The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  The next day I posted it, and as I came back to the shop I saw a man in a white raincoat standing on the far side of the road, staring up at the building and then making notes in his little book. When he saw me unlocking the door, he came over and introduced himself.

  ‘Mr Harrison,’ he said, ‘from Hamgate. You wrote to us.’

  ‘Did I?’ I said, opening the door and stepping inside.

  ‘We are the head lessors.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘Any chance of a look around?’

  ‘Feel free,’ I said. ‘I’ve just forked out for the roof, but I’ve kept the receipts, well some of them anyway, so if you’ve brought your chequebook with you, maybe we could settle up.’ So off Mr Harrison went on his inspection. When he came back down half an hour later, he was putting his notebook into his pocket.

  ‘It’s worse than I thought,’ he said.

  ‘What do you intend to do about it?’

  Mr Harrison sat down on the chair by the side of Fordie’s table and placed his folded white raincoat across his knees. He was a short man with attractive regular features and a healthy mop of black hair. There probably wasn’t much real difference between us in age, but with his hair so unimpeachably black and mine now so irreversibly white, we looked as though we came from different generations.

  ‘Have you actually read your lease, Mr Bayliss?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I have a low boredom threshold.’

  ‘Well then, let me explain something. It is what is known as a full-repairing lease. And its ten-year period is about to expire in six months.’

  ‘Fordie said they were always renewed,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed, they always have been. But we did warn Mr Tewk last time around that the state of repair had become a major cause for concern. Of course, he did nothing about it, we didn’t really expect him to. We suspected he’d become something of an institution around these parts, to be honest, so we decided to do nothing about it ourselves, until…’ He stopped.

  ‘Until he died?’

  ‘Let’s say until there was a substantial change in the situation.’

  ‘And now there’s been one.’

  ‘What I think I’d better do, Mr Bayliss, is to have a schedule of necessary works properly prepared and sent to you.’

  ‘And what do I do with it?’

  ‘You effect it, sir, by the time of the expiry of the lease.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘First, your lease will not be renewed. Second, you’ll be held liable for all the works deemed to be necessary. I should warn you that a rent-review is imminent, in any case. Given this property’s worth now, if realistically valued…’ I had already walked into the back room and I was opening a bottle of Chablis. At least we still had plenty of that left.

  ‘I’d offer you a glass, Mr Harrison,’ I said, ‘but I have the feeling that I can’t afford it any more. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘I don’t actually drink,’ he said, ‘and I have to leave now, in any case. We’ll be in touch shortly.’

  * * *

  That night in a dream I pulled hard at Harry’s hearing aid and more and more of something came out, some long intestine of white flesh that kept winding out of his ear the more I pulled. Ectoplasm. I woke then, and remembered the last words Fordie had spoken to me, the last item in his confession. ‘And I cheated you,’ he had said. I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but now it was impossible not to. But even if Fordie’s gold had turned out to have all disappeared except for the Chilford papers, the stock of books must have considerable value, surely. And with that thought to comfort me I managed finally to sink back into a fitful sleep.

  The sound of the motors outside whirring and thrumming up and down the road from the bridge abraded memories, eroded certainties, like a circle of fifths making a ghost of tonality.

  Idle Fellowes

  How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe.

  JOHN AUBREY, Brief Lives

  The next day, I took the folder out of the safe once more. Fordie had done what work he could on Prince Zabrenus and the Children of Bethany, but the truth was that this obscure sect had simply become more obscure as the years had passed. No one knew much about them. They were part of that antinomian tradition that threads its way through the religious history of these islands. Zabrenus preached an exhilarating freedom from the slavery of both sin and guilt. He preached the redemption of the spirit and stated emphatically that those on whom the spirit had alighted could no longer sin. Their bodies might sin, in their aboriginal attachment to darkness, but such sins could never beslime the anointed soul. If this was bad theology, it appears at least to have been good therapy, where Pelham was concerned at least. Some of his more eirenic letters were dated to this period, including this one, in which he was very nearly friendly to the lord whom he otherwise appeared to consider his tormentor:

  My prayers can no more summon the presence or assistance of the Almighty than a hobby-horse can fetch in a fecund season or start to sprout the tiny hairs that grow between a virgin’s legs. If my liturgy inclined all one way, my vices leaned always to the other side entirely. I wonder all the same if one might anticipate in Paradise the disreputable noise of gaiety? Perhaps you and I might still expect to be merry there together one day. Or at least to share the ancient haunting ground of English mercies.

