Helter Skelter

by Des Sheridan

  After dinner Tara, who looked bushed, made her excuses and retired early to bed. Robert still needed to unwind from the day’s driving, so he went upstairs and picked up a sweater before heading out to explore the village.

  Night had fallen and a glorious array of constellations hung suspended in the night sky, with a clarity of definition that reminded him of the night sky at Rosnaree. Strolling in the balmy warmth of the night air, he found himself under the spell of the place. Surrounded by sturdy medieval buildings, lovingly crafted by long-departed stonemasons, he felt as though he had stepped back in time. Not a soul was about, and the village seemed a ghost town, as though the inhabitants had recently inexplicably fled. The sole creature he saw was a cat, crouched on top of a door in a wall, but even that wasn’t real. It was a sculpture made of the same stone as the wall it sat upon.

  What happened next would become engraved indelibly in Robert’s psyche. He had entered a stretch of cobbled street that had tall walls on either side, lit only by a dim glow cast by an old-fashioned lamp post, when a sudden change took place. Without any warning a feeling of intense anxiety overtook him, stopping him dead in his tracks. It was as though an invisible essence had seeped out of the porous sandstone blocks and the mortared joins of the walls and overwhelmed him like a cloak. His heart started to race, his tongue dried up and his breathing tightened like a noose in his throat. Something was out there, invisible in the darkness, a presence of absolute evil that was palpable. He gasped for breath and his exposed flesh, moist with perspiration, tingled painfully as though undergoing a severe allergic reaction. His peripheral vision was distorting as was his hearing, the sounds he heard being those inside his body

  He could even smell it, a rank, putrid stench that made him want to gag. His memory jolted back to a mountainous village in Afghanistan - an old tribeswoman attacking him, rubbing the leaves on his clothes, cursing him - and he falling backwards, with that smell on his clothes, the unmistakable pungent, sulphurous stench of asafoetida, or devil’s dung. The smell of putrefaction.

  His intuition told him, with visceral certainty, that the thing was looking for Tara and he was relieved she was not with him. Backing up against a wall, he slid to the ground, trapped by the presence and expecting his life’s breath to be choked from him. Images flashed in front of him in rapid fire succession. Childhood glimpses, moments in the desperation of war, other random excerpts. And people as well, relatives and friends, half-forgotten until this moment, and of course Sarah. Always Sarah.

  Hearing a loud, wordless cry, Robert looked up. His vision was blurred but there seemed to be a person nearby, dressed in white or encased in light, he couldn’t be sure. Because he was prone the figure seemed tall, preternaturally elongated. It pointed an arm horizontally, like a statue, as though fending off the invisible presence or dismissing it. For a second Robert glimpsed the face. The eyes were extraordinary, dazzling ultramarine blasts of light. The features of the face assumed form, for a second, and were reminiscent of Deacon Malachy, but everything was blurred and he could rely on nothing. Then he passed out.

  When Robert next opened his eyes he was still sitting on the cobbled street and knew at once that the thing was gone. He gratefully gulped in mouthfuls of evening air and smelt again the reassuring heavy scent of jasmine, spilling over the walls from some unseen garden. Whether the experience had lasted thirty seconds or three minutes he had no idea. He did know that never before had he experienced anything like it and there was no mistaking its nature. The presence was real and external to him, he had not imagined it. No one could imagine something as evil and hellish as that.

  Chapter 71

  The terrifying encounter had cleared Robert’s head. Gone was any sense of post-prandial sluggishness. He was thoroughly shaken by the encounter. Picking himself up, he walked unsteadily for a few yards before realising that he had lost his bearings. How could that happen in a place so small, he wondered?

  Proceeding a short distance he heard a sound faintly carried on the breeze. It was uncanny, rising and falling somewhere far off. Without making a conscious choice he followed it and at the next corner turned right up a long cobbled street. Above him in the blackness loomed one of the great towers that they had seen from the road. He was puzzled because, although the sound was closer, looking up the street he could see no lights of windows or doorways that it might emanate from. But he recognised now that it was the sound of acapella voices which seemed to summon him, climbing up and down the scale in soaring melodies, waxing and waning on faint eddies of the breeze. It reminded him of plainsong, which he loved, but this sound didn’t seem to be strictly monophonic. There were several voices singing counterpoint and harmonising about a principal melodic strand.

  Stopping to listen more closely, free from the clatter of his shoes on the cobbles, he became aware of a large wooden double door located in the wall beside him and shrouded in darkness. There was no sign or notice by way of invitation but something impelled him to raise the black metal latch. The portal swung open and the sound increased measurably in volume. Stepping through the porch his eyes were met, to his surprise, by the night sky and stars above. Looking about he got the measure of the place. Pointed arches told him it was a covered cloister, four-square, with a grassed area in the middle open to the sky. The sound of water sprinkling gently told him there was a fountain present. Slowly he walked around the covered walkway, hesitant for fear that his next step would somehow break the spell and make the music stop.

