by C Harrison
RavensWish - got my ticket for @totenherzen in fact got two, one for midlands arena one for ahoy, first night, so happy :-))))))) don't know how to get there but can swim if i have to
DM to RavensWish - will send you details for getting to the Ahoy. Do you still want to meet the band? Sent by WhiteRotterdam
DM to WhiteRotterdam - do I still want to meet the band? Do I still want to meet Toten Herzen and change my life? In a word yesyesyesyesyesyes: Sent by RavensWish
DM to RavensWish - I'll tell you who to speak to when you get there and then we can have a talk. Keep this to yourself: Sent by WhiteRotterdam
DM to WhiteRotterdam - cool. Who are you? do you work for them? Sent by RavensWish
DM to RavensWish - you'll find out: Sent by WhiteRotterdam
34 (September)
Selling out or cashing in, he wasn't sure which, was supposed to have lifted some of the pressure off Marco Jongbloed's ageing shoulders, but his freedom had soon regressed into boredom and aimlessness and he joined the idol rich. Something he thought he'd never be. Now everything he owned was a trivial embellishment, a whimsy. He couldn't speed in his sports cars, his large house was a rattling empty box echoing with tedium. His only entertainment came from reading the solicitor's letters during his divorce. And his children. God, he wished he could forget the grabbing little fuckers' names.
But things changed. In retrospect it was inevitable that they would, only the circumstances surprised him. Now his careful step had developed a spring, his oats were being resown, the autumn of his years were alive with colour and noise. He was reborn. Rewired, renovated, redecorated. The old dog was biting again, not quite in the same way as others bit, but well, some days he wondered what might have been, how he would have looked after all this time. Same as Rene, he supposed. No, the time for regret was over, age had taught him that. The pros and cons sort of balanced each other out. He was reconciled to his mortality. He understood.
Unlike Tom Scavinio. The manager had moved out of New York, out of his hotel and was playing yin to Marco's yang by taking up room in his coastal house. Sea breezes and the smell of the brine did little to take his mind off this crazy new life he had fallen into and he bombarded Marco with questions about the past and the lost years, as Scavinio called the period between 1977 and 2013. Marco had been patient, but believed the American was dancing round the subject, afraid to tackle it head on. For what reason he didn't know. Maybe he was a fundamental atheist or secular extremist, but all his questions, his conversations, small talk and asides failed to mention, failed to acknowledge the V word. They couldn't even joke about it.
As a late summer storm blew in from the North Sea Scavinio's alarm swelled like the rising tide as if the band were circling on some terrible ghostly thermal, swooping around the roof of the house, clattering the tiles and kicking the windows. Outside all sorts of paraphernalia were blowing about, a bin, a bucket, garden tools, bits of wood, flapping and rattling, groaning and spitting. The rain lashed the glass and roared at the trees. "It could be worse," said Marco standing at the large patio windows with a glass of Armagnac, "there'll be men at sea in all this."
"Well, that's their choice and good luck to them," replied Scavinio.
Then a shattering sound announced itself and Marco knew it was more than a flower pot going over. "That sounds like the garage." He finished his drink. Both men grabbed their coats and went outside to see what the damage was.
Barely able to stand Marco forced himself towards the garage where the door had blown open, almost torn off its hinges, shattering the small window panes. The door was forced close and the two men found themselves inside the brick and timber shelter next to a gleaming Jaguar E-Type.
"You wouldn't want to drive that on a night like this," said Scavinio.
"No. It's a delicate thing at the best of times."
"You'd have to go a long way to find a modern car as beautiful as one of these." Scavinio delicately touched the curves and bulges of the Jag.
"It was what I always wanted," said Marco standing on the other side of it. "Cost me fifteen thousand Euros and I've driven it once. I saw all sorts of things come and go. You'll have seen them too, I guess, but I always liked these cars. Sports cars these days look designed to scare you. This is like an oil painting. A work of art."