  Fordie had written in his notes: Richard Pelham: both mystic and occultist. He believed all darkness had light shrouded within it. Who can say whether or not he was right? Lightning from a black sky. What did Serena see when they put the charge through her?

  But Pelham’s alcoholism and drug addiction could by this stage have been terminated only by incarceration or death. And the single-line letter he sent Chilford towards the end showed the true terror of his condition:

  Self-slaughter in wanhope, without housel or shrift.

  I’d had enough for a while. I would have taken a walk, but the weather had turned bad. It was raining in Richmond. A dreary infinity of rain. A relentless drench from the heavens that hammered down in wet insistence upon Fordie’s lean-to roof. The autumn was pressing on into winter.

  Maybe I lacked Fordie’s strength of character, but I couldn’t leave whoever it was standing outside and tapping on the door. Not in that rain.

  The man shook his umbrella fiercely as he stepped forward, and then smiled a broad, red-faced smile. He looked like a farmer come up to town for the weekend.

  ‘I came to offer my condolences,’ he said.

  ‘That’s kind,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Fordie’s vicar,’ he said. ‘And you must be the new proprietor.’

  ‘Here, take your coat off. Can I offer you a drink?’ I gave him a glass of wine and he sipped it and laughed.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be impolite. It’s just that it’s nice to know some traditions are maintained. It is Chablis, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Always what I was given on my infrequent visits.’

  ‘How often did you come?’

  ‘Maybe once a year. Fordie would occasionally come to me.’ He paused then for a moment. ‘Correction: Fordie came once to me. And I’m afraid I wasn’t a lot of use to him. Though his quest at the time did strike me as a trifle cryptic.’ I liked this vicar. He was one of those men who set you entirely at your ease merely by their presence. He’d probably found the right job, I thought.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask what it was, this cryptic quest? Or would that come under the rubric of secrets of the confessional?’

  ‘You must be a Roman Catholic,’ he said, and I realised that his glass was already empty. I brought the bottle over and filled it. ‘We don’t share many secrets of the confessional in our church. No, I don’t believe there was any confidentiality in our discussion. Fordie was after information about…’ He stopped.

  ‘About what?’

  �
�About a demon,’ he said finally. ‘Can’t remember its name.’

  ‘Agarith,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ he said, mildly startled. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I’ve picked up his studies where he left off. Let me fill your glass again.’

  ‘Sorry. Drinking all your nice wine.’

  ‘There’s plenty, believe me.’

  ‘I’ve been stomping about out there for hours, but I’m afraid that most of the addresses I visit aren’t as hospitable as Tewk’s Bookshop. First glass I’ve been offered all day.

  ‘I wasn’t much use, I’m afraid. In fact, the truth is I was no use at all. A shame really. The only time Stamford Tewk ever went to consult his vicar, and I had to shrug my shoulders and say I didn’t have a clue. It’s simply not a realm with which we concern ourselves. Not these days, anyway.

  ‘I heard about the ceremony, by the way. I would have been happy to help of course, but…’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, realising the extent of the slight, ‘my fault entirely. It honestly didn’t occur to me. Fordie’d made no mention. I’m sure he’d have wanted you there, probably wanted you to conduct it. Sorry.’

  ‘Not to worry. But we thought, perhaps, a memorial service. Not immediately. But he was a local figure of some importance, however eccentric.’

  ‘Very good of you,’ I said. ‘Anything I can do, just let me know.’ He had finished his drink now and stood up to go.

  ‘So you’re the new proprietor. Planning any changes?’

