by Phil Rickman
'Ain't gonna tell him,' Tom says. 'And I'm sorry, darlin', but I ain't gonna tell you, case you feel obliged. It ain't important, not to the cops.'
'All right,' Shelley says. 'The other question.'
'Sile?'
'I don't know the man. I met him a couple of times when he came into Epidemic to see Max. But I don't know him. I can't imagine why he'd want to abduct a thirteen-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome. I can't imagine any bad reason.'
Tom says, his voice heavy with dread, 'I can.'
'Tom?'
'Let me fink about this.'
'In that case,' Shelley says, facing him up, 'you can bloody well think aloud.'
'It's probably not right.'
'Tell me!'
Tom puts his hands on her shoulders, gives her a condensed history of Sile and his connection with the Abbey. He tells her some things she doesn't know about the Abbey. He doesn't dress it up.
'This is ludicrous, Tom.' Shelley backing away into the mist, her voice risen most of an octave, 'I don't need this. Just now, I don't need it. I want some sense. I don't want...'
'All right. See that man over there we was wiv a minute ago? His name's Prof Levin. He's one of the best. You go and have a coffee wiv Prof, steady your nerves and by the time ...'
'Don't do this to me!'
'You don't believe me. You never believed me. You humoured me for years and you went your own way, and you fought, he's gonna get straightened out one day, yeah?'
Tom keeps his hold on her shoulders. She can't really see his eyes, but she knows they're staring far into hers.
'Darlin', this is as straight as I get.'
Right,' Gwyn Arthur tells Case and Prof. 'Things are moving. The two PCs up the road have been detailed to take a look at Grange Farm. There are others on their way.'
'Dreadful night, yeah?' Stephen Case says. He could be talking about the weather.
'Put your handkerchief away, Steve.' Prof snorts. 'Not your style.' Steve gives him that you'll-never-work-for-me-again look and Prof acknowledges it with one finger. Gwyn raises an eyebrow.
He nods towards the ruins. 'Mr and Mrs Storey seem to have a lot to talk about.'
'Leave 'em alone, eh?' Prof says,
'I think you're right, my friend.'
Tom has been talking rapidly at Shelley, and the thirteen grotesque years of her marriage have been leaping up at her, wiggling their flabby rubber hands like grinning cut-outs on a children's ghost train.
Tom has been talking about seven-year cycles of death maintained since the year 1175, and Shelley just wants to run away and bury her head in some distant pillow.
'See, we was supposed to all piss off, shattered, after Dave died. And the studio sealed off by the cops, who don't give a shit what's underneath it. Another tragic accident in the music business - we kept saying that. But, fanks to Moira, we don't piss off, we take the place apart and we find the oak.'
Shelley just wants a quiet, dry place where she can have long, unpublic hysterics. 'Yes,' she says tightly. 'Yes, OK.'
'Copesake knows. He's bound to know. Bound to've heard us trashing the joint. And then this wanker Gibson turns up with Vanessa, and she just stares at him, all big-eyed and solemn - you know the way she does?'
'Yes,' Shelley sobs.
'And it's the big taunt." Clutching her shoulder tightly.
'Telling him, you blew it last time too.'
'I don't unders—'
'Cause we passed that death, like passing the parcel, Dave to Moira, to me, to ... to Debbie. But at the end there was life. Don't you see? Life out of death, out of the flames. Life! Vanessa! Life born out of the Abbey. There was life when- there shoulda been only death''
Under Tom's hands, Shelley's shoulders start to give way.
'The kid's a walking taunt,' Tom says quietly.
'He's going to kill her, isn't he?'
Tom won't answer.
'He's got to kill her. Hasn't he. Hasn't he?'
'Nobody's got to do anyfing,' Tom says lamely.
'But by all the laws of this warped logic, the laws of the Abbey, he has to do it. That's what you're saying.'
'You told me to fink aloud. That's what I done.'
'So tell the policeman.'
'You fink he's gonna believe that?'
'Tell him!'
