by Phil Rickman
Moira pushes back her hair. Her eyes are red and swollen. Prof remembers how they had to pull her gently away from Dave; she was holding him like she's now holding his guitar.
'And Russell Hornby,' Prof says. 'And Debbie. And Barney Gwil…'
'Hush, Prof,' Moira says.
'They're getting a doctor from the village,' Sile says in his sandpaper drawl. 'Just a formality. And the police'll have to be told.'
He never changes. leather jacket, close-cut hair, stubbly beard. And flat eyes, flat as slate. About the same age as Prof, but he looks fifty, always has. The Godfather of the British blues.
Moira says, 'Formality?'
'Another tragic recording industry accident. Were you close to him, lass?'
A question entirely without sympathy. Like you'd say, were you at University?
'Yes,' Moira says. 'We all were. We're a band.'
Sile pulls up a stool. 'Mixed up character, Dave.'
'Like Russell,' Prof says. 'Like Barney. Like Debbie.' Anger lodges in his throat. Is this a human being?
'Never mind,' Sile says philosophically, as if he's heard none of this. 'He's at peace now, eh?'
Moira says, very calmly. 'You're saying he wanted to die?'
Sile shrugs. 'Like I say, another tragic accident in the recording industry.' He slaps his knees, as if to say, well, that's that. 'Look, if the rest of you want to complete the session, you can come back in a week or two.'
'But it doesny matter to you, huh?'
'No.' Sile rises lithely to his feet. 'You're right. It doesn't matter any more.'
Prof can't believe it. He's washing his hands. He's saying, Look we all know what really happened. Just be thankful it's him and not either of you. Because the Abbey's not particularly selective.
Prof wants to kill him and half-rises; Sile's smile stops him.
A small smile, containing just sufficient pity to make it a cruel smile. What it says is, we're about the same age. Prof, I'm a very fit man and you're a clapped-out alky.
Sile nods, pleasantly enough, and walks away. There's a barely perceptible snigger in the air.
'No,' Moira whispers. 'Don't rise to it.'
'Fuck this, Moira.' Fury courses through Prof like the electricity that killed Dave. When Sile reaches the Gothic door. Prof calls out, 'As we're unlikely to work together in the future, and just to show I'm not like Russell, I'd like to ask something.'
Sile stops. 'Make it quick, I'm easily bored by engineers.'
'It's about the blues.'
Moira says, 'Let it lie, huh. Prof, please?'
'I just want to say, Sile, that I'm one of a lot of people who've always known why you needed all those young guns brought into the band over the years.'
'Not what you think,' Sile says. 'Goodnight.'
'That you're queer? Nothing so admirable, mate. Reason you needed those young guys was to provide the one commodity you hadn't got. You had the voice and the technique and the image and the confidence. But what you ain't never had . . Prof pauses '... is the blues.'
Sile's face darkens. From across the room, fifteen feet away, Prof can see it happening, like a photo going into negative, and it makes him feel much better.
Moira sighs. 'Don't do this to us.'
'The blues,' Prof says, 'is, like, a very heroic form of self-pity. The blues is without arrogance. The blues is having the guts to accept what you are. Like, I lost my woman. I drink too much. Tom Storey, he's got the blues.'
'I know. I taught him.'
'Balls. You wouldn't know where to fucking begin, Sile. The only blues you had was the blues you bought.'
Prof turns away, bitter moisture in his eyes. There's a crash of the door. When he looks over his shoulder,
Sile Copesake has gone.
'Oh God,' Moira says, 'I agree with everything. But that was a mistake, Prof.'
Prof kicks vaguely at the partition of the booth where Dave died. 'What we got to lose?'
'You just don't understand, do you?'
'Everybody keeps saying that. I don't know what it means. Dave's dead. Dave. Our mate. You heard what that cunt said - the Abbey's had its seven-year sacrifice and everybody's happy. We can all go home.'
'Sure we can. And in seven years' time we can make sure we're all safely abroad on a skiing holiday or locked up in our houses with the central heating up full. All of us knowing that Dave, our mate, is part of the filthy fabric of this place now. Just like Aelwyn.'
Prof looks back at the death-booth, as if he might see Dave's tortured shade strumming into eternity.
