Sympathy for the Devil

by Howard Marks

  ‘It looks like the place has been washed down,’ Huw said.

  Huw moved over to the stack of DVD-R players beside the desk.

  ‘All the players have been disconnected,’ he said. ‘They’ve upgraded from DVD to DVR. That means there are no discs, no coaxial cables, everything’s stored digitally on a hard disc that could be miles away, secured behind passwords.’

  ‘But those cameras in the empty ward aren’t motion-sensitive.’ Catrin had got up from the desk, moved out of the sightline of the doorway. ‘They’re continuous. So anyone watching from here might have seen what’s been going on there.’

  Outside the door they heard heavy, stumbling movements. She pointed urgently to a pile of cardboard boxes behind the door. As one, they rose and hid behind them. The orderly was entering much the way he had left, his arms feeling ahead of him in the dark, his movements slow, unsteady.

  But he wasn’t completely gone. He’d noticed that the link to the old panelled room had been replaced by images of the empty cell. He lurched over towards a glass case on the wall.

  As the man reached the panic button, Huw came at him from behind, a length of cable pulled tight between his fists. He wrestled the man down onto the floor, the wire cutting across his windpipe. The man couldn’t move, he couldn’t cry out.

  He groped blindly for the button. But Catrin pushed him back, her boot slamming hard in the centre of his chest.

  ‘It must get lonely up here all on your own,’ she said.

  The orderly was gasping for breath as Huw tightened the wire round his throat. Catrin kept the weight of her heel on his chest.

  ‘So you’ve been a bad boy, jerking off over Jones in action. Bet you’ve been enjoying that.’

  She used the tip of her boot now to raise his head, so that he faced the screen image of the bed. At first the man didn’t seem to want to understand. He had opened his eyes wide, was pulling his head away from the screen, as if there was something there they couldn’t see.

  ‘What has Jones been doing in there?’

  The man let out a high, screeching sound. Huw pulled the cord, silencing him, then gradually released it to give him air. His head was shaking from side to side, then abruptly he grew stiller, his eyes blinking rapidly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. His voice was strangely high, reedy, like air blown through a broken pipe. ‘The camera gets turned off sometimes, then afterwards the room has been cleaned up.’

  The man started to lose consciousness. He sank back into Huw’s lap. Catrin kept on scrolling through the different cameras. There were only more images of empty corridors and the black hillsides.

  ‘Where is Jones?’ she asked softly.

  The man’s head lolled to one side; he was breathing weakly through his mouth, unevenly. ‘No one knows that,’ he whispered.

  ‘Don’t worry, we believe you,’ she said. ‘But where did you last see Jones heading on the other monitors? The man isn’t invisible, he must have appeared somewhere.’ She put her lips close to his ear.

  His lips were moving but it took a moment for the words to form.

  ‘Up the top.’

  He was out now, his pupils staring blindly up at the ceiling. She slapped his face, but he wasn’t coming round. She let him slump back into Huw’s arms. They could hear noises down in the stairwell. Huw pulled the man under the pile of boxes behind the door, nudging them forward with his feet until they covered his body.

  Catrin felt Huw drawing her close to him, so the weight of his body was shielding her as he moved towards the door.

  9

  The footfalls behind them died away as they ran outside. What light there was came from the sickle moon, hanging like a gash in the blackness. Each time Catrin lost her footing, Huw pulled her upright again, keeping her moving into the woods.

  Somewhere up ahead lay the escarpment. It was barely visible in the dark, but she could just make out its outline jutting out from behind the trees. There were glimpses of a clearing between clusters of hazel and holm oaks. Steps had been cut into the earth and covered with rough planks of wood. Catrin looked back now, noticing a sunken area at the edge of the clearing, above which the land rose steeply. Lights had fanned out behind them from where the clinic lay hidden in the mist, but were not moving forward.

  ‘Why aren’t they coming after us?’ she whispered.