  ‘Not planning anything at all until I’ve sorted out this Agarith business.’ His smile vanished momentarily as he looked at me.

  ‘No good asking me, I’m afraid. Just don’t regard it as my job.’

  ‘No,’ I said as we reached the door. ‘Maybe it isn’t.’

  ‘Are you actually planning to, I mean, unlike Fordie…’

  ‘Sell any books?’ I said, and he started laughing.

  ‘Well, he never did seem very keen, did he? It always struck me as a bit of a shame really. By the way, I’d just like to say one thing, which I hope is not presumptuous. But Fordie did come to see me once more towards the end, to ask me if I would do something for him. Something I was more than happy to do. But perhaps you know all about this?’ I shook my head. ‘It was in regard to his daughter.’

  ‘Fordie has a daughter?’

  ‘Ah. You don’t know about it. Well, a stepdaughter, in point of fact. His wife Serena’s child. And now suffering her mother’s illness, more’s the shame. It’s just I know what Fordie was like, not a great communicator in such matters, and I just thought you might want to know how much it meant to him, you investing in the bookshop in the way you did, so that he had the money to make sure she could be properly looked after. She’s over fifty now, of course. Knowing she’d be properly cared for till the end was important to him. More important than I could tell you.’ So now at least I knew where that money had gone. It should have made me feel better, I suppose, but I’m not sure it did.

  ‘What was the favour he asked you?’

  ‘Oh, just to visit her, that’s all, once every couple of weeks, as he used to. It’s not my parish, of course, and Fordie was not as I ever understood it a believer, but these things are given one sometimes, and perhaps it doesn’t do too much to question them.’

  ‘Will you come back?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Will you come back and have another drink sometime?’

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ he said, looking slightly astonished, and then he set out into the rain again.

  * * *

  Something had confused me entirely in working my way through Fordie’s notes. From time to time he would make a reference, only by initials, and then with a page number appended. For example: BLJ, p.623, or ITPC, p.147, or MD, p.223. They corresponded to no works I had seen referred to, and I simply couldn’t imagine what they were or what purpose they served. I was sitting at Fordie’s desk looking behind me distractedly at the two shelves of books he had assembled. I had assumed they were merely a miscellany, since they appeared to have no connecting thread that I’d ever noticed. Then I took out Boswell’s Life of Johnson and saw the marked pages, and I thought: BLJ. I turned to the markers and found pencil lines and comments in the margins. Then I got down on my knees and started carefully scanning the titles. Could MD be Moby Dick? Again I pulled out the volume, and once more inside there were markers and pencilled marginalia. It took a while to locate ITPC, but I found it finally inside the single volume of Kafka: In the Penal Colony. I felt a strange sense of exhilaration. Then there was a knocking on the door. I had locked it. I could see far enough behind the closed sign to recognise Mr Harrison and a companion. I went and opened the door but I didn’t invite either of them in.

  ‘Hello, Mr Bayliss,’ Harrison said, smiling his meaningless diplomatic smile, ‘I’ve brought a colleague with me who’s a little more expert than I in these matters. Could we come in for half an hour, and do another little survey of the works required?’ He was already stepping forward. He hadn’t been asking a question, he’d been making an announcement.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t come in. I’m busy. Go away.’ He looked nonplussed.

  ‘We are entitled to get a court order, you know.’

  ‘Then go and get one,’ I said, ‘and don’t come back till you have it in your grubby little paw. Whatever the state of it, I’ve still got six months in this place, according to you.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘So bugger off,’ I said, ‘and take your little friend with you.’ As I banged the door shut, and heard the bell’s startled merriment, I sensed that the spirit of Stamford Tewk had never left his bookshop after all; it had simply taken a while for me to absorb it fully.

  ‘I’m still fighting them off, Fordie,’ I shouted into the depths of the bookshop. ‘They haven’t evicted us yet, even though you did set me up for it.’