  A small notice on a wall told him that he was in the Abbey at La Romieu, a pontifical institution on the pilgrim trail to Santiago de Compostela. He was taken aback to come across this echo of their previous stopping point and curiosity impelled him to advance further. Finally, having walked three sides of the quadrangle, he spotted a small door, again with a Gothic pointed arch, located on the inside wall. He approached it and turned the handle.

  The sound of the music, loud now and gloriously unrestrained, poured out of the doorway and on entering he found himself in a long, narrow chapel with a high vaulted ceiling. Large candles, as tall as a man, threw flickering light on bare, honey-coloured, stone walls and tall narrow windows that were, where the light fell, a blaze of colour. The abstract simplicity of the forms told him that the stained glass must be modern. At the front of the church a small number of people, perhaps half a dozen, sat listening to the singers There were five choristers, all female, and dressed in identical rich blue robes, with an orange flare under the arms, and neck scarves, banded in yellow and red, entwined around starched white collars. The brightly-attired singers stood in front of the altar, a simple modern slab of white marble. The colours, set off startlingly against the white backdrop, seemed familiar but Robert couldn’t place them. Then his eyes fell on the cloth across the altar and he remembered where he had seen them before. The colours were those of the Swiss Guard in The Vatican and the altar cloth, in simple yellow and white banding, carried the image of the crossed keys of St Peter in silver and gold. The keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.

  He walked quietly up the aisle and, sitting down a few seats back from the others in the audience, let the singing envelop him. It was simply the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, the high female voices singing in unison, creating an effect like celestial bird song. Clearly the music was old and to him it sounded ancient. Closing his eyes he felt himself carried back to a time when people sang to their Christian God with the intensity of those who believed: who simply knew He was there. An immense aura of peace descended upon Robert and ecstasy flooded his heart. He wasn’t sure how many songs passed, nor even which language they were sung in. Sometimes it was self-evidently Latin but at other times it sounded like French. He watched the faces of the singers, ordinary women transported in the shared joy of singing. There was no applause between chants. The context was evidently too sacred for that. These people were not singing to entertain their audience, he realised, they were singing in praise of their God. Then he let h
is own being enter into the experience and, without words, joined in the sung prayer by simply being at one with it.

  When eventually the choir finished and the final notes dissipated into the hum of the night air, no one, Robert included, moved. All seemed transfixed by the experience. Robert sat and pondered his dual experiences of the evening. He realised that he had received a demonstration of the elemental binary forces in the universe, of evil and good. Whatever the force in that chapel was, summoned up by the vocal incantations, then that was a God he would gladly follow. It was joyous and life-affirming. What’s more, someone, or something, had laid the experiences out for him. He appreciated that he was being inducted into Tara’s world of dreams and presences. He sensed he was being prepared but wondered for what purpose.

  Chapter 72

  France, 18 October 2014

  Tara and Robert resumed their journey north the following morning. Somehow the news about Andre’s death had changed everything and both their moods were subdued. Robert didn’t mention his nocturnal experiences in La Romieu. He was struggling to comprehend the enormity of what had happened and Tara had enough to contend with already.

  ‘It’s about 450 miles, which will take up to nine hours, allowing for stops, maybe a little longer. So that’s about four and a half hours’ driving each,’ Robert explained.

  ‘Let’s go for it. If we don’t make it we can always stop somewhere like last night. Somewhere no one can find us,’ said Tara, ending on a wistful note.

  ‘Sounds like a plan!’ confirmed Robert in an attempt to sound upbeat.

  They left at nine and Tara drove the first stretch, driving westwards to join the E9 at Montauban, and then heading north to Brive. The journeying of the last few days had given them the time and space to get used to each other and establish a reassuring pattern of being. They interspersed conversation with listening to CDs, radio music, chatting or just silence. Robert felt that they were living in a cocoon uninterrupted by the outside world and was glad they found each other easy company. On day one they had passed the acid test of travelling companions: they had become comfortable with being silent with each other – at least, this was Robert’s sense of it. This morning, in response to the news from Maynooth, Tara started to open up. She talked about Boston and laid bare the essentials of the fiasco with Newton. And once started it came out like a flood, no holds barred.

  ‘It was hard to find that the last ten years of my life had been a sham and I hadn’t realised it. I had been living with a man who had lied about so much. All the time he was swindling the company we both worked for out of millions of dollars. Of course when it was discovered I started to think back, as you do when disaster strikes and I had to face up to a harsh truth. The signs had been there all right, little signs but telling none the less. I had just chosen to pretend they weren’t.’

  ‘We all do that,’ Robert commented. ‘When you like someone you choose not to see the bits that don’t add up. It’s human nature.’

  Robert was keen for her to continue but did not want to pounce in judgement, so he tried to make his comments supportive. She was plainly able to carry on.

  ‘Since my breakdown my psychotherapist has been helping me figure out what was wrong. It seems to have been my mother’s death, which traumatised me as a teenager and I suffered a breakdown. Basically I coped with her death and people’s responses to my distress by locking myself off from my emotions. I just blocked the memories and feelings out. That is scary, you know, Robert. The idea that your mind can censor what you recall, what you think you know about yourself. Makes you wonder who is in charge, and then in turn who you are. Anyway, I became Miss Ambitious. I just focussed on external things, being successful in exams, acquiring wealth, being seen with the right people. And I was bloody good at it. I became a driven, self-centred monster.’

  Tara whacked her two forearms angrily on the steering wheel and the car swerved badly. He jerked forward in his seat.

  ‘Tara! It’s an interesting story but I would like to live to hear the ending, OK?’

  He was relieved to see from her smile that he had broken the tension.

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that I have to come to terms with so much, with how badly I treated people. There was a man. You’ve heard this much so you might as well hear how bad it got. The stuff I wish I could bury, but can’t. Someone I was investigating as an auditor. I fried his goose just before I returned to Boston. The day I heard Newton had vanished I got news that this man had killed himself. Within hours of my interrogation he’d fucking hanged himself by his belt in his cell. Miss Ambition graduated to Miss Executioner. After that I started to unravel.’

  Robert was stunned into silence by this unexpected flood of self-revelation and by how swift and final her fall from grace had been. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘God, is it that bad?’ Tara said a few moments later, and turning Robert saw tears running down her face.

  ‘Pull over Tara, I will take over,’ he said trying to be helpful.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ she shouted impatiently, her mood swinging. ‘It doesn’t matter! I will still feel exactly the same even if I am not driving. I can’t fucking escape it. Day or night. The fact that I don’t like who I am! That I am ashamed of what I became! That I need to redefine myself but where do I start, and how? And all the while this fucking craziness is going on around us! People linked to me are dying! ‘

  An awkward silence descended which thankfully morphed, as the countryside sped past, into another of their comfortable silences.

  Chapter 73

  The weather changed as they continued north, becoming overcast and, shortly after Robert took over the driving near Brive, rain set in. Having both driven through the thunderstorm of Tara’s outburst a little rain seemed no big deal for either of them.

  Somehow the convention had evolved that the person behind the wheel led the conversation, which made it Robert’s turn. The great thing about talking when you are driving, Tara thought, is that you look out the windscreen, whereas normally you look at the person who is listening to you. Their body language inhibits you. But when you are driving you don’t see that and keep talking. And what’s more your words are free, not pinned down in time or space because both of those things are changing instantaneously around you, like the landscape. That was why she had told him so much.

  Robert started talking. He talked about his parents being killed in a car crash when he was fifteen and how his headmaster at Grammar School had wangled it so he got into the army as a cadet. It became clear to Tara that the army had become a surrogate home for him. She felt sorry for him, the way he spoke of the Army at that point in his life was so naïve and trusting; essentially a child-like view. His teens sounded truly grim and his identification with the army more than a bit desperate. But then she heard how this surrogate family had forged him: he had got a degree, become an officer, seen the world and grown up. His conversation moved onto his current obsessions, antiquities and ARAD, and he spoke with authority on both. How wrong she was, she thought, in thinking him an uninteresting, repressed personality. On these topics he was passionate. His fondness for his ARAD colleagues was evident, as was his loyalty towards them. She had met Mac but not the others he spoke of, people like Trinny and Nico, but it was interesting to hear him talk about them.

  As he spoke more and more openly she realised that this small tight knit group of people were not just colleagues or close friends. They were now his family, replacing the Army in that role. Wherever this man went he created his own emotional security by giving to the people around him - not in a flashy way but just by being himself. He is so different to me, Tara thought. He is steadfast, caring and loyal. It made her feel ashamed and inferior sitting alongside him. And it made him more attractive.

  The contrast with her position was stark. She had few close friends. When the cookie crumbled in Boston she had found that out fast. She had never invested enough time in people. Instead she had spent an entir
e decade as a money-grabbing, go-getter who trampled on those whom she worked with or was sent to investigate.

  She also began to get an insight into why Robert was accompanying her on this quest. Yes, he was interested in the Triskell as artefact, and the business it might bring, but if that was his main focus he would have stayed at Rosnaree. So why was he with her? The answer, she realised, was simple. It was a gift from him to her. He wanted to be with her and aid her. Maybe that meant he saw her for what she was, a confused mess of thoughts and emotions trying to sort itself out, and felt sorry for her. Or maybe he just liked her?

  That question opened her mind to other possibilities, something their continuing close proximity made very pertinent. Travelling with him the last ten days had made her more aware of his physicality, the fact that he was a handsome man and that she was increasingly attracted towards him. For a crazy moment she wanted to stop the car, tear off his clothes and just fuck him. She felt herself moisten at the thought. That’s what they said, she recalled, about the war. When death was close everybody took risks, everybody wanted sex.

  Oblivious to her thoughts Robert reminisced about the creation of ARAD, and made passing references to Sarah, mainly about her expertise in Mesopotamian art and her experience of the international antiques trade.