"Were things better in the old days?" Scavinio's question was rhetorical and Marco refused to answer. He wasn't talking about the car. Marco clicked the door open and sat inside. After a moment Scavinio joined him. He was behind the wheel, in control, but Marco wanted to change the subject.
"You're still struggling with all this, aren't you?"
Scavinio gripped the wheel and steered himself along an imaginary journey. "How long does it take to accept what is really going on, Marco? How long did it take you?"
"Doesn't matter how long it took me, we're all different. Look at Rob. He came to terms with it in a few days. For me, several years, but after so long you see they're the same people they always were."
"Were they?" Scavinio considered it.
"Yeah. How long have you known them? A few months. The impact lasts longer than that. If anyone is struggling to come to terms with it, it's them." Marco spat the words out and jabbed his finger on the dashboard. "You don't believe me? Let me tell you a little story about something that happened to Dee a few years ago."
-
The four of them weren't stuck in the house in Obergrau all the time. They travelled; sometimes together, sometimes alone. Dee would hear about some curiosity, an event or an object and she'd go and find out more about it.
One autumn she visited Salzburg, looking for books about the musical heritage of the city. Not the usual names like Mozart, but anything that was a little more obscure. She found a bookshop in the old town and was browsing when she noticed a man walk in with a parcel.
He went to one side with the owner of the shop and unwrapped the parcel. It was covered in linen, folded over and over, and tied with cord. Inside was a book, something big and old, leather bound. The owner of the shop examined it and eventually approved it and the man who brought it in was paid.
Dee's curiosity was too much to control and she asked what the book was. It was a seventeenth century collection of botanical lists, quite rare and very expensive. Not quite what Dee was looking for, but what really caught her attention was what the shop owner said next: the man who brought it in was the last man in Salzburg who could repair and restore books of this age.
Well, she found an excuse to leave and being much younger than the book restorer caught up with him and followed him back to where he worked close to Nonnberg Abbey. It was a tiny place set within a narrow terraced street that followed the steps up the abbey hill. She stood outside for several hours waiting for the book restorer to leave, but he lived here so Dee had to wait until all the lights went out.
Inside, the ground floor was his workshop and it was like a laboratory. There were smells of cleaning fluids and glues; bench mounted tools, racks of card, drawers of parchment. There were inks, quills, brushes, a wooden rickety old printing press. The place looked like a revolutionary's publishing house ready for another batch of pamphlets. But on shelf after shelf Dee found stacks of manuscripts in varying states of disrepair.
Then he found her. The book restorer turned on a light and confronted Dee, but he was obviously not afraid of her. Even though she had got in without a key or smashing a window her presence didn't scare him a bit.
He said his name was Gottlieb. "You must be a collector. No other reason for being in here at this time."
"I'm always looking for something unusual. Never been in a restorer's workshop before."
Gottlieb was very old. It was hard to tell how he still had the eyesight and the steady hand to work, but he managed. He showed Dee all the different manuscripts and what needed to be done to repair them.
There were pages with the tiniest of holes waiting for the finest of threads to bind them together. A book about gloves commissione
d by a Bourbon princess; a treatise on ailments associated with hunting for a 15th Century trader from Padua; maps of the Paris swamps and routes through them.
Dee saw the completed spines, glued and hardened, ready for the hardback covers to protect the edges of the paper and the stitching. There were title pages of colourful creatures and unpronounceable introductions in Catalan and Finnish. Around the workshop the manuscripts were brought back to life until they were healthy enough to be returned to their owners.
Except one.
"This, I finished twenty years ago," Gottlieb explained. "The gentleman who paid for its repair never came back."
The book, abandoned like an unwanted child, was only small, maybe fifteen by ten centimetres. It had a vivid blue pigskin cover with an embossed sun and fiery rays in gold. Inside, the text was small and filled every page to the edge.
"And what's it about?" asked Dee.
Gottlieb sat and summarised. It was a small journal, he explained, commissioned by a nobleman in 1210. The book is a report into the events that took place in a small village two years earlier.