  Slowly Huw moved into the open space ahead. No pathways led to the place, yet it seemed to have been preserved from the encroaches of the surrounding woodland. She could see a series of objects lying among weeds that had grown up through the shale. Most appeared to be small buckets, the sort that children might play with in a sandpit, though there was no sand anywhere in sight. Others were in simple symmetrical shapes, stylised crosses and waves and stars, their bright colours dulled by the mud.

  But Huw was no longer looking towards the play area and had raised a hand up to her mouth. Following his line of sight along the ridge, Catrin saw a figure partly hidden by the trees. He was no more than thirty yards away, head bowed in a play of torchlight. He was holding small binoculars, the type bird-watchers use. But there were no birds visible in the dark sky, nor could any calls be heard; only the wind and the insistent patter of the rain.

  She edged through the trees towards the figure. The man was not moving away, just standing still, silently beckoning to them. As Catrin got closer she saw he was wearing green farmer’s weatherproofs, and around his neck a string of furs and small bones. She recognised him as old Tudor, and was sure now that he had been the one who was watching them earlier from the rocks outside the inn.

  Huw rushed past her and pinned the man down. ‘You’re one of Jones’s people –’ his words seemed spat out with anger – ‘you’re a lookout, aren’t you?’ In the faint glow of the moon Catrin saw dried mud on the man’s forehead and his grey, uneven teeth. He looked frightened but said nothing.

  She eased Huw away and touched the man’s arm softly. ‘We heard about your daughter,’ she said and lowered herself slowly. ‘I’m sorry. She looks a lovely girl in those photos.’

  She thought she saw tears welling up in his rheumy eyes. ‘She wasn’t my daughter,’ he said softly, ‘but I brought her up as my own. Her mother was a traveller, a wild child. I looked after her girl when she was off doing whatever she did, until one day the girl just disappears.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘Caris. She took my surname. Mower.’ He was glancing into the trees.

  Catrin followed his stare, but saw nothing. Around them there were no sounds other than the drumming of the rain and the muted hum of the wind. The old man was gazing out into the darkness as if he had already forgotten they were there.

  Gradually a realisation struck her, one that had sat half formed at the edge of her mind ever since they had visited the shop in the woods. ‘Your daughter – you came back here to look for her, didn’t you?’ Old Tudor leant back on his heels so as not to disturb the branches in front of them. He said nothing but he nodded fractionally. She thought of the girl the doctor had mentioned seeing from a distance with Jones, of the girl they’d just seen with Jones on the screen. The old man seemed to smile at her, the moonlight filtering behind him through the branches.

  She moved closer. ‘Caris, she’s the one the orderlies spotted with Jones, isn’t she?’

  There was fear in his eyes. He squatted low on the ground, motioning for Catrin to do the same. His gaze was on the clearing now, the coloured shapes floating in the black pools of rainwater, the steps no more than a dim smudge against the trees.

  ‘This place,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘It took me a while to find out,’ he said.

  Some of the star-shaped and other objects had begun to roll in the wind, back and forwards on the sodden ground. Huw glanced nervously towards the ridge above them.

  ‘Spit it out,’ he said, ‘we don’t have much time.’

  The man stared intently into the mist. ‘It’s Jones,’ he said
quietly, ‘sometimes I’ve seen him here, and sometimes children playing.’ Catrin kept her eyes on the man. ‘The children are always silent. They play with a straw doll or old-fashioned toys. One wears some kind of costume, with feathers on the arms.’

  Old Tudor had spoken in a measured, calmly emphatic tone. Catrin felt Huw touching her sleeve. He was looking down to the edge of the clearing, scanning from side to side. ‘But that’s what you said you’d seen them doing all those decades ago,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’ She watched for hesitation, any tell that he was lying, but she couldn’t see one.