'Prof, it's no' gonna go away. You think your nightmares will end? You think Tom's gonna go back on the road, three nights at the Albert Hall and then Wembley Stadium?'
'Fuck it,' Prof says hoarsely. 'Fuck Copesake.'
'But not here. Not yet.'
'What is he? High priest? Caretaker?'
'Whatever he is, he's brimming with power. Prof. He's just, like, lit up with dark energy. I never saw anything like this. He's like the man who just sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Except it doesn't happen like that. It's gradual.'
'He told Simon he was here as a kid. Evacuated.'
'Yeah, yeah, he found his spiritual home early in life. Maybe he had a small, seductive, black vision like that Walden guy, he …'
'He persuaded Goff to buy it.'
'Sure. And he almost certainly persuaded him to put together a psychic band. The Philosopher's Stone is Sile's product. A manufactured sacrifice, like sheep bred for slaughter. We're the Abbey's children. What he just said was, there's only one way we get away from it.'
'Like Dave?'
Never mind, he's at peace now, eh?
'Except we don't. You think Dave's at peace? Like Aelwyn's at peace?'
'I'm out of my depth, Moira.'
'Too right. Copesake can walk in here and sneer at us and send us away, knowing that he ... it, the Abbey ... can get us back here just whenever it likes. Whenever it needs a life. And that goes for you, too.'
'He's only a bloke, Moira.'
'And the Abbey's only a heap of stones. What kind of shithead are you, Prof?'
'This is not real.' Prof hooks back a foot and sends it crashing through the glass door of Dave's booth. Reality.
Glass is still tinkling when the top door flies open and Simon bursts in, followed by Tom. They stop when they see Prof picking splinters from down his sock.
'Well done, Prof.' Simon sighs in deepest weariness. 'I did that, once. Maybe we should act like a traditional rock band and trash the whole place.'
There's a brief silence before, with all four fingers, Moira plucks a ringing A-chord from Dave's guitar.
'Right then.' She puts down the Martin and stands up.
'Let's do it. Let's do just that. Let's invoke the destructive spirit of the great Keith Moon.'
Prof is the first to realise she's serious. He takes a step back as Moira selects a straight mike-stand, chromium-plated, with an old-fashioned solid base. She lifts it, holds it briefly above her head and then swings it around like an Olympic throwing-hammer.
'Look, Moira.' Simon tries to grab the end of the stand. 'I know how you must feel. It's just the police are going to be in here soon. You know what that...'
Moira smiles briefly. And then, with all the force she can summon, she hurls the mike-stand at the five-foot-wide glass panel between the studio and the control room.
VI
Home at Last
Meryl calls out, 'Isn't she lovely, Vanessa? Isn't she graceful?'
Are they hand-in-hand? She can't quite tell.
A glimpse of blue, a swish of taffeta.
But Vanessa's dowdy brown school blazer is almost the same colour as the mist among the trees and the stones.
'Don't go without me.' Meryl begins to run. 'I'm coming. I'm coming.'
Blue is the only colour she can see and the only colour she wants to see. Blue is a delightful colour, whereas brown's the colour of old, varnished furniture
in the dingy kitchens of days gone by and the colour of Tom Storey's sad old father, the Man with Two Mouths.
Meryl can do without brown.
Perhaps, when they get home, the Lady will dress Vanessa in blue.
Meryl runs gaily through the fog, the little blue light dancing ahead of her like a gas-flame.
Pardon me, Eddie,' Gwyn says, 'but this is one for me.'
'Look, are you really a policeman?' The crinkle-haired man seems harassed. 'Because we don't have a great deal of time.'
'Jones, Gwyn Arthur, Detective Superintendent.' Gwyn opens his wallet, holds it up.
The man nods gratefully. He tells Gwyn about the missing child, Vanessa.
'Vanessa?' Eddie Edwards interrupts. 'Are you Vanessa's parents? But I thought ...'
The crinkle-haired man explains that neither of them, in fact, is a parent of Vanessa, an admission which makes Gwyn Arthur begin to trust him. And the woman ... the woman is close to coming apart.