Urgent footsteps on the brittle grass, female footsteps, make Shelley turn, frantically hoping against hope ...
'Tom? Oh ... Shelley. It is Shelley, isn't it?'
'Hello, Moira.'
Moira says, 'I'm sorry, Shelley, I need Tom.'
Tom says, 'What's wrong, Moira?'
Moira says, 'Please?'
Shelley screams, 'You've to tell the policeman!'
'What about Simon?'
'I've been learning things about that tower.'
'Tom, you've got to …'
Tom turns to Shelley, squeezes both her arms. 'Darlin' ... you tell him. You tell the copper.'
'Where are you going? Tom!'
'Tell him.'
'Tom!'
IX
Blues
They think he's a stupid, garrulous old man, retired from work, retired from useful life.
Eddie Edwards, unwanted, has been discarded, like the small, tubby child excluded from the football team and anything exciting, like pinching apples from Morgan's orchard - aye, he remembers that, too. You keep watch Eddie. You can be ... the lookout. As if anything ever happened for lookouts to look out for.
He has been home for a warming cup of tea and to apologise to Marina, who looks not in the least concerned - even she thinks he's too old to worry about any more; what's he going to do in the teeming metropolis of Ystrad Ddu, find himself another woman, a hot number in a tight skirt?
Nevertheless, he goes back on watch. He promised - hardly graciously, but he promised (... while my good friend Mr Edwards remains here, on the offchance that the little girl should reappear. Pah!).
He feels the most bitter when the police car whizzes past with its beacons spinning. And then the ambulance. An ambulance! And then the ambulance returns. But the police car does not. Gone to the Abbey!
So what action have the police been able to take? Who was in the ambulance? Not even anyone he can ask. The street is deserted, the pub closed now, the villagers locking their doors in some relief - relief that an ambulance has passed by on the night of the eighth of December on a seventh year, and neither they nor any of their loved ones are inside it.
Eddie prowls up and down between the church and the vicarage. Once or twice he goes into the church - half fearfully, he has to admit, after the business with the candles. What if the candles are alight upon the altar and the church is fetid with the stench of human grease?
And why is it always so much eerier when you are alone? He doesn't think he'll go back to the church again; not the kind of place a child would hide.
What is he thinking about? He knows where Vanessa is. Or, at least, who she's with. And if bloody Gwyn had not been so keen to shut him up, he would know too.
So cold it is. Eddie wraps his overcoated arms around his chest and stamps his feet. This is a waste of bloody time. He marches up and down the street, past the Dragon, closed now for the night and back towards the church.
And it is then, above the church, in the mist, that he sees the small, moving light.
'Mrs Storey.'
Gwyn Arthur turns away from the gate, beckons her with his pipe. A uniformed policeman is on the other side of the gate, under the searchlight. He is expressionless.
'And Mr Storey - where is he?'
Something has happened. Something horribly serious. Shelley starts to babble: Tom was tired of hanging about doing nothing. He's gone to look for Vanessa. She doesn't know where he is, but he can't be far away.
'Pity. We rather need him. Mrs Storey, your firm's vans - what colour?'
'Green. Dark green.' Real dread seizes Shelley.
'I'd like you to come and look at one, if you do
n't mind.'
'Vanessa?' Her voice cracks.
'No sign, I'm afraid.'
She goes with them in the police car on a journey lasting no more than a couple of minutes, over rough road. When they stop, the headlights reveal a farmhouse of grey stone and peeling whitewash. Another policeman is waiting by an outbuilding whose double doors have been flung wide.
Gwyn Arthur says heavily, 'I wouldn't normally ask you to do this but, in the absence of your husband and in view of the urgency of the situation, I'd like you to take a look at a body.'
Shelley slumps in her seat.
They park in front of the barn, the headlights illuminating most of the interior: rotting hay, a rusting motorcycle carcass and, in the middle of the barn, one of the two dark green Love-Storey vans.
Shelley's breath locks in her throat.
