by Phil Rickman
‘Rector spoke German?’
‘He did by the time the war ended.’
‘You wouldn’t think mixing with the enemy would go down all that well with his fellow prisoners.’
‘Oh, I think it would, lass. Nights drinking schnapps in the German officers’ quarters would give him a lot of useful details to pass on to the escape committee. Anyroad, end of the war, Rector emerges with a goldmine of incredible history and a stack of useful contacts. Moves back to Cambridge where it takes him twenty years, on and off, to turn it into a book. Widely acclaimed as a seminal work on magic and the Master Race. Wasn’t written in a sensational way and it wasn’t full of strident condemnation. Which was what caused some confusion later.’
‘So you’ve read it?’
‘Years ago. Gives you a vivid understanding of how occult theories came to justify the mass extermination of Jews – small hairy men, inferior species polluting the gene pool, all this. You can even understand why they saw Hitler as an avatar, a god incarnate with a mission to guide mankind into the next phase of the golden age or some such crap.’
‘You sound… surprisingly impressed.’
‘It’s compelling. He intended it to be. It’s shown from the Nazi perspective, rather than just… look at these bloody crackpots. And he does it that way because that’s how he received the knowledge. While it was happening. While it was convincing men like Scheffler. While it was white hot.’
‘So what were Rector’s actual views? Did he have Nazi sympathies?’
‘He said not, after the war, when he got accused of it. What he said to the Germans is another matter. It got him through it, anyroad. And it made him a lot of money when it was over. Goes back to university, studying theology and ancient history. Lectures for a while, joins a number of occult fraternities. Meets Crowley in his heroin days, Israel Regardie, Kenny Grant, Austin Spare.’
‘There’s one of Spare’s… erotic cartoons on the wall at Cusop.’
‘Good mate of Rector’s, by all accounts. Maverick, even amongst his occult peers. Died in the sixties.’
‘So why are Spare and the others remembered more than Rector?’
‘Hard to say. Unless, after being suspected of Nazi sympathies, he deliberately courted obscurity. Seems to have given a few lectures to boost sales of Negative Sun and then moved on. Never wrote about Nazism again, despite offers from publishers. Went to ground. Here.’
Seemed Rector’s parents had a farmhouse with some land between Capel-y-ffin and Hay Bluff. A second home; they’d loved it there because it was all so different from the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and the Fens. Summers at the cottage, all the long holidays. So, while Peter wasn’t born there, he and his siblings had done a lot of their growing up in the Black Mountains.
‘Where there’s a tradition of odd events that he must’ve shared with Scheffler on those long night over the schnapps,’ Huw said. ‘You’ll’ve heard of Father Ignatius.’
‘Established an Anglican monastery up there? Around the turn of the twentieth century?’
‘Rector’s old man’d written a paper on him. Father Ignatius being the name adopted by an ordained C. of E. minister called Joseph Leycester Lyne, fanatical Anglo-Catholic. The monastery’s up there to this day, spooky owd place. Better known now, mind, as the home of the artist Eric Gill, who set up his own community in the nineteen twenties. Great sculptor, mad Catholic, colourful sex life involving his daughters. Summat in the air up there.’
‘So we’re actually talking not far from Cusop.’
‘As the crow flies, about six miles. He inherited his parents’ house up in the mountains. This was the nineteen seventies, his escape from the taint of Nazism. He’d written two more books on magic by then, nowt to do wi’ Nazis, but none of ’em sold like A Negative Sun. Sod’s law.’
‘So people did think he was actually a closet Nazi?’
‘It were all a bit of a mess.’ She heard the groaning of old leather as Huw stretched in his chair. ‘It came out he’d sent a chunk of his royalties from the book to Scheffler’s widow. Doing the right thing, as he saw it, and you can understand that. But you still had a lot of anti-German feeling in Britain, even in the seventies, and, aye, he were perceived by some as still being too close to it. I see him as just a very learned, erudite bloke who were a bit naive. And, like I say, he’d moved on.’
