by Phil Rickman
‘Watkins, I should say at the outset that if you’ve come about your pathetic steeple fund or the… parish orphanage, or some such—’
‘Wouldn’t be so crass, Anthea. I’ve come about Peter Rector. A man even older than you. Whose mental decline can only be measured by the way he’s disposed of his assets.’
You didn’t drop your guard and you didn’t give an inch. But her palms were moist and she had to clear her throat.
‘Hard as it is for me even to frame the question,’ she said, ‘does this mean that you might have been the, erm, love of his life?’
Miss White frowned, but her voice was tiny and kittenish.
‘Try harder.’
‘All right. Ruling out the possibility of some enormous, back-dated blackmail payoff, we’re probably looking at something that would take a long time to explain to someone without an extensive knowledge of the dark arts. Closer?’
No reply.
‘Of course, you don’t have to tell me anything. Or even the police.’
‘Watkins, you wouldn’t dare deprive me of the pleasure of demoralizing a detective.’
You had to accept that even the appearance of an Armed Response Unit fanning out across the lawn would elicit no more from Miss White than a faintly scornful smile. But now, quite suddenly, she was serious.
‘Seems to me, Watkins, that the only way you could know of my… well, you might think of it as good fortune, but at my age it’s no more than a tedious responsibility… is, indeed, from the police. Who aren’t yet ruling out the possibility that Peter Rector was murdered. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who, perforce, must now dip their clomping boots into unfamiliar waters. So some superintendent approaches his masonic brother, the Bishop of Hereford, with a view to obtaining some assistance from his appointed “advisor on the paranormal”…’
‘No! Hell… the Bishop’s not even in the Masons…’
At least, not any more.
Merrily pulled her bag onto her knees.
‘Do they allow smoking in here, Athena?’
‘Of course. They also allow the snorting of decent-quality cocaine and a limited amount of oral sex. Help me up. We’ll go outside.’
The lawn slanted down to a golden row of laburnums and a teak bench, with a dedication plate, on which they sat, with the Zimmer alongside, as the smoky clouds crept up on them.
‘One cop,’ Merrily said. ‘A friend. No inquiry. Just suspicions. And I’m not even at work. I’m on holiday.’
Miss White peered at her from a corner of the bench.
‘Do I believe you?’
‘I’m a Christian.’
Miss White turned away and gazed, through a gap in the trees, at the modest grey twin-bell tower of Hardwicke Church in the middle distance and the hills of Radnor on the other side of the hidden Wye.
‘Very well. I’ll go this far with you. I’ll concede a difficulty in accepting that my friend Peter Rector died as a result of what the coroners used to call misadventure.’
‘How long have you known him?’
‘Forty years.’
‘Did you see him often?’
‘Saw him hardly at all.’
‘What bothers… some people… is that Mr Rector seems to have had visitors only hours before his death. I suppose it could save a lot of trouble if you were able to explain to me, so that I can explain to my friend, what they might have been doing there.’
‘And did some nosy neighbour report that one of them was on a Zimmer?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘That’s probably because I wasn’t there. So how would I know about his possibly apocryphal visitors?’
‘Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I was thinking you might know why he was living there, under a spurious name, and… essentially, I suppose, what he was up to.’
Athena White adjusted herself on the bench.
‘Let’s be clear about something. There are – always have been – things I know about but can’t discuss. Any more than I could, in my former occupation, break the Official Secrets Act.’
Merrily didn’t really know what her former occupation had been, other than that it had included a period at GCHQ, the government communications centre at Cheltenham. You assumed it involved ciphers and the linguistics of espionage. But for all anyone really knew she might have been Head of Accounts.
‘I take it you know why Mr Rector left you his house and contents and… all his money?’
‘Not all his money. He has a daughter in Canada or somewhere. She’ll get half the money. And of course I know why I’ve been left the house. I also know I’m not obliged to tell anyone. And I won’t.’
‘And who will you leave the house to?’
‘That’s an interesting point. And pertinent. I don’t yet know. But to return to the first part of your original questions, I imagine he moved here for the same reason he moved to Wales. Now he’s dead, I can admit that I first encountered him while on secondment to the Security Service during the early seventies.’
‘MI5?’
‘Call it what you like if it gives you a frisson. There were worrying elements of neo-Nazism around at that time, even down to the pathetic little urban skinheads with swastikas tattooed on their skulls. Rector’s book was quite subtly written, from the wartime Nazi point of view, to show how magical thought – even when corrupted, or perhaps especially when corrupted – could damage the physical world. Some factions found it terribly exciting in a contemporary sense.’
‘Neo-Nazis?’
‘Rector’s book was a considerable influence on extreme right-wing activists. It suggested there was what you might call a dark energy just waiting to be tapped into again. It suggested he knew even more than he’d put into the book. We needed to know – to begin with – who his sources were and to what extent the… darkly inspirational effects of the book were intentional. I was asked to… look into him. Chosen, I suppose, for my knowledge of… certain allied matters.’
‘So your employers knew about your interest in the esoteric.’