'It's not Vanessa,' Gwyn Arthur emphasizes.
Even before one of the uniformed policemen swings the van doors wide, Shelley starts to feel faint, knowing whose body this is going to be.
Eddie remembers thinking despondently, I shall soon be too old for this. Be too old before Zap is too old.
He meant too old to use the narrow, stony footpath which crawls stealthily behind the church to the great clefted rock of Ystrad Ddu. Too old I am, certainly, to attempt it at night, in a heavy mist.
But the small, wan light still taunts him, glimmering in and out of the murky canopy, like a candle behind filthy old lace curtains.
The light is somewhere up there, around the clefted rock.
Out of the question. Too old, too fat and only ever picked as the lookout, the one rewarded with the most withered-looking apples in the haul.
Anyway, perhaps it's only a couple of the village kids, up there for a dare.
Really?
On the night of the eighth of December of a seventh year, with ambulances racing past and police about? The night of the locked doors and the TV-volume turned up high?
The night on which only the retired idiot, Edward Edwards, is out on the street?
And a small, sad-faced handicapped child. And a woman with both legs paralysed.
Do you really have a choice?
Eddie pushes a leather-gloved hand into his overcoat pocket and flicks on his Maglite.
He swallows. He's afraid.
Who wouldn't be?
The path can best be picked up at the far end of the churchyard, under whitened yews. He shines his torch up the path; it looks impossibly steep, slick with frost and has a big puddle at the bottom, too wide to get round. Ice on the puddle has been broken, shards floating like dead fish in the brown water.
Someone came this way.
And I'm too ...
Eddie wades miserably through the puddle, feeling the water seeping into his socks. He thinks of Marina hunched happily over a fat fire, reading Danielle Steel.
... old for this.
The first diversion in the track is marked by a thorn-bush, as they so often are in this area. One path down to the village, one upwards to the great cleft. Among the thorns, twin circles of ice reflect the Maglite's thrusting beam.
Eddie stops.
He takes off his leather gloves and inserts quivering fingers among the thorns.
Bringing out a pair of large, round spectacles, with very thick lenses.
He almost cries out.
Nothing worse than this. It makes for a rare and terrible moment when, like a cold blade entering your chest, it becomes shockingly apparent that your very worst fear is one hundred percent justified.
The lenses are rimmed either with the juice of berries - too late in the year for that, obviously - or with some other substance, still sticky.
He doesn't know what time it is. He has no watch. But the dawn must be hours away yet. So the vague luminescence, which allows him to see the jagged shapes of stones at the edge of the tower - the edge of his world - is more likely to be a moon of sorts, beyond the mist.
Which means the mist is thinning. Maybe.
Or maybe that his eyes have adjusted.
But this isn't the main subject for debate right now.
The knocking is.
The bumping, a throbbing from somewhere. It goes on, it gets louder. It's inside his head, but it's also ... out there. Out here. Within the boundaries of his world.
Simon stands up.
The whispers and the sniggers, from earlier, were in the air; they had no substance, aural will-o'-the-wisps. But this is a sound he hears. He feels it, like the beating of his own heart.
The stone floor is maybe twenty-five feet across, the spiral stairs emerging about fifteen feet from where Simon was sitting, his back to the highest part of the wall, the part least likely to collapse and leave him
flying
like Isabel and her lover.
The mist winds around him, like a gauze bandage. The noise comes out of the mist, and Simon takes a couple of steps forward. And stops.
A black figure wobbles in front of him. Not a shadow. Quite solid. A small, dumpy figure, pear-shaped, throbbing and oscillating.
It's the guitar case.
Standing on end.
Like a small sarcophagus, a child's coffin, wobbling in the grey vapour. Was this how he left it? A black moulding of fleecy-lined reinforced leather-effect plastic, perhaps four feet tall, standing on end?
No, he laid it flat. It was not on end. And there was no noise inside it. No rapping. No rattling. No insistent let-me-out clamour.