  * * *

  So I started elaborating that little concordance of Fordie’s. I didn’t understand what he was up to at first. Then it began slowly to shift into focus. When Ishmael first meets Queequeg, the writing on the harpoonist’s body, his tattoos, is like the mark of Cain, something that sets him apart to be shunned. But as Ishmael learns to read that writing on his body, horror turns into acceptance and finally love. In Kafka’s story the dreadful punishment in the penal settlement is to have a machine write on your body the commandment you have ignored. This is script as capital punishment. Fordie was trying to understand the ways in which writing on the body had been understood. He had written at the end of this section: All these questions resolve more and more into one question, one question it was surely impossible for Chilford, given his beliefs, to ask: Grappin.

  Back I went to the little bookshelf, and found the book he was referring to. It was a study of St John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars. And I began to wonder if I should have ever become involved in this business, because now it seemed I was going to have to read the life of a Catholic priest, and not just any Catholic priest either. Resentment. A real resentment was beginning. This time I went out and had a French meal on the bookshop account. And how much longer would I be able to get away with that?

  For someone who had once never remembered his dreams, who had stepped into wakefulness the way he stepped into his well-pressed clothes, I was certainly turning into a serious dreamer now, and the dreams were all bad. I would roll over to take Alice in my arms and find Queequeg instead. I would wake to the chattering needles of the penal colony’s machine, as they bit into my flesh. I always woke a moment too early to read whatever the commandment was that I had failed to obey. It wasn’t much after dawn the next day that I rose and went downstairs. I thought I’d better get this Curé d’Ars business out of the way. I poured myself some coffee, picked up the copy of Grappin, subtitled The Disciple Against Reason and started. I knew well enough who Vianney was. I had even attended his feast-day mass in Rome and been
exhorted from the pulpit to emulate the humble parish priest as far as possible in my own sacerdotal life. The problem was not who Vianney was, but what he was. He was either what his status in the Church proclaimed, a man of almost infinite obedience and humility who had stared down infernal powers for decades, or a credulous rural priest who, in reaction to enlightenment and revolution, had once more conjured all the Gothic palaver of medieval diabolism, so as to keep his flock well within the Church’s grasp, to frighten the good citizens back into craven belief. And the interesting thing, it struck me now, was that I’d never been able to answer that question, even while I was in Rome. Hence my resentment now at being forced to confront the question once more.

  As for the title of this book, Grappin, that was what everything hinged around. This word was the name the Curé had given to the Devil, the Devil who visited him, screamed abuse at him, called him a dirty little potato-eater, threw excrement at his holy pictures, and on many occasions even tried to kill him. The problem, simply put, was this: either the Curé was mad, or the Devil did indeed exist and had arrived in Ars each night to torment his humble little enemy. The surrounding testimony, of which a considerable amount still survives, corroborated Vianney’s story. Even the severest scepticism had been overcome finally by the severity of the phenomena with which it had been confronted. If the Curé had been mad, then it seemed that he had made the better part of a French village mad with him.

  I suppose it had been a curious time in the Church, when I was studying to enter the priesthood. There had been a strong sense that a great deal of outdated paraphernalia now needed to be dispensed with. At the time of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII had announced that he was opening the windows. It was time to let some fresh air in, and for the dark shapes of superstitious dread to fly away for ever. At some point between my childhood and my young manhood, the words in the creed that said of Christ after his crucifixion He descended into hell had disappeared, and they had never returned. The implication appeared to be that Christ had not made any such journey after all, in those hidden times between crucifixion and resurrection, and if he had never made that journey, could it perhaps be because there was no such journey to be made and no such place to disappear into? And if the dark kingdom had been quietly declared null and void, then perhaps its famous lord and master had also been dispensed with once and for all. There had been one or two ancient Jesuits about in Rome during my stay, who were whisperingly reputed to have conducted exorcisms many years before. But nobody ever spoke of anyone conducting such ceremonies any more. Except for half-smiling accounts of sinister goings on in Africa, or voodoo mumbo-jumbo in Haiti. Hell and its fallen angels had simply ceased to be a fit subject of concern for a modern Roman Catholic.