‘Well, of course. Would’ve been futile to try and conceal something they could, occasionally, use in the national interests. In this instance, it amounted – initially – to little more than attending Peter’s lectures and working out where he was coming from.’
‘And that was…?’
‘Oh… Peter Rector had a great developed talent for what one might call magical empathy. He could project himself into other people’s consciousness, see through their eyes. Whether you want to believe this was simply the application of advanced visualization is up to you. It’s something which, in future years, he was able to pass on to pupils – especially writers – with considerable success.’
‘You’re saying that when he wrote the book he was allowing himself to empathize with the Nazi shamans or whatever—’
‘Precisely. Entirely factual material, but the presentation was a creative exercise. Never entered his head that he’d be seen as a sympathizer. By the time I was following him around he’d become a latent hippy, growing his hair, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. He was giving talks and interviews about Nazi occultism only because his publishers were making him. And for the money, of course. He was also becoming alarmed about the kind of people who were pursuing him.’
‘Pursuing?’
‘Writing long letters to him, waiting for him after his lectures. Tracing him to his hotel. Sitting next to him on trains. My own masters, of course, by this time, were now far more interested in them. Which is how I came to befriend him.’
‘You were told to.’
‘Well, of course I was told to. He just wanted to run away, but the service was keen for him to stick around and quietly encourage these individuals so that they could be identified and kept under surveillance. My job was to get him to cooperate.’
Well, well…
‘You’d have been about… my age, then?’
‘I would imagine.’
And doubtless very sexy.
‘And, erm… did you succeed?’
‘For a limited period. And, before you ask, I have no intention of going further down that particular thoroughfare.’
‘Heavens, Athena, you were a honey trap?’
Miss White gazed into the hills, expressionless.
‘Remove that foolish grin from your face,’ she said, quite mildly, ‘before I’m compelled to slap it. It was never going to be a long-term thing. Peter hated playing a double game and hated, even more, having to associate with these wall-eyed maniacs in their leather coats.’
‘But he rather liked you.’
Miss White sighed.
‘In that sense, it was an extremely brief affair. A certain mutual respect remained, however, and we kept in touch, mostly by telephone. We, as they say, looked out for one another. When he moved to the mountains, he asked if I’d like to be involved in his study centre. I declined. The thought of all those ghastly people in search of spiritual fulfilment… besides, I knew it wouldn’t last. These things never do.’
‘But when you retired, you came here.’
‘Some years after I retired, I came here. I like the air.’
‘Do you remember when Rector came to Cusop under the name David Hambling?’
‘Of course I remember. It was about a year after he phoned me one night and said, “Why do they keep coming back? Why are they doing this to me?”’
22
Worm in the apple
‘YOU MEAN THE Security Service?’ Merrily said. ‘On his back again?’
The laburnums were aglow under a sky now an ominous sage-green, Radnorshire rain clouds sailing in. But it was still warm, no breeze.
‘Good God, no,’ Athena White said. ‘Peter Rector was no more than a curling file in the bottom drawer by then. I’m talking about the vermin with swastika tattoos in their armpits and shrivelled paperback copies of A Negative Sun in their back pockets.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘They were turning up on his courses. Didn’t have far to come either, some of them. This was the era of young people fleeing into the countryside to set up smallholdings. The Welsh Border being one of the cheapest areas of southern Britain to buy into and reinvent yourself. Get a cottage and an acre of scrub for a few thousand. Live off the land. Self-sufficiency, small is beautiful.’
‘Was it?’
‘Hardly ever. It was usually damp and gloomy, and everything died. And amidst all the silly little hippies you’d find a more sinister survivalist element with primitive weaponry. And these deranged followers of the Aryan left-hand path.’
‘I didn’t… actually know about that,’ Merrily said.
Warily.
‘You’ll find them on the Internet to this day. Probably the one named after Peter Rector’s book. OSIS – the Order of the Sun in Shadow. Its central premise was that mankind evolves only by acts of extreme violence. Its targets were the usual Jews and gypsies, sundry foreigners and those it describes as The Detritus – people deemed to be a drain on society, whether unwilling, unfit or too old to work. I’d qualify as a prime example. Accept voluntary euthanasia or we’ll have to kill you.’
Maybe it was an effect of the colours of the sky but Miss White’s cheeks looked drained and sunken. She’d always been the old woman in the poem who dressed in purple, living on her wits and her witchery. Merrily glimpsed cracks in the protective layers, felt her inner rage and the terror of its containment in an old lady’s body.
‘They were actually here? On the ground?’
‘Out there.’ Miss White pointed past the bell tower to the misting horizon. ‘Living in their remote farm-workers’ cottages in the wilderness. Or up in Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. Perhaps in emulation of Hitler and Himmler in their rural retreats, looking down over mountains and forestry, drawing inspiration from the haunted hills and the legends. Dismal little fantasists.’
‘How many of them?’
‘Mere handful, I expect, but two hate-driven individuals on the Internet can be a virtual army. It’s what kind of influence they have. The power of their steaming rhetoric.’
‘What did they want from Rector?’
