's arms as his sleeves ignited.
Which left Tom wearing an aura of flames like St Elmo's fire on the mast of a sailing ship. And this was the last bright aura Dave ever saw. After that, all black.
He looks up at the tree. Ash? Beech? Horse-chestnut? Sycamore?
They've come back to the Abbey, the four of them, with their eyes open and their senses attuned and all that crap. They've come back because something from the Abbey has remained, like a virus, inside each of them. Because every time Dave sees a polluted black haze around somebody's rinsed coiffure or silky, shampooed tresses, he thinks, This is what the Abbey left.
But right now only one sullied aura concerns him.
Go over it again. Ask the question.
This is the eighth day of the month of December on a seventh year. He remembers Prof's news cuttings about Soup Kitchen in 1987. Simon has told him about this girl in the village and her accident in '73.
Now Dave has worked out something probably no one else knows. For what it's worth.
Before walking out here he went into the little TMM admin office next to Lee Gibson's luxury quarters. The woman in charge, Michelle, was not there (Lee likes to relax before a session) but her calculator was.
On the calculator, Dave brought up the figure 1994.
From it he subtracted 1175.
This gave him 819.
He stood looking down at this figure for a long time. It was an awkward-looking number, which was good. Nineteen itself was a number you couldn't do a thing with - there was a name for the ones you couldn't divide by any other nu
mber without getting a bunch of digits on the wrong side of the decimal point; 819 looked like it ought to be one of them.
What the hell. Just to reassure himself, because all the odds were against it anyway, Dave took a deep breath and divided 819 by seven.
No.
It came to 117.
Exactly. No decimal point.
No!
Dave felt nearly sick and did the calculation again.
It doesn't mean anything, he tells himself now. It doesn't mean that the seven-year cycle of death began with Aelwyn in 1175, or that Aelwyn was even part of it. It certainly doesn't mean that at least 117 people have died at the Abbey. It's a numerical coincidence.
Isn't it.
And it can't possibly mean that someone is destined to die here tonight.
Can it.
Even if one of those here is someone whose lustrous black hair - now with its single vein of white - has been seen on two separate occasions, by Liverpool's very own Angel of Death, to be softly framed by the hideous bonnet.
A night wind is drifting in from the Black Mountains in the west. It fumbles irritably among the bushes on the edge of the wood.
The wind is saying. Don't piss about, ask the question?
There are two lights high up in the tower, one just below the other. Simon's room. Moira's room.
The lowest of the two lights goes out.
In his head, Dave asks the question.
Behind the question is the knowledge that, for every single person he has told about the bonnet since the Black Album's session, it has been too late.
Dave asks the question aloud.
'Should I tell her?'
Nothing comes to him. After nothing has continued to come to him for a couple of minutes, he tries to manufacture a reply from his dead buddy, John Lennon.
How the fuck should I know? What's it to me?
That the best you can come up with?
Is that the best you can come up with?
Maybe this is the one night Lennon is incommunicado. Maybe he goes to Strawberry Fields in Central Park to watch the annual influx of pilgrims, listen to the tuneless chorus of 'Give Peace a Chance'.