‘So he was – I mean the kids at Cusop had it right – he was a magician. Or just someone with an academic interest in it?’
‘Oh, bloody hell, more than an academic interest. Lot of popular demand, them days, for mystical experience, wi’ the drugs and the psychedelic music. He found a way to continue his studies and his… experiments… and make a good living from it. He rebuilds his life, up in the Black Mountains, in his fifties. Sets to work on the owd farmhouse, opens up outbuildings for self-catering accommodation. Converts the biggest barn into what today you’d call a conference suite. Lectures, workshops. People were taught meditation exercises, sent out into the hills to try them out. Strong vibes in the hills above Hay.’
‘Like an ashram?’
‘Aye, a Welsh ashram. Transformation – that were his buzzword. He called it the Centre for the Transformation of Mankind.’
‘There’s modest.’
‘It were the seventies, Merrily. You thought big. For Transformation, read altering your state of consciousness, discovering your psychic potential. Exploring the Inner Planes, as they liked to say. Whatever you liked, except owt that stank of Nazism. He pulled a lot of celebrities into the mountains. Writers. Actors. Musicians.’
‘So how did he wind up as a recluse in Cusop Dingle?’
‘Couldn’t tell you. Until you told me he’d been found in a pond, I didn’t even know he were there. He was supposed to’ve gone abroad. All I knew was the Centre for Transformation got wound up in the mid-eighties, not long before I came down here, and he’d sold the farm to an adventure-holiday firm. All over.’
‘Right. Huw…’ She was curious. ‘How come you know so much about Peter Rector?’
‘Good question. I… I suppose I encountered him in my… quest, if you like, for summat else. Small obsession, Merrily. Listen, I’d love to take this further, lass, only I’ve a bunch of Deliverance rookies at the chapel till weekend. But if you want to meet me up there Saturday morning, you might find it enlightening.’
‘First day of my so-called holiday.’
‘We’ll do that, then. I’ll see you at Capel around ten. At the little church.’
‘OK. I’ll be there. Thanks, Huw. Erm… one final thing… was Miss White involved in Rector’s activities in the mountains?’
‘I don’t know. You going to ask her?’
Merrily said nothing. Athena White. The use of words like bête noire might be a bit excessive when applied to a woman approaching eighty, last seen in a wheelchair. A retired spook – possibly – whose tiny frame enclosed a monstrous intellect.
‘In an old folks’ home, in’t she?’
‘The Glades at Hardwicke. Next place up from Cusop. Quite an upmarket home. Always maintains she’s able to live happily in a place like that because of her rich inner life. Always been blatantly contemptuous of me.’
‘If she were that contemptuous,’ Huw said, ‘she wouldn’t talk to you at all.’
And he was gone, before she’d had a chance to ask him about Ms Merchant and Ms Nott.
But then, what could he have said?
She hadn’t mentioned the photocopy, either, because Bliss had told her not to discuss it directly with anybody.
Like he said, it told you nothing. Could have been a copy of a picture from a book. Some Holocaust horror.
Part of Rector’s research, maybe – she hadn’t known then that he’d written books. The female, photographed from behind, was unidentifiable, the picture so grainy you couldn’t say with any certainty that it was a female. The words could mean anything.
What will you do now?
Who? Rector himse
lf? It had been hand-printed on the photocopy.
Why had the copy been kept in that particular book? No possible connection with Nazism there. It was mainly about medieval monastic life.
Impossible, without tests, Bliss said, to say how old the copy was, either. It had been flattened in a hardback book in a shelf unit protected from the light.
For the moment, Bliss had said, might be best just to put it back.
But keep it in mind.
And then he’d photographed it with his phone.
Merrily switched off the computer and went upstairs for a suitcase. Couldn’t get the image out of her head. Couldn’t lose it. The way it had come out of a book she’d pulled out almost at random.
What was random?
20
Transition
AFTER DARK, SHE carried the first of two suitcases of clothes, toiletries and food across Church Street to Lol’s cottage.