'In 1208 five villagers had been accused of heresy and were to be burned at the stake. The wood piles were prepared, the victims shackled and coated with pitch. Then the fires were lit and the villagers stood back from the heat as the five heretics roasted. But the fire was not punishment enough and the bishop who had travelled from Brandenburg wanted their agonies to be even worse. He approached the fires, mouthed his incantations of fury and threw a red powder into the flames. As a consequence, the mixture of fire and the mysterious red powder was an explosion so violent it destroyed the heretics, the bishop, the onlookers, the village and the surrounding fields and woodlands in every direction. From the epicentre of the blast the ground was blackened and at the edges of the destruction, many kilometres away, mature trees were flattened in a fan shape radiating away from the blast. The explosion was heard in adjacent valleys and when people saw the clouds rising ever upwards they took it as a sign of God's anger. They came to see what had happened, but found nothing except the blackened landscape looking like a vision of hell. Slowly, life in the surrounding areas went back to normal, but then one night a villager who was at the burning showed up in a nearby town. People were astonished that anyone could have survived, but over the following weeks more and more of them reappeared as if returning from the dead.'
"Which is, of course, what they are," said Gottlieb. Dee understood why he had chosen that particular book. "The powder," he explained, "thrown into the fire is believed to have been red sulphur, which some say is used to create the Philosopher's Stone."
"For alchemy," Dee said.
"Yes. But not just for alchemy. The Philosopher's Stone can also be used to heal and to achieve immortality. When the bishop threw the powder on the flames he obviously had no idea what he was doing, but the victims didn't die."
"So what happened?"
They became opposite. Instead of death their existence became opposite to life. An anti-life, an opposite state of existence."
Dee wasn't sure what Gottlieb meant, but he was more interested in making a different point. "There were fifty to sixty villagers and most of them survived. You are what you are because of what they became. Now there may be as many as ten thousand of you."
"Vampires?"
"That's just one of the names to describe you. Your kind continue because you carry some essence of those original villagers who died and yet didn't die. If they kill first before feeding their condition is not passed on, but if they feed first their victim will become like them. They contain the Philosopher's Stone within them and now it's within you."
As the book had been abandoned so long ago he let Dee keep it. Over the years she tried to find the village described, but she never found it and doubts whether the story is even true, but she thinks it's the best explanation for the origins of what she is. She still has the book. It's probably worth millions, but she'll never sell it.
-
"It's a difficult word to use," Scavinio muttered to himself.
"What?"
"Vampire. It means too much. It's a loaded word. Is there not an alternative, something more plausible?"
"They'll still be the same people, whatever word you use."
"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Lenny Harper's stakes had been several inches to the right?" said Scavinio.
Jongbloed had thought about it many times. He thought about it most at Wim Seger's funeral when the band turned up long after everyone else had left. And again when he met a solitary figure mourning the death of her mother hours after the burial had taken place on a warm, sunny Rotterdam day. If Lenny Harper had known what he was doing he would have spared Susan Bekker the heartbreak later in life that she still talked about in her darkest moments.
"Penny for them?" Scavinio asked.
"What if? Everything has a what if attached to it. You can waste too much time wondering what if: what if Micky Redwall hadn't split up our band; what if," he stopped himself before he mentioned the Valentine's Day Kiss; Susan's fatal meeting in 1974. "So, what are they doing at the moment? Still rehearsing?"
"They've gone into one of their mysterious moods, which I don't get. They're cosying up to this Terence Pearl guy. Nuts doesn't begin to describe it, but they're interested in him for some reason. Any clues, Marco? You know 'em better than me."
Jongbloed sighed. "Maybe they want to keep an eye on him. No more Lenny Harper surprises coming out of nowhere."
"Yeah, yeah. They might not be so lucky a second time. So when do we get to see this thing on the road?"
"I might take her out tomorrow." Jongbloed laughed. "Get another old girl out on the road, eh Tom?"