'If I can just explain, see ...' Eddie begins, but Gwyn plants a large hand on his shoulder and administers a painfully meaningful squeeze: Gwyn would like Eddie to keep his garrulous Valleys trap shut.
He smiles encouragingly at the couple. 'My immediate thought is to follow you to the Abbey in my car, and we'll ask one or two questions.' Turns to Eddie, enunciating, 'I should like to see the Abbey.'
'Fine,' Eddie says, 'Fine, but...'
'... while my good friend Mr Edwards remains here, on the offchance that the little girl should reappear. And if we get no joy at the Abbey, we can consider calling out the troops. How does that sound?'
Prof has never liked violence.
OK, he's angry, he's frustrated, he's frightened. Yeah, he wanted to kill Copesake, yeah, he wants Dave's death paid for.
But not like this.
With the glass panel gone, it's clear that the wall between the studio and the control room is no more than a partition, made of several layers of plywood under soundproof wadding.
From inside the control room, Simon is hacking at it with a microphone stand, the end unscrewed to expose an edge of raw metal. He's managed to dislodge two bolts attaching the partition to the curved stone ceiling.
'OK, Tom?'
On the studio side, Tom jumps up and gets his fingers in the space between the partition and the ceiling and hangs all his weight from it. Prof winces. If Tom slips he's going to wind up with huge gashes across the fingers of both hands.
This man is a guitarist.
This man is mad. Everybody here is totally bloody mad.
Prof turns away to avoid a storm of splinters as, with a creaking, splintering roar, the partition and Tom come down together. Tom lies half-stunned on his back on the studio floor with about a hundredweight of smashed-up panelling on top of him. He squirms from underneath as Simon steps through the gap.
'You OK, squire?'
'Never fucking better.' Sawdust in Tom's moustache and a cold fire in his eyes that scares Prof. Nobody smashing glass, tearing down fabric, actually screams out, this is for Dave. They don't speak any more than they have to; it's savage, systematic destruction, grown-up people - one of them a minister of the church - chopping and slashing and clawing. If they had paraffin would they torch the place?
The dust clears, like after an earthquake.
'OK,' Tom says. 'Give us a hand wiv the desk. Si.'
'Hey!' Prof is shocked. 'No!' He's spent half his life behind mixing desks. 'You can't smash the bloody desk.'
'Sorry, Prof,' Moira says. 'Si, just make sure the master switch is off, huh?' This is the Moira who didn't want him to cause trouble with Sile Copesake. Who wouldn't condone a little sarcasm.
'Off,' Simon confirms.
The two horizontal banks of speakers hang forlornly in space as Tom gets underneath to examine the plinth into which the desk is built. 'Interesting. It is definitely stone. Tell you what, Prof, maybe we can just shift the desk to one side. If you get that end ... triffic.'
'I'm not ...'
'Just bleeding do it, yeah?'
A hundred coloured wires are ripped and snapped.
The deck is dumped, upended in the corner by the tape-machines.
Simon looks into the gap. 'You're right. It's stone ... and it's old. Moira, what can I say?' He smiles thinly. 'You must be psychic'
'Just save your breath for the masonry. The cops show up, we're screwed.' Moira leans over and starts brushing rabble and sawdust from the stone. 'Something on it. That Latin. Si?'
'It's not even lettering, I don't think. It's some sort of symbol, quite crudely carved. Can we ...? Thanks. It's extremely old, probably as old as the Abbey. It's almost like ...'
'Almost like a tomb,' Moira says.
It's Lee Gibson who discovers the child.
As a rule, Lee does not like to go outside here at night, except to walk (if there were cabs, he'd take a cab) the couple of hundred yards between the studio and his apartment. Two reasons: A: it's cold as hell and depressing; B: these are goddamn religious ruins and they are kind of eerie.
Except tonight it's even eerier, godammit, a whole lot eerier, inside his so-called luxury apartment behind the admin office.
Like, they really think he's gonna sit there with one thin wooden wall between him and the probably still-smoking remains of the late Dave Reilly? A stiff? They think he's gonna share a Portakabin with a fucking stiff?
When he gets back to L.A., he knows, he'll be dining out on this.