  ‘So how do you explain it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I took some photos, but they came out badly. I sent them round to universities, asked them if they recognised anything.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. But then a few months later a graduate from Aber calls me, says he’s found a picture that looks like mine. It was from some academic psychological journal from the early Seventies.’

  Huw glanced at Catrin, then looked closely at the old man. ‘But how could that be?’

  Tudor was smiling slightly. ‘It wasn’t exactly the same, just the same place, the same costume. It was all odd stuff. It was a study into some cult from way back.’

  Huw had half risen to get a better look around. He crouched down again uneasily.

  ‘Okay,’ Catrin said, ‘I get it. So this cult they studied, the one into all this weirdness, it was the one here in the Seventies. Jones’s group?’

  The old man turned, his eyes hidden from them both, as he watched the trees. ‘They may have had older roots.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He stared out between the branches. ‘The author of the article claimed their leader to have been a member of an occult order founded a couple of hundred years back.’

  Catrin thought through what this could mean. Most organised occult groups had died out long before the war, but perhaps this one had carried on in isolation, avoiding publicity up until the point the academics studied them. If Jones had been the group’s leader, and the group had other influential members, in politics maybe or the criminal justice system, this could explain why Jones had been protected all the years until his arrest and then released. But where did Face fit in? And Rhys? Something was warning her not to write off other explanations yet.

  ‘That article give the cult leader’s name? Jones, Serafim, Molloch or any of Jones’s aliases?’

  ‘Penrhyn.’

  She turned to Huw. ‘That’s the name of a man who along with his eldest son was accused of witchcraft out here in the nineteenth century. Another alias, maybe.’ She tried to catch the old man’s eye. ‘Any other details about him?’

  She caught the stale scent of the old man’s breath as he moved closer. ‘Not much. All it said was that he came from an old family from this area. One of his ancestors had been a radical figure in the occult revival of the nineteenth century. His group was expelled from the main occult movement.’

  The darkness of the place was like a fist closing around her. ‘And the reasons for this?’

  ‘It didn’t say. It seems this group viewed Crowley and the other Satanists as mere showmen. Its members focused on going back to the roots of witchcraft in the old Celtic religion and in shamanism. After they were expelled from the occult movement, they went further underground.’

  ‘So what happened when the academics came here?’ Huw asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  ‘It’s not very clear, the study was never completed.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Some of the academics were threatened. Dead animals were left at their homes along with photos of their children. They backed off.’

  Catrin followed the old man’s eyes out to the clearing. Nothing was moving there, the shapes lying still in the tall grass. The moon had gone in between the low clouds, the ridge above barely visible now. Lights were threading through the trees towards them. Moments later they had disappeared, and everything was dark again.

  She felt her stomach clench, her legs tensing, the sweat cold on her shoulders. Her hand reached out, scraping over a trunk’s rough surface as she steadied herself. We are close now, she thought, and I need to stay clear, strong.

  It seemed as if the lights in the trees were moving towards them, but then they turned and started to gain altitude. Whoever was carrying the lights was ascending the slope, heading for the escarpment. Huw stared intently after them, trying to make out the path they were taking.

  Catrin put her hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘That track up there where we can see the lights, it leads to the top of the ridge?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s nothing up there, just the woods.’

  Huw seemed in no hurry to get up. He was crouching against the bank. The leaves around them were quivering, but the wind had dropped. As Catrin rose, she felt Huw’s hand on her arm. She pulled her arm away, stood up. For the moment, she felt no fear.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we can’t just go up there blindly. There’s no mobile coverage, no chance to call for help. Much better we try to get back, contact the police.’

  She could see the anxiety on his face. He touched her arm again, more gently this time, but again she pushed him away.

  ‘In case you’ve forgotten, I am the police.’ She was angry now. ‘I’ll go alone. Do you know where the path up the hill starts?’

  ‘I do.’ The old man spoke quietly.

  ‘If you can point me in the right direction I’d be grateful.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Tudor got up, stiffly shaking his long legs.