35 (October)
Listening to Toten Herzen rehearsing, Rob Wallet hoped the acoustics of the Ahoy and all the other arenas would be better than this enormous tin shed. The warehouse might well have been the ideal European location for storing ninety thousand tins of peaches, but it buzzed and crackled like the afterburners of a jet engine. It was always the same with guitars and steel trussed rooves; a high frequency distortion that left human ears feeling like they'd been filled with limestone. Watching Toten Herzen rehearsing, Wallet hoped they'd get their act together and move around a bit more. As they finished another song he spoke over the PA.
"Can I make a small suggestion?" They stood, hands on hips and waited. "Can't you move around a bit more. You're sort of huddled in the middle of the stage like you're comparing one anothers' strings." No response. (Could they hear him?) "It's a big stage, use it. From back here you look like one big fat guitarist."
Dee stepped up to a microphone. "It's only a rehearsal. It's not like we're on stage tomorrow night."
"Just suggesting, that's all. Put on a show, give 'em their money's worth."
"Maybe we can get the white tie and tails out, put on a bit of vaudeville."
"I'm not suggesting you go that far, but what are these ramps for here. Come down them. Shove your guitars down my throat."
"We'd love to, Rob" Dee said, "but we don't want to damage them. They're all we've got."
"Promise me you'll move a bit more on the night."
"Rob," Susan stepped up to another microphone, "just shut up worrying."
"I'm not worrying. Look, you're better than this. You want to be in a rock band then why don't you look like one!" He could see them looking at each other. Could he push them far enough without getting eaten.
"Rob," Susan again, "if you want to conduct the English National Opera go and ring them up. We'll move when we decide to move."
"Not sure I can wait that long. That Flying V's wasted on you if no one can see it being played." That was it, he'd lit the blue touch paper and now all he had to do was wait for the spark. Susan finally marched down one of the ramps. Rene stood behind his drums to see this. She jumped down from the end of the ramp and strode over to the sound desk. Once in range she launched a right hook that sent Wallet flying
over the equipment into a heap on the hard floor. She stood over him, looking down through a black waterfall of hair. "If you want a show then go out and arrange for the magic ingredient."
"What? What magic ingredient? That hurt, that did." Her legs looked a lot longer from his angle. He was growing to like Susan when she was mad.
"Go and find your mad friend with the Cathar spaceship and find out if he's still willing to join us onstage."
"That's, er, that's a bad idea, Susan. Are you serious?"
"Make yourself useful. I got here before Elaine did and I know you wouldn't want that."
Wallet stood up rubbing his jaw. It didn't really hurt. "Tell her to move a bit, as well. She makes John Entwistle look like Freddie Mercury." She suppressed a grin. Wallet saw it: Susan Bekker definitely suppressed a grin.
-
During the day cows would hang their heads over the hedgerow whenever anyone walked along the lane. Terence Pearl would wonder what they were after. Food, probably. That's the usual reason why an animal bonds with a human being. It wants a free meal: it wants nourishment. Pearl didn't have any pets. Not because he was too tight to feed them, but because of the commitment; emotional, temporal and physical. He didn't have children. His wife left him three years after they got married and he swore he wouldn't make that mistake again. So Pearl wandered the lanes around Westerfield alone, but call him lonely and you'd get a short answer.
His evening stroll always concluded along Church Lane coming back into the village. (He wondered what he'd do in summer when his agonising aversion to sunlight forced him to take his evening strolls later into the night: the sun only disappeared at half ten in July!) But on this particular evening he noticed a shadow on the corner of the roof of the Church House. Pearl slowed his walk to a curious stroll. The Church House was a small building with a pitched roof, but Pearl couldn't remember there ever being a chimney or large gargoyle up there. As he reached the gate he could see that the shadow was in fact Rob Wallet, sat on his haunches peering down at Pearl like a large cat watching a bird.
"Mr Wallet?" Pearl couldn't think of anything more appropriate.
"Off home, Terence?" said Wallet.
"Yes. How did you know?"