The silence of the living room – no bleeps, no strings – felt softer, no longer dispiriting. Merrily switched on the wall lights and the ceiling shone a vibrant orange between chocolate beams. It felt like – be careful – coming home.
She fell back into the sofa, thinking about Peter Rector’s room, with the Zoroastrian rugs, the erotic drawings, the books on ritual magic and some not obviously related subjects. In her mind, the room now had an atmosphere of intense serenity so ingrained it was like a perpetual hum. Until you shook a photocopy from a book about religious life in the Black Mountains.
She’d only been once before to Capel-y-ffin, on a late-winter’s afternoon, finding it remote and bleak, residual snow caught like pockets of plaque in the teeth of the rocks.
She wondered about Bliss and the physical problems that were blighting his working life and could still end it prematurely. Had he thought of trying natural therapy? Would he have the patience? Could she help in any practical way?
Shoulders fitted into a corner of the sofa, Merrily stretched out her legs, with a guilty sense of detachment. Could never quite achieve this state at the vicarage. Living, as it were, over the shop, in a too-big house that had to be a refuge, twenty-four/seven, for anybody troubled.
Nobody yet knew where she was. Only Lol. She listened to his voice in her head, thought of the M-word, a pleasant pre-sleep lethargy setting into her leg muscles.
No time for this. She rolled off the sofa to tug one of the suitcases up the stairs to the bathroom, unload soap and flannel, toothpaste, electric toothbrush, deodorant, towels, underwear. Zipped up the case to take home with her and refill. Maybe one more trip before bedtime – didn’t want to keep going back to the vicarage next week to trouble Martin Longbeach for essential items she’d left behind.
Standing in Lol’s doorway, she felt held in an odd, airless state of transition. Neither here nor there. It was not a particularly warm night – there’d been none so far this summer – but at least the rain was holding off and the cobbled square was mellowed in the yellow-pink glow of the fake gaslamps while a flat, waxing moon dangled like a medal above the church steeple.
Six cars and two Land Rovers were parked on the cobbled square. The council was trying to turn it into a mini pay-and-display car park, and the village was fighting it. Quite right, too, if the Council was prepared to wreck tourism for short-term gain. Visitors hated an unexpected charge in some olde worlde village. It created ill-will against a community which had done nothing to deserve it.
Always some battle in Ledwardine, probably no bad thing.
Ochre lights burned blearily behind the leaded mullioned windows of the Black Swan. She’d have to go across there tomorrow, tell Barry she wouldn’t be at the vicarage next week but Martin Longbeach would. And then she’d have to tell Gomer Parry, who could perhaps keep an eye on Martin because… well, who knew?
When she was locking Lol’s front door behind her, there was a movement on the square: someone in a long mac and a hat coming out of a grey car on the edge of the cobbles, walking over to the market hall to stand uncertainly by one of its corner oak pillars, looking across at the vicarage.
Merrily paused. The man moved slowly across the cobbles, still glancing up, after every couple of paces, towards the vicarage where the security light was splintered by overhanging trees. Merrily stepped quietly back into the shadow of the Church Street terrace.
There was something about that walk that wasn’t…
Oh God.
The figure had passed under one of the fake gaslamps, and she’d seen white hair, long neck, cheekbones so high they looked painful for the skin. She’d seen Sylvia Merchant, now decisively crossing the road to the vicarage, vanishing under the moon-dappled ash tree beside the gate.
Bloody hell. Sylvia Merchant coming to visit? Normal reaction would be to walk boldly over, invite her in for a cup of tea and a chat. Ask her – diplomatically, at first – where exactly she’d got the idea that a few prayers constituted an attempted exorcism.
But there was Sophie…
… had to call Ms Merchant back and tell her that I’d forgotten you were on holiday.
George Curtiss, Cathedral canon, was supposed to have gone to talk some sense into Sylvia Merchant. Diplomatic George. What had happened to that idea?
Merrily slipped back inside Lol’s cottage, shut the door and returned to the living room, keeping the light out. Watching from the window, opening it slightly, in time to pick up, from across the silence, the echoing thock, thock of a knocker on old oak.