  Huw was standing back from them. Behind him, Catrin heard a rustling, close in the branches. Something was moving towards them through the trees from where the lights had been.

  She heard the branches cracking, a sweeping sound low along the ground. Huw had heard it too and turned back to look.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘This way.’ She reached out and tried to pull Huw back, but he lifted the branches and then she couldn’t see him any more. The air was filled with a sudden screeching, and a rushing as a dark shape swept past. She ran straight into the branches where Huw had disappeared, the wet leaves brushing over her eyes. In the blackness she sensed the movements of feathers all around her and at the edge of her vision lights were flickering. She shouted out Huw’s name but there was no answer.

  Something was pulling her back. She turned and saw Tudor’s face behind her. ‘This way, quickly,’ he said. ‘It’s too late for him now.’

  The old man pulled her after him into the deeper brush. They made their way on hands and knees through cover so thick that there was no knowing what lay above or beneath. She was surprised by the muscles bunching up beneath her grasp on Tudor’s arm and the ease with which he moved. His strength seemed that of a much younger man, as he led her upwards.

  Through the trees a single path ahead led up the steep face of the escarpment. This was where the lights had been moving. A crude gangway had been built from black-painted planks, clinging to the edge of rocks higher up. Over the planks a length of rope hung, frayed and loose, shuddering in the wind.

  The sounds were heading this way, not back towards the clinic. Whoever had closed in around Huw, they were somewhere ahead. There was still a chance he was alive. He was strong, resilient, she had not heard him cry out. She sensed his presence up ahead, silently calling to her.

  The blurry form of a mound was occasionally visible through the mist. The trees were dark walls on either side, many dead, their branches black and rotting. They climbed into a hollow, a dark, hunched thing that merged with the dimness. In the moon’s weak light, a muddy path led on, bordered with what might have once been hedgerows but were now overgrown and shapeless.

  The old man had begun to move on into the trees, but Catrin stopped him. Ahead was a steep leaf-covered slope, patches of frost glistening on the surface of the grass, and beyond it lay a blackness that could have been rock or the mouth of a cave. T
he place looked familiar. Catrin thought of the old print of the witch at the mouth of the cave. She thought of the scene in the first film of the approach to the tunnel, the person behind the camera half stepping, half gliding down towards the blackness of the tunnel’s entrance.

  Beyond the fallen rocks and tall grasses she saw a heavy stone lintel over a rusted hatch. The rocks were covered with thick moss and weeds and overgrown. The place looked long-abandoned.

  As she moved up to the hatch, she thought she could make out the scent of Huw’s expensive cologne. She pushed on the metal, but it didn’t move. She stood back. Deeper under the lintel she could make out a sill, covered with cobwebs, over it an ancient length of chain-link wire. It looked like it had once been an opening of some sort.

  Climbing onto the ledge under the door, she peered down but could see nothing within. Her fall was broken by something soft and smelling of mildew. As her eyes adjusted she saw the floor was covered with feed sacks that had once contained straw. In the corner was a rack of old, rusted farm implements, hoes and scythes. As Tudor landed beside her dust rose into the air. In the beam of his torch she saw a low passage ahead, broken plaster and brickwork.

  She pulled a scythe from the wall, held it ahead of her in the darkness. Calling out for Huw would only reveal their position. Better, she thought, to get a sense of the place first, to find out where the others were and create a diversion. The torch lit up the walls of the passage. On the ground below were shallow puddles of rainwater, some black feathers floating on their surface.

  Tudor was beside her now, and they had reached a rotten wooden door. Behind it were no sounds or lights. The space seemed shallow like a cupboard. Catrin could hear hangers along an empty rail, as he felt his way inside. He brought out a long, pointed object and set it down slowly on the floor. He moved the beam along its length, revealing a black mask that would cover all the face. From the back, strands of raffia sprouted in a stylised imitation of feathers, while the front formed a long beak.