"Well, you live thataway," Wallet gestured towards the other side of the village where Pearl's house marked the start of open countryside, "and you're walking in that direction, so I figured, well, call it an intelligent guess."
"I suppose so."
"I thought you of all people would appreciate a bit of intelligence. In fact, have you noticed how intelligence loosely rhymes with Terence?"
"Mr Wallet," Pearl was conscious of other villagers seeing him talking to a figure on a roof, "are you drunk?"
Wallet looked over the edge of the roof. "No. I'm high!"
Pearl couldn't really argue with that. A car was heading towards him, headlights blinding. He stepped aside and as the light passed he wondered if Wallet would still be on the roof. Did the driver see him? Was he really there? Pearl turned back to the church and sure enough Wallet was still anchored to the roof, watching.
"You don't move very quickly, do you, Terence?"
"I don't know what you mean, Mr Wallet." Pearl stepped through the gate and stood on the church side of the hedge. He thought he might be less conspicuous if only the top half of his body could be seen talking to the Church House roof.
"We spoke to you a couple of weeks ago, but you still haven't told us who your mystery colleague is."
"I've been meaning to."
"What's wrong with you, Terence? You're an intelligent man, cleverer than me, and yet you side with someone who's no friend of yours. Haven't you grasped the benefits of working with me? All the things I can do for you? What's he giving you for all this?"
"A sense of right, a sense of righting a terrible wrong."
"Oh Terence. All your efforts, all the time you're devoting to this; how much do you think that time is worth? Don't you have any sense of self-worth? You're a teacher."
"Retired, actually."
"It still makes you a teacher whether you're retired or not. It's a calling, isn't it? A vocation? You can't just stop being a teacher. And besides, I thought teachers were all about spreading the truth. The inviolability of facts. The fundamental truths?"
"Yes, yes, I suppose so, but you can't use facts for evil purposes." Pearl suddenly looked up at Wallet with a fearful expression. He pushed himself against the hedge and felt for the crucifix hanging somewhere around his neck.
"I can show you the truth, Terence. I tried the other week, but it doesn't seem to have fired you up. Maybe I need to try harder to inspire you. What does it take, Terence? What can I offer you to make you see sense and come with me?"
"Please Mr Wallet, you're making me feel very scared."
"You don't have to be scared of me, Terence. I'm just trying to do the right thing for you. You love knowledge, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Come with us and we'll show you the world. We're a rock band. Not your kind of music, I know, but we travel the world. All those cultures, new people to meet, places to wonder at." Wallet hadn't moved an inch all the time he'd been talking. Crouching on his haunches, fingers together, sometimes talking directly to Pearl, other times to the darkness up the road towards the open fields. "Come on, Terence. You've written a lot of toe-curling bollocks about us. Don't you want to know the truth? Don't you owe it to yourself, a man of learning?"
"I would need time to think about it."
Wallet sighed. "Good job you don't play for Ipswich Town, Terence. You get the ball in the box and then need time to think about where you're gonna stick it." Wallet turned to the ridge of the roof behind him. "In fact, forget I just said that."
"I'm going home, Mr Wallet."
"Oh, didn't take long to make that decision, did it?"
Pearl made for the entrance of the church, but his mind was reeling, he couldn't remember where the door was so he went back to the lane and scurried off towards his house. He was well and truly wedged between two immovable surfaces. Earthly and, what was Rob Wallet? Unearthly at the best of times, but squatting like a medieval effigy on a roof with his crimson jacket and short black hair. Eyes ablaze like two tiny lamps. Oh to get home, to the safety of his dining room and a large cup of Greene and Blacks chocolate, which he admitted became less palatable by the day. His world was beginning to make no sense as the things he treasured moved out of reach: his garden was becoming untidy as he struggled with allergic reactions to the pollen and grass seed, pesticides and tomato fertilisers, each turning his skin to raw sandpaper. He woke up later, went to bed later, preferring the peace of the early hours with the chattering birds . . . which, come to think of it, was more of a cacophony these days. And now the dread of cataracts every time he looked at his hazy reflection, reminding him that the loss of his sight would end his passion for books. There was so much he wanted to do, so little time to do it, a raging desire to knock down the wall separating his kitchen from the dining room. Maybe Wallet was right, maybe he did have a better offer.