Evidently, Ms Merchant had been given reason to think the vicar was not on holiday. But if she wanted to talk, rather than file a complaint, why didn’t she phone first?
After a couple of minutes, Ms Merchant emerged from under the trees and seemed to be talking to someone, rather crossly. Nobody there, of course. Nobody on the square except Ms Merchant, her coat hanging open, the end of the belt swinging.
Mutter, mutter.
Ms Merchant stood looking around the village square. The only sounds were the distant hiss and thump of the juke box in the Ox, down the bottom of Church Street. Normality.
For a shivery moment, Merrily was reminded of Big Weale, the Mid Wales solicitor whom Eileen Cullen, the nursing sister from Hereford Hospital, had sworn she’d seen emerging from the hospital mortuary, where his dead wife lay, followed by… an indistinctness. Big Weale had been very dangerously disturbed. Probably nothing like that happening here. People did chat to the recently departed. Nothing wrong with that. Part of the process of letting go.
Ms Merchant didn’t immediately return to her car but walked a few yards up to the church lychgate, looking up at the moon over the steeple. Stayed there for a couple of minutes before presumably deciding, by the absence of interior lights, that Merrily wasn’t in the church either, then walked back to the square.
The light from a fake gaslamp, as she passed under it, showed she was smiling, rather grimly, as she unlocked the car with the bleeper and then went around to the passenger door and held it open for the empty air.
PART THREE
The night sky looked pale and
strange. Reflected in the window
I saw a glimmer of flame…
‘Join the ranks of the homeless,’
remarked a hippy standing next
to me.
Richard Booth
My Kingdom of Books (1999)
21
An extremely brief affair
‘AND WHERE, PRAY, is Robinson today?’ Miss White asked sweetly. ‘Are you an ex-item, as they say? Has he tired of your piety and your wearisome soul-scouring and found himself a new home between the thighs of some cheery little whore?’
She was crouching behind her Zimmer like a cat in a cage. None of the other residents was in this particular lounge. Occasionally a wizened face would peer around the door at the far end of the room and then vanish when it discerned the occupant.
‘Athena,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m awfully afraid that… Robinson is working. But he sends his…’
‘
Regrets? I doubt it.’ Miss White was sitting in a strong, supportive armchair with the Zimmer in front of it. She peered over the frame, curious. ‘You didn’t call me Anthea. You must want something. How exciting. What’ve you brought me?’
‘Left your chocolates with Mrs Cardelow to share among the other old ladies.’
Poor Mrs Cardelow, who, on arriving at The Glades, must have thought her worst problems would be linked to dementia. As distinct from a malevolent, alien intellect in a bushbaby’s body.
Miss White’s eyes narrowed. Was she wearing heavy mascara or were they just becoming more satanic? Merrily pulled out one of the harder chairs and sat down a safe distance away, her black hoodie unzipped to expose the pectoral cross.
‘So… when will you be back on your feet? I thought people were supposed to do a fair bit of walking after hip replacement.’
‘Never walked anywhere without a specific purpose, Watkins, as you know.’
‘I thought that was the purpose.’
Miss White scowled.
‘Felt compelled to discharge myself soon after surgery. No one warned me that the art of being a patronizing little shit is now part of the core curriculum at medical schools. On which basis…’ She lifted the Zimmer to one side, exposing her cuddly mauve jersey dress ‘… I suppose I should greet you like a breath of fresh air.’ She sniffed. ‘No, that’s not right, either. Never mind. Why did you leave my chocolates with Cardelow?’
‘Mmm…’ Merrily looked out of the window, across the grounds to the Radnor hills, dark with impending rain. Actually she had the overpriced Belgian chocs in her bag. ‘If what I’ve heard is correct, you can now afford to buy your own. Also the finest thirty-year-old malt.’ Turning back to Miss White. ‘In quantity.’
Taking care not to smile. It was a gamble, but the odds were very much against the old vampire bat ever lowering herself so far as to ask how Merrily knew about the Cusop inheritance.