MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Or a little more if he wants to give us time to connect, which I suspect he does. From my point of view, while I don’t go out of my way to conceal my private interest, I’d rather nothing appeared in the papers. If only because I don’t want any tedious jokes from young solicitors about magicking an acquittal.’

  ‘I can see you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m an initiate,’ Claudia said, ‘in an order of ceremonial magicians. A neophyte with aspirations.’

  ‘What kind of initiate?’

  ‘You mean white or black?’

  ‘I doubt it’s ever that simple. Why do you do it?’

  ‘I’m guessing you don’t want the offensive answer about Christianity, as practised in this country, no longer satisfying people’s spiritual needs.’

  ‘Doesn’t offend me, Claudia. If we provided much of a buzz any more, congregations wouldn’t be going down the toilet. What’s the non-offensive answer?’

  ‘It’s also an intelligent, challenging, demanding… escape. Into myself. Been meditating since my teens, and this is what comes next if you don’t want to get into some incomprehensible eastern discipline. It’s been wonderful for turning the mind into a blank screen, increasing one’s powers of focus and concentration and… other useful skills. Now, I know for a fact, for example, when someone’s lying to me in court.’

  Claudia slotted her heels into the bottom bar of the gate and hauled herself up to sit on the top.

  ‘But they’re just side-benefits, really. Using peripheral skills to try and become superhuman in a world of ordinary humans, or to score points or make money is… bad karma, if you want to put it like that. Am I gaining your confidence at all, Merrily?’

  ‘My daughter’s drawn to paganism. It hasn’t turned her into a werewolf.’

  Claudia nodded.

  ‘All right.’ She looked across the fields. ‘The project, then.’

  ‘Can I guess?’

  ‘Do.’

  ‘Is it Hay itself? If he was the Magus of Hay, was the project the Kingdom?’

  It had come to her whole, standing so close to the border between England and Wales. Here before her was the Kingdom, right on the frontier. No obvious housing estates or factories visible from here, only the original medieval town. You could almost see the walls.

  ‘If I’ve got this right,’ Merrily said, ‘declaring independence was a spontaneous act. Richard Booth didn’t think about it, plan anything… he just said it and it happened. Metaphorically speaking.’

  ‘Far more than metaphorically.’

  ‘And when everybody thought it was a joke… to Peter Rector it wasn’t. It was something that was almost visionary.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘Maybe Booth thought it was a joke too, with his tin crown and his plastic orb.’

  ‘Which, unintentionally, are magical artefacts,’ Claudia said. ‘Far more powerful than if someone very rich had fabricated the real thing – real gold, real jewels. Here they are, made entirely from recycled stuff. Glass jewels nicked from a dog collar. Everything cobbled together. Worthless.’

  ‘Second-hand. Very Hay?’

  ‘Yesss!’ Claudia jumping down to the grass, surprisingly nimble for someone her size. ‘Breaking all the rules. Saying to the government and the council and tourist and development boards…’

  ‘You don’t exist,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Exactly. Booth and his supporters were saying, “On our level of consciousness, you don’t exist. If we don’t see you, then you aren’t there. We’ve made you disappear.” Magic.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Natural magic. A number of factors coming together at the right time. Serendipity. Serendipity is very close to magic. Except it doesn’t last. Mostly it explodes. The bubble pops. Unless…’

  Claudia walked out into the darkening paddock, the grass sloping towards woodland below the town on the horizon, sparkling now with lights.

  Merrily didn’t move.

  ‘The last redemptive project was to make sure it continued?’

  ‘The continued powering and protection of a brilliant chaotic mind,’ Claudia said.

  ‘So Rector had appointed himself court magician.’

  ‘I never actually thought of it like that.’ Claudia looked momentarily disapproving. ‘But I suppose you’re right.’

  She went to stand where the hare had sat.

  ‘An exercise like this stands more of a chance of success if it’s set in train at the beginning of something. If it’s not a rescue package. Blank canvas. You spot your opportunity and then you move quickly. When you look at Hay now, it’s hard to imagine how it was before the first second-hand bookshop opened, most of its shops closed down, its railway ripped up.’

  Claudia extended her arms.