-
Back on the roof of the Church House Rob Wallet noticed Dee reading a small book. "It's 14th Century this church," she said pointing up at the tower. "Apparently, St Mary Magdalene is a rare name for a church. There's only three others in Suffolk."
"Really. Are these roof tiles not digging into your arse?"
Dee closed the book. "You just couldn't resist a sporting analogy, could you?"
"I tried to stop myself."
"You're fucking impossible. And you were doing so well. You were starting to scare the crap out of me for a minute."
"You've read Paradise Lost, haven't you?"
"Yeah." Dee leaned on her elbow and asked Wallet to quote something from it.
"Since first this subject for heroic song pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late;
"Not sedulous by nature to indite warrs,
"hitheto the onle argument heroic deem'd, chi
ef maistrie to dissect with long and tedious havoc fabled knights in battels feign'd;
"The better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom unsung. . . ."
Dee closed her eyes and speaking quietly joined in with Wallet's soothing recital.
"Or to describe races and games, or tilting furniture, emblazon'd shields,
"Impreses quaint, caparisons and steeds. . . ."
And on it went until they both realised they were quoting at each other, eyes blissfully closed, accompanied only by the sounds of a countryside evening and the poetry of their own voices. They ran out of words and Wallet asked Dee a question: "Why were you all sleeping in a tomb when Lenny Harper staked you?"
Dee smirked and took the little local history book out of her jacket pocket. She flicked the pages. "It was all a lie, Rob," she said. "Ask Barry Bush."
"Barry Bush? PC Barry Bush?"
"Yeah, with his daft mate who played for Queens Park Rangers. Someone sent the police up to Highgate on a wild goose chase while Lenny Harper was breaking into a flat we were living in somewhere near Swiss Cottage. And then after all the publicity and everything he started perpetuating this tale that we were all in Highgate Cemetery. He's stuck with it all these years, dined out on it for as long as he's been able to keep a straight face."
"The bastard!"
"Hooked you as well. The great investigative journalist, Rob Wallet." She leaned on her elbow again, but this time her expression was full of mischievous life. "And good luck to him. Didn't do us any harm." Wallet was dumbstruck.
"And who else knew?"
"How many coppers are in the Metropolitan Police? That's why Lenny Harper got done for wasting police time. We weren't up there, we were somewhere else getting our breath back and making plans to get out of London. Get out of the UK."
"So, Lenny did get to you, but in a house, not Highgate?"
Dee nodded. Her thoughts were placing her back at the scene and there was a moment's silence before she scanned the pages of the book. "Could have ended everything that night."
-
The following day Wallet found Barry Bush's phone number and had a brief, terse phone conversation. "You knew all along they weren't staked at Highgate Cemetery?"
"Course they weren't," said Bush, his voice fading in and out of a poor phone signal.
"You spun me a right load of old cobblers. I wrote all that down."
"No, you recorded it on your mobile phone."
"Same thing."
"Look," said Bush, "every time people have spoken or written about Toten Herzen and Lenny Harper they always come to me, they go away with the same old tale and they never, never check the facts. They never follow up on it and you're no different. You believed all that vampire bollocks just like the rest of them."
All that vampire bollocks! Wallet's scorn broke apart, shattered, fragmented and he found himself with a wry grin, a half smile and a sneaky regard for old Barry Bush. A bored copper sent on an excursion up to Highgate Cemetery, why shouldn't he make hay out of it? Stuck in front of the telly all day, what else did he have going for him? Gotcha!
"Barry," said Wallet, "no hard feelings, mate. Makes a good story, I suppose."
"Yeah."
"I suppose Stan Bowles took the secret to the grave with him?"
"Laughing all the way, he was. Laughing all the way."