‘Some of them clearly wanted him to be their leader. He still had cachet. The more obvious ones who appeared up at Capel – identifiable by the kind of questions they asked at the end of his seminars – were given their money back and unceremoniously dispatched down the mountain.’
Merrily sat back, shaking her head.
‘Athena, either I’m not getting this or there’s something you’re not telling me. If they were on his courses, presumably they’d realize he wasn’t preaching Nazism. What was he doing up there that might lead them to suspect that he wasn’t a lost cause?’
They leaned into their separate corners of the bench, the Zimmer between them.
‘All right,’ Miss White said. ‘How much do you know about what’s become known – rather disparagingly, I suppose – as chaos magic?’
Not much, actually, but she could bluff for a while.
‘Free-range sorcery?’ Merrily said. ‘Pick ’n’ mix?’
‘For a person of the cloth,’ Miss White said, ‘you can be a frightfully crass little woman.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Although, I will admit to finding some of it – or at least the way it’s handled – to be superficial, haphazard, disrespectful and dangerous.’
‘Let me work this out. It’s a practice that rejects what you might call the confining disciplines of the past by following, in the most liberal sense, Aleister Crowley’s maxim, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Cabala and Catholicism, druidry and freemasonry, witchcraft, yoga, dianetics… if it works, toss it in the pot?’
‘You’re halfway there. Halfway to Peter Rector’s discipline, anyway. And discipline is the operative word. Performed correctly, what we’re talking about is the most disciplined form of magic. Bringing elements of different traditions together successfully requires a very sure touch.’
‘I can imagine. What I can’t imagine is why?’
‘It’s product based. A means to an end. The means tailored to the desired result. For example – during the war, a magical defence system was set up by Dion Fortune and a few others, based in Glastonbury. It had one central aim, which was to keep Hitler off British soil. A psychic wall erected around us. But within that central premise, different operations were mounted to challenge specific developments in the war. Now I’m not saying too many different occult methods were used to this end, but it was a project to which the principles of what we now call chaos magic might well have been applied. You identify exactly the result you’re after and you decide which combination will best achieve it. Yes?’
‘Has a weird logic,’ Merrily said.
‘However, it also gets carried away with the need to break rules. From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse. You see where I’m going with this? Perhaps you don’t.’
‘Not sure.’
‘You don’t. All right… the Order of the Sun in Shadow write on their websites of the necessity of breaking human taboos, pushing the mind and body beyond accepted limits of behaviour. Performing acts regarded by society as hideous, in order to align themselves with perceived dark cosmic forces. The sublime shock of breaking civilization’s constraints releasing them into the next evolutionary stage.’
‘Satanism, in other words.’
‘Satanism only exists in the theology of your fundamentalist friends.’
‘I don’t have any fundamentalist friends. Let me get this right. I think what you’re saying is that the practices of modern extreme right-wing magical groups is developed from the same source as chaos magic, as practised by Peter Rector. Did he ever follow the other path?’
‘I think I’d have to say not intentionally. But he nevertheless pointed the way, and would never recover from the guilt.’
<
br /> Miss White supported herself on the Zimmer, her small, pointed chin on her arms.
‘I suppose what was worrying Peter the night he phoned me was the possibility of a worm in the apple. Someone studying or helping at the centre undercover, as it were. A disaffected follower of what he’d perceived to be the Rector philosophy. Perhaps using techniques he was learning there to expand the parameters of his own negative theology. Poisoning the pond, essentially. Peter couldn’t prove it, but was increasingly conscious of things going wrong. Arguments. Dissent. A clouding of the atmosphere. When something’s functioning on a rarified level, it doesn’t take much to tip it the other way, and even if the problem’s expunged the equilibrium is never quite restored.’
‘What was he doing up there that was harmed?’
‘Not for me to say.’ Miss White wiped a dismissive hand through a ball of frantic midges. ‘The ironic thing is that Peter Rector’s writing had shown these people how to present it in a far more… honourable light. In their terms. Thus, for example, the so-called Detritus are seen as acceptable victims for blood sacrifice or ritual execution. Performing a human sacrifice is viewed not only as ethnic or social cleansing but as a form of initiation.’
‘But surely it never—’
‘Never happens? How do we know that it never happens? All right, evidence of a human sacrifice would lead to a police hunt on a frightful scale. But if some denizen of cardboard city, some anonymous doorway-sleeper – some detritus – were to disappear… who would know?’
No answer to that.
‘They also dislike Christians. Your turn-the-other-cheek primitive socialism, your creepy humility, your abhorrence of violence, the delusion that love conquers all. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to encounter someone following this path, you’ll see a person who, endeavouring to reach a new level of humanity, has effectively jettisoned all the finer qualities of this one.’
‘OK, I get the point.’
‘I’m not sure you do. It vaguely parallels the way a psychopathic serial murderer is often shown to have begun with small animals. By the time he progresses to human beings, the act of killing has become almost routine, and he’s looking to raise the bar. He’ll kill with abandon, increasingly at random, believing himself invulnerable. But if there’s magical ritual involved, the impulse will be fuelled by what you would call psychic energy so that the act is done in such a state of higher consciousness that—’