  ‘Imagine this is Hay. This field. Imagine the gate is the castle. Behind it – as in physical reality – the Black Mountains. Below it, the River Wye. Most of the medieval town walls have gone – but still there, the stones taken to build houses and shops, so therefore still in the town. It’s all still here. On our mental model, we might choose to put the walls back in their original place, enclosing the heart. The street pattern at the core of the town, if you hadn’t noticed, actually forms the shape of a heart.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Look at a street plan sometime: High Street, Castle Street, Lion Street, Bear Street and the rest… all blood vessels shaping and wound around a heart. Peter’s self-appointed task was to make it beat. To a strong, persistent rhythm that couldn’t easily be stopped. To give it momentum.’

  ‘How does that work? What do you mean by the mental model?’

  ‘Something that exists on a higher plan. Constructed in the imagination. Imagine it as virtual reality on a screen into which you can drag images, make things happen. All magic works through will power and the harnessing of energy. Spirits, if you like. Which can be seen either as external forces or processes from deep in the human psyche. In this case, we also have natural energies directed into the town – the power of water rushing down the Dulas Brook, with all its waterfalls, flowing into the River Wye, the best, most revered river in England and Wales. But more powerfully, emerging on the other side of town, you might have something else.’

  ‘We talking about the church?’

  ‘You know it? And the surroundings?’

  ‘I was there this afternoon.’

  ‘It’ll be very clear in your mind, then. Go there now. Go on… you’re safe. It’s one of yours.’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  She found she didn’t have to try too hard. As she stood by the hedge at the side of the paddock, she was, at the same time, below St Mary’s Church, following the stream past the waterfall, across the bridge. Then she was in the alley between the almshouses, emerging opposite the entrance to Forest Road, the end of the Gospel Pass, highway of saints, up to another St Mary church, high in the Black Mountains, where the statue of the Virgin raised her crumbling hands to bring down the…

  ‘… sheer power of medieval Christianity, Merrily. In a time when the Church was illuminated by miracles and magic. The blessing and guardianship of the Holy Mother.’

  Claudia’s voice coming across the twilit field, with a slight echo. Seeming to pick up your unspoken thoughts. The tricks these people played. Merrily said nothing. Found she was holding the pectoral cross in her pocket, sliding her fingers through its chain. Well aware of how the modern Church had let all that dissipate.

  ‘So here’s Peter, at the confluence,’ Claudia said. ‘Where streams feeding the Dulas brook rush past another significant Mary church.’

  ‘Cusop Church. That one.’

  Out of the corner of her right eye, she could see it: solid, short tower, enclosed, like the others, by yew trees, one said to be nearly two thousand years old.

  ‘Where was he?’ Merrily asked softly. ‘Where exactly was Peter Rector?’

  ‘In the engine room,’ Claud
ia said. ‘And the engine was comprised of people. Living and dead.’

  53

  Right-hand path

  IT WAS LIKE something was preventing them getting close to the truth, erecting barriers.

  Kapoor had an old VHS recorder for transferring vintage cricket tapes to DVD, but his only hope of finding a Betamax recorder was getting hold of the guy who repaired his kit.

  An anorak, who never threw anything away, who worked out of a shop in Brecon, long closed for the night. And whose name was Jones. And who was unknown to Gwyn Arthur.

  Kapoor had started ringing people in the phone book called Jones. It could take a while.

  Meanwhile, the videotape sat on the console table that used to be an altar. Upstairs, the hole in the wall made Thorogood Pagan Books part of the Castle.

  Robin had a little black book full of pagan contacts. Just didn’t carry it around with him, so he’d had to borrow Gwyn Arthur Jones’s laptop to track down George Webster, last heard of in Manchester and linked to a Wiccan group operating in the Pennines.

  George was, presumably, still editor of Witches’ Rune, formerly a quarterly magazine, now only a website which, like most goddamn websites, didn’t go out of its way to reveal home numbers. However, the single number given was one for advertisements and subscriptions which, unless Witches’ Rune had acquired actual staff, was worth a shot.

  Answering machine.

  Shit.

  ‘This is Robin Thorogood,’ Robin said, ‘George, if that’s you, for the Goddess’s sake, call me the hell back, willya? This is urgent.’

  He hit end call, turned to Jones.

  ‘George thinks urgent is against the flow and therefore not a pagan concept, so we can only hope he comes back tonight.’

  Jones pulled up one of the cane chairs he and Betty had brought from upstairs.

  ‘If you do get a number for someone linked to the Order, I’d be grateful if you’d speak to them yourself. I can brief you on what to ask but I doubt I’d be able to master the jargon or manage not to sound like an old policeman.’