He wants to reach out and simply push the case over. But guesses that if he does this, it will burst open with an awful gasping, farting sound, and the contents - the grit and the dirt, the pieces of Aelwyn's skull smudged with his brains - will be exposed to the mist and whatever wants to come and pick at them.
Leave it. That's what it wants. It wants him to push it over.
It's a trick.
Simon?
I can't hear anything.
Come on, pal.
The guitar case sways. Its front swells and bulges out and then contracts. He can almost see the indented maker's name, C. F. Martin, warped and distended. Hears the plastic cracking.
The case is trying to breathe.
Come on, pal, it's hot in here.
'I can't hear you.'
Damn, he said that aloud. Never let them know. Never speak to them.
He puts a hand up to the handkerchief he's tied around his face to staunch the blood, where Sile slashed him. Still there.
A peal of convulsive, cackling laughter is funnelled through the tower, whorls of mist shivering like huge shoulders heaving with shared merriment, while the black guitar case rocks and wobbles in giddy glee.
You want to. You want to let me out.
He shakes his head, so weary.
You want to let it all out.
'Leave me alone. Piss off.'
Shit!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
He covers his ears with both hands, rocking his head.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Simon cowers back into his corner of the tower. Never react, never scream at it, never curse ... never leave yourself open to negative emotions.
Think beautiful thoughts.
Oh, don't be so f—
No!
No impurity. You did it once.
Just don't fall asleep. Stay cool. Stay cold.
Simon lies on his back, a finger jammed in each ear, staring up into where the sky used to be. It is getting lighter, surely, the mist above him no longer pea-soup thick, more like mushroom soup. It won't be long, it can't be long now, and when the morning comes he'll open the case and give up the spirits of Aelwyn and Dave to the light.
Please, God.
Eddie takes out his handkerchief, shakes it and wraps the glasses in it, placing the bundle in the inside pocket of his overcoat.
He knows whose glasses they are. But they can't be. Unless Meryl lost all sense of direction in the mist and ended up here.
This is his last hope, that theirs was the travelling light
He wonders whether he should call out. Meryl.
But if it isn't her, if it's somebody else he'll feel ... well, stupid.
Stupid. A better word, this is, than bloody terrified. Eddie shields his Maglite with a hand, pointing the beam down at the narrowing path from which stones bulge like sores and blisters.
The path does not curve into the great rock, but slightly above it. To get to the rock, you have to leave the path, which is risky enough by day, risky enough on a nice day.
Too risky for an old, retired man.
He takes the path curving around and above the cleft. Got to watch it here; there's no fence; one slip and you're down twenty feet to the rock; come off the rock and it's a hundred feet into the churchyard. The cleft. He's often wondered how it was created. An entirely natural feature, obviously; would take two hundred men with stone chisels about fifty years to carve it out. No, volcanic activity, this is.
And yet it's known - not far and wide, exactly, but certainly hereabouts - as an observation point for the Skirrid, perfectly aligned with the cleft. Take half a dozen steps either way and the holy mountain disappears.
Not a problem on a misty night.
This, however, this steep, curving footpath, is the most perfect observation point for the cleft itself. Eddie directs his Maglite to the start of the channel, on the edge of the coniferous woods and follows it as it widens and deepens into an enormous V.
Wherein lies ...
Jesus God!
Eddie rocks on the path, has to clutch at the bushes to prevent himself losing his footing.
About fifteen feet below him, in the deepest part of the cleft, lies a small body.
Eddie panics. He pockets his torch and comes down the path backwards, on all fours, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the path, sending small rocks and pebbles skittering into space, hearing them bounce from the great clefted rock of Ystrad Ddu.
Not standing up until he reaches the wider area from which the rock can be reached.
Leaving the path behind, he hurries across the scrub with its spiky tufts of moorgrass hard with frost and hauls himself onto the rock, a bare and icy moonscape in the torch beam. Not much breath left, but he must reach her before he stops because if he stops, if he allows himself even four seconds to fill and empty his lungs, it's going to take him forever to get moving again.