(... Yeah, and the guy's sitting on his amp, mid-session, when - thanks to British weather and the standards of British workmanship since the buttholes went into Europe - all this water comes cascading down the fucking wall and the amp becomes like, an electric chair, and ... whoooosh ... about ten thousand volts turn this guy's ass into steak tartare.)
But meantime, he's gonna keep his distance until the cops have been and Dave Reilly departs in a body bag. However, no way is he gonna saunter among the crumbling stones until the morgue wagon hits the trail. He also would rather not mingle with the bereaved. Which is how Lee and his flashlight have wound up on the edge of the wood behind the Abbey.
Now, in Wales (Lee is still telling the story to the guys back home) even the goddamn woods are eerie. What's good about life in California and neighbouring states is that trees know their place and mostly do not presume to grow weird, bloated branches blistered with frost. And in places where it's cold, the trees are the kind which are considerate enough not to shed their green bits.
Lee's wondering whether it would be less eerie if he switched off his flashlight, or whether that would be the fastest way to plunge into a ravine and break an arm, when the beam finds
Eyes.
Eyes full of mist and ice.
And Lee damn near shits himself. (Like, I was a tad surprised, you know?) Until he realises these are merely big, thick glasses on the nose of a little girl, who just stares at him, probably totally stunned at coming across Lee Gibson in a small wood in Wales.
'Scared the life outa me. What you doing out, night like this?' Kid's not what you'd call properly dressed for the conditions. School blazer, for chrissakes. 'You lost? You want me to call up your mom?'
The kid says not a word; maybe she's in shock like every other bastard around here tonight. Lee eventually extends a hand, the kid takes it and holds on, like she wasn't too sure he
was real. Like, would you expect to find Lee Gibson in a Welsh wood at night and on foot?
'Where d'you live?'
No reply. Lee guides the kid back on to the track. 'Hey, you can talk to me, you know, I'm not gonna bite. Who's your mom?'
This is getting nowhere. Lee puts his flashlight on her, takes a better look. About twelve, not too tall - kind of dumpy, in fact. Mid-brown hair, not too much chin ... Hey, man,
something not totally one hundred per cent right here. This kid could be what d'you call it, used to be mongoloid? Maybe ran away from a home or some place like that. The cops will know
what to d
o, when they get here. And, shit, the way things are going, Lee Gibson is not going to be able to avoid witnessing Reilly's Last Exit in the long, low van.
'Let's move, kid. Hey, you like rock music? I do that. I'm a rock star.'
The kid does not seem over-impressed. The kid finally speaks.
The kid says her dad's a rock star, too. And Lee says, 'What?'
Couple of minutes later, they arrive back among the lights.
No police cars yet. But at least there's one friendly face in the canteen.
'Hey, Sile,' Lee says. 'Look what I found. Kid reckons she's Tom Storey's daughter.'
Sile, sitting on his own behind a cup of black coffee, takes a good, long, serious look at the kid.
'What do you think?' Lee says, chuckling. 'Maybe there a family resemblance.'
'Where d'you find her?'
'Down by the wood, across the grass. She was just wandering. Doesn't make much sense, though, does it? How would Storey's kid get here?'
'How indeed?' Sile says thoughtfully. 'Let's get you a drink, luv. What would you like?'
The kid just stands there in the school blazer. Not a movement.
'How about a hot chocolate? Then we'll take you to your daddy, eh?' Sile smiles, obviously likes kids, it's OK, Lee, you can push off now. I'll deal with this.'
'More like an altar than a tomb.' Simon stands back, rubbing dust and mould from his hands.
'That figures,' Moira says.
They've exposed the stone, or as much of it as they can get at. It's nearly three feet off the ground, which allowed the mixing desk to fit snugly on top of it. But, because the floor is higher in the control room than the studio, it probably goes down another foot or so.
The stone they can see, with the faded symbols on it Moira thought was lettering, forms a kind of thick shelf. Simon slips his finger under its lip. 'If it was cemented down, it isn't any more.'
'We can get it off?'
'You couldn't Moira, but Tom could.'
Tom's sweating. He looks, not happy, but somehow in better health than Moira's ever seen him. Tom Storey getting to grips with destiny. He gives the stone a tug, grins harshly. 'Piece of piss.'
'OK,' Moira says. 'Go for it.'