  ‘And you think I talk Nazi?’ Robin’s phone rang; he lit up the screen. ‘Jeez, there is a goddess. Hold on…’ He listened, grinned. ‘Yeah… will do, George.’ Lowered the phone. ‘I’m calling him back directly. Times are hard at Witches’ Rune. Like everyplace, but at least George can lay a curse on the bank.’

  He called back.

  ‘George, I guess you’re about to start a significant ritual so I won’t mess around.’

  George’s voice was cold.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  Because your whole freaking life’s a ritual, George.

  ‘Forget it. George, listen up, I need help to trace a guy who ran a… well, a Left-Hand Path group operating on the Welsh border. This bookshop we’re running, someone wants me to try and get hold of some of their original literature. Normally, I’d politely decline, but we only just started up and I don’t want to get a reputation for being unhelpful.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Order of— Hold on, I got the note here. The Sun in Shadow?’

  The phone went silent.

  ‘George…?’

  ‘The Nazis?’

  ‘That a fact? This guy just said Left-Hand Path. If he’d said like, Extreme Right—’

  ‘The Order of the Sun in Shadow once contacted me to place a display ad seeking members. All a bit ambivalent, but it didn’t look too harmful at the time, so we ran it and they didn’t pay, despite repeated invoices. I’d imagine having a customer who collects fascist occult literature wouldn’t be terribly good for your image.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve promised now. You kept a contact address, phone number for this guy?’

  Across the room, Robin heard a yelp of triumph, saw Kapoor throwing his mobile in the air and catching it.

  ‘—always keep contact details of people who owe me money,’ George said. ‘I’m just looking through the file. How’s Betty?’

  ‘She’s good,’ Robin said. ‘She’s always good.’

  ‘Yep, here he is. Moved from his original address in Radnorshire, to Solihull. Quite a reputable address – well, suburban-sounding anyway. You want that or just the number?’

  ‘Both, if that’s OK.’

  Robin wrote it all down in Jones’s notebook.

  ‘Just keep my name out of it, Robin. These are unlikely to be terribly nice people.’

  ‘Yeah, the word Nazi was kind of a hint in that direction.’

  ‘I’m serious, Robin.’

  ‘I’m truly grateful to you, George,’ Robin said. ‘Heil Hitler.’

  54

  Poppet

  ‘EACH OF THEM stationed in a chosen spot,’ Claudia said, ‘at a prearranged time.’

  ‘Physically?’

  ‘Initially, yes. Someone might, for example, stand at the confluence of the brook and the Wye, down on that little beach near the sewage works where the King was found.’

  Here, on the edge of night, Hay-on-Wye reduced to a serrated silhouette against a band of fading red, it all sounded entirely logical, disturbingly persuasive. But Merrily, uncomfortable with it, found she’d put the cross back around her neck.

  ‘If you can have a group of people with the same focus,’ Claudia said, ‘working with perfect synchronicity in a sympathetic atmosphere, the results can be amazing. Think of the transcendent power of Gregorian chant in a cathedral.’

  ‘So you’d have a group of trained initiates, all focused on the creation of a successful economy founded on books?’

  ‘Nothing so simplistic. You don’t concentrate on making booksellers rich. You refine it to something which is, at once, more amorphous and more exact. Think of it in its purest form – illumination, a whole ethos founded upon the word. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or Dan Brown. Knowledge begins with the word.’

  ‘Knowledge, enlightenment… books?’

  The moon had come out, not far from full. Claudia’s broad face shone.

  ‘Because books were central to the aspiration, Peter liked to involve writers. They’d come individually to Hay and Peter, or one of his group, would introduce each of them to a particular spot, perhaps linked to their personality, and show them how to store the images – the sights, the sounds, the atmosphere of the place – in their imaginations. So that, even if they were hundreds of miles away, they’d be able to visualize and to project themselves into a location.’

  ‘That couldn’t’ve happened overnight.’

  ‘No. Some people, it would take a year, two years, of daily practice. And not everyone stayed the course. Using writers was not invariably a good idea. Bruce Chatwin dropped out quite quickly – more interested, I suspect, in what he could get out of it for a novel or a travel book. For something like this to work, it has to be separated from all personal desire. One must maintain a level of complete detachment from what one wants to achieve. That’s why most of the people involved were, as they say hereabouts, from Off.’

  ‘Is that why the Convoy were involved?’

  ‘Sorry? Oh, you mean the travellers? Before my time, I’m