23
AS IT HAPPENS, I KNOW A BIT ABOUT SURVIVAL. TO A POINT, I know this because I come from Bénouville, Louisiana, where hurricane preparedness is a topic of conversation every summer. Did you stock up on bottled water? Batteries? Canned food and granola bars? Do you have bleach for when the water goes down and the mold comes? Do you have a radio? Flashlights?
But the nitty-gritty stuff I know because my neighbor is a nutjob. A nutjob with a lot of practical skills. I mean Billy Mack, who lives down the street.
Billy was never quite the same after Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people weren’t the same after that. A lot of people went without food and water and help, and a lot of people developed an interest in survival skills. Billy Mack took this to an extreme. He has a boat on his porch roof, tethered to one of the second-story windows. Billy is also the founder of the People’s Church of Universal People, a religion he runs out of his garage. As part of his mission, he sometimes goes up and down the street, handing out pamphlets. His religion is a kind of apocalypse-come-hither thing mixed with the Army Rangers field guide. He believes that the end times are coming, and people in his religion will not only be right with God, but they’ll have the proper supplies on hand.
I don’t spend a lot of time with Billy Mack, but we get the pamphlets. And right on the front they say things like, “A human being can survive for three to five days without food or water. Jesus needs you to be ready for His coming. Do YOU have the supplies you need?”
The pamphlets probably had all kinds of good tips for how to deal with situations like the one I was in now. But I’d never gotten past the front cover before I put them in the recycle bin. I was sorry for that now. Billy was the kind of person who always had a knife strapped to his shin. He would have had ideas about how to deal with this.
“This” was sitting in the back of the car with Devina on one side and Jack on the other. Jane was at the wheel, chatting merrily as if this was a perfectly normal trip, talking about “traffic problems on the A4.”
As we went, everything seemed to slip away from me, like the buildings were fading from existence as I saw them for the last time. The roads were rolled up. The spare sky went into a box. Because, I felt sure, I would not come this way again. I looked at the names on the signs of places we were passing—Fulham, Hammersmith, Chiswick. I could try to fight, I could throw myself against the back window or grab Jane by the neck or do something…That something would only get me pushed down in the seat. It would get me hurt, and it would get people I love killed.
I was going to the country.
“We’re coming up on Barnes, now,” Jane said. “It’s where Marc Bolan died. You probably have never heard of Marc Bolan, but he was one of my favorites. Crashed into a tree. Terrible and shocking. When we do our work, Marc is one person I’d love to help.”
“What work?” I asked.
“We’re going to defeat death,” she said. It was very matter of fact, like she was saying, “We’re going to have a bake sale.”
“Oh,” is all I could manage.
“Have you ever heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Rory?” Jane smoothly negotiated a roundabout. “In ancient Greece, it was understood that Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, presided over the fecundity of the earth. Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld. Demeter forced him to return her daughter, but you see, Persephone had done the one thing that you shouldn’t do in Hades—she had eaten the food of the dead—and was forced to return to the underworld part of each year. In their honor, the Greeks had the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which initiates were shown the real nature of life and death. Now, we think these things are just stories—except, of course, that the ancient Greeks were correct. Death, as you have noticed, is not the fixed state that most people believe it is. Do you agree?”
“Sure?” I said, because it seemed like the right thing to say to this terrifying speech that seemed to be going into a deeply bad place.
“They may have spun a colorful tale around it, but they were aware of the reality of life and death. Their mysteries, their rituals—they were experiments. And those experiments started to bring about changes. They made us, Rory. Those who achieved the highest of the mysteries, the hierophants and the initiates, they developed the sight. They began to perforate the wall between the living and the dead. Somewhere, far, far back in your family history, there was a great mystic, someone who achieved this wonderful state. We are all, in that sense, related.”
“Family,” Jack said.
“Family indeed,” Jane replied.
“But the great work was destroyed. The Temple of Demeter was sacked. The Christians took over, and the mysteries were thought to be destroyed, the knowledge gone. But knowledge lives on. The rituals continue. Which is why we did what we did this morning. The psychic, of course.”
“Why her? What did she do?”
“We needed a victim, someone in the right general area. Someone whose death would arouse suspicion. Someone we couldn’t be linked to. A relatively insecure building where it was easy to get in and out. She was perfect. The death of a psychic so close to the Wexford grounds—we’ve put enough in play to keep your friends busy for a while. And Jack had a blood debt to pay. In the original mysteries, it was thought you had to be free of ‘blood guilt,’ that you couldn’t have killed anyone. But we are performing the advanced mysteries now, and now a blood debt is required. You need to meet it in order to be initiated.”
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a piece of cloth, soaked in blood.
“Jack has proven himself ready,” Jane said. “As has Devina.”
“Mum’s boyfriend,” Devina said lightly.
“And you?” I asked Jane.
“The man in Yorkshire,” she said. “The one I told you about, the one who attacked me. It may sound horrible, Rory, but we have all removed people from society who needed to be removed…”
“What did the psychic ever do?” I said. “She was innocent!”
“You think that’s innocent? Someone who pretends to see into the future? Someone who tricks people for money? It’s because of people like her that the good name of the true religion is sullied and lost.”
I know a true believer when I see one—that high fervor, that total conviction, the calm that explodes into emotion in a moment. I was in a car full of conviction, full of belief in ancient Greek rituals and destroying death. And murderers.
The detour was taking us through a series of very tight lanes, barely wide enough to hold a car. Outside, England was normal and quiet, just living a December day. People would be getting ready for Christmas. Doing their jobs. Thinking about what to have for dinner. Cyclists rode past us on occasion. All that separated me from that world was a car door. But I could not get out.
“I would have fallen in with people like that,” Jane finally went on, “New Agers, nonsense spiritualists, but I was lucky. I met my friends. They taught me about the true history of the sight. They had used their wealth to invest in knowledge. They traveled to India, to Egypt, to Greece. They collected books. They talked to seers. They brought the knowledge back to London, and they made the ultimate sacrifice to help us all, to gain control of our own destinies. It’s been left to me to continue their work, to help them…and now…you. You are a transformed being. You are proof that what we believe is correct and possible.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just…”
“You don’t even know what you are,” Jane said. “But we will show you your true potential. And then…”
And then we all jerked forward, all at once, with the impact.
We’d plowed directly into the side of a police car.
I suppose, on some level, I’d suspected it. Like everything else today, I hadn’t really understood it fully—it made no sense—but it shouldn’t have surprised me. I had reached the point where surprises were no longer really possible.
The police car had come shooting out of
a small lane just as our car had approached it, and had taken a heavy impact in the passenger’s side. Our car made a sickly sound, but was still running. The door of the police car opened, and Stephen stepped out, a trickle of blood running down the side of his face. At the same moment, there was a thud and a hiss on one side of the back of the car. Then a clank, then a similar thud and hiss on the other side. Boo and Callum then approached the back windows at the same moment. Boo had a crowbar in her hand. They had taken out the tires.
All of which would have attracted a lot of attention, but we were between two blind sides of buildings on a small street. The crash itself probably didn’t make that much noise.
Stephen approached the driver’s window like a policeman performing a normal traffic stop. He was walking stiffly, and he wiped away the blood on the side of his face.
Jane rolled down the window.
“Hello, Officer,” she said politely. “You’ve ruined my car.”
“I’d like Rory to get out,” Stephen replied.
“And why should she do that? I don’t think you have any legal right to remove her.”
“She’s a minor who’s been reported missing. Either she gets out or I assure you that the full weight of the London police force will be brought to bear on this car.”
“Well, I don’t think Rory wants to leave, do you, Rory?”
I did not reply.
“This is all quite illegal,” Jane said. “Police brutality doesn’t even begin to cover it. We certainly won’t be jailed for this.”
“You’re right,” Stephen replied. “Now get out.”
Boo was wedging the crowbar into the space between the door and the body of the car on Devina’s side. She popped the door open, grabbed Devina, and pulled her out. Callum remained on Jack’s side, his hands pressed against the glass of the window.
“Get out of the car, Rory,” Stephen said. “This is over.”
I slid over toward the open door. Boo pushed Devina aside and took me by the shoulders.
“You all right?”
“Fine.”
Devina didn’t move—she just stared at us both.
“Come on,” Boo said, guiding me away. “Come on. We need to leave now.”
But I stayed where I was.
“You are making a mistake,” Jane said. “If you try to take me, that will be kidnapping. You will be prosecuted. I’m going to call my solicitor about this vandalization of my car and assault on my young friends. You’ll never hear the end of this.”
“I look forward to it,” Stephen said. “You’ll be walking home. Which will be under surveillance. As will every vehicle registered to it, and every person known to have lived under its roof. Nothing you do from now on will be unobserved. On the street, cameras will turn and focus on you. And if anything happens to anyone connected with Rory’s life, I’ll personally see to it that every moment of what remains of your miserable life is spent in the maximum amount of suffering.”
He said all of that as if rattling off a grocery list.
“Oh, you do go on, don’t you?” Jane said.
“Come on,” Boo said again. And this time, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Boo was strong. She could have thrown me over her shoulder if she felt like it.
The police car was clearly not drivable, so Boo hustled me away, back down the lane.
“I can’t go,” I said. “They know—”
“We can’t stay, Ror. Come on, come on, we can’t stay here.”
Someone turned down the lane and saw the crash. She started to walk toward us. Boo pulled me harder, shoving the crowbar inside of her coat. Callum joined us in a few smooth strides.
“Just keep walking,” he said, taking my arm on the other side. “Walk away. Let Stephen deal with this.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Stephen put his phone in your pocket when we were at Dawn’s. It sounds like he didn’t think you were going to listen to him and go back to school. We used it as a GPS. Who are those people?”
“That was my therapist,” I said.
“And that’s put me off therapy for life,” Callum replied. “Do you have money? We know you emptied your bank account.”
I had forgotten about the roll of fifties and twenties in my pocket. When I reached in for it, I felt the phone.
“That’ll be enough,” Callum said. “We’ll find a taxi to take us back to the flat…”
“They know where the flat is,” I said. “They know about you, where my parents live. They have Charlotte…”
That last one hit me all over again. Someone, somewhere had Charlotte.
“What do you mean?” Boo said.
“I mean, they had her. I saw her in the house. She was in the bedroom one minute, the next she was gone. They said I had to go with them or…”
“What?” Callum said. “How did we miss them getting her out of the house? We were parked up right outside.”
“They kept talking about some house in the country. That’s where they were taking me…Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This is my fault. They knew all this stuff, and I went…I listened to them…”
I started to shake, and Boo tightened her hold around my shoulders.
“Phone it in,” she said to Callum.
Callum made the call to someone to report Charlotte’s abduction. Boo stayed with me. Stephen came jogging along a few moments later, fast, if a little unsteady on his feet. Without a word, he reached into my pocket and took out the phone, then he stepped away from us and made a call. I just heard a few clipped words, like “cleanup” and a street name.
“You all right?” Boo asked, looking at the blood on Stephen’s face.
“I played rugby. I’ve had worse. We need to get out of here.”
“Flat’s not safe,” Callum said, coming back over. “They know the address. We could have more of them waiting for us there.”
“Right,” Stephen said. He wiped away a rivulet of blood that was creeping down his cheek. It left a streak on the side of his face.
“Does Thorpe want us to come in?” Boo asked.
“We can’t walk into an MI5 building with a missing person. Rory’s in the system now. She’ll be caught on about a million cameras, and they do use facial recognition there, so no. We need to go somewhere and lay low and regroup…”
The blood trickled down again.
“Right. I know where we can go. It’s in Maida Vale.”
24
MAIDA VALE WAS A HEAVILY TREED AND DISCREET SECTION of northwest London, just above Paddington station. Quiet and secure brick houses with walled gardens and rows and rows of identical buildings in one solid block, side by side. There were commercial streets with pink and white cupcake shops and nonchain coffee places, stores where you could buy cashmere baby blankets, imported green tea from Japan, French cookware, and jeans so expensive one could only assume that they had been hand-sewn by monks who chanted prayers for the thighs of the would-be wearers. Stephen directed the cab to a series of golden brick apartments.
“What is this place?” Boo asked as Stephen punched in a code to gain access to the lobby.
“My father’s flat. He uses it when he comes to London for work. I think he’s in Switzerland right now. I hope he is, anyway.”
“What exactly does your dad do?” Callum asked.
“Banking,” Stephen said.
“Did he break all the money?” Boo said.
“Possibly. It’s the sort of thing he might do.”
We all crammed into a much-too-small elevator and rode to the fourth floor. Stephen led us down to one of the end apartments. He pulled back a framed photograph of a bridge that hung on the wall near the door and produced a key, which he used to open the door.
The flat was dark. The floor-length curtains were closed. He switched on just one light in the middle of the room. We were in a very tastefully, almost clinically decorated living room. There were two sofas facing each other, and between them, a long and low marble table that
contained some books of art and photographs that looked like they had never been opened. There were no signs of life in the place, really. Just perfectly positioned vases and decorative bowls.
Stephen went into the other rooms, and I heard more curtains being closed. Callum, Boo, and I milled around. There was one family photograph, pushed back on an occasional table and mostly obscured by a yellow vase. It showed what was clearly Stephen’s family, and it had been taken in someone’s garden, possibly against their will. They all squinted a bit against the sun. His parents looked about how I expected them to look. His father wore a pinstriped suit, his mother a yellow dress and a very large yellow hat with a wide white band. And there was Stephen’s sister, a girl with a surprisingly wide and open grin. Her hair was chestnut brown, and she was freckled. Her arm was looped through Stephen’s. Stephen looked like he was maybe twelve or thirteen in the picture, a bit thin and very uncomfortable. He towered over his mother and sister and was as tall as his father. Even in this photo, it felt like there was something competitive about this, like his dad was standing as straight as he possibly could so his son wouldn’t reach an inch past him.
“We need to get your head looked at,” Boo said. “That’s going to need some stitches.”
“Head wounds always bleed a lot. We need to keep a low profile. I can stitch it myself if it comes to that.”
“Well, let’s clean it,” Boo said.
“You know how to stitch your own head?” I said.
“There are probably instructions online. How hard could it be?”
While Boo helped Stephen clean the wound, Callum crafted a bandage by tearing an undershirt he found in the bedroom into strips, so the top of Stephen’s head was now mummy-wrapped, with a shock of brown hair coming out of the top. Some blood was already leaching through. We gathered in the living room.
The Madness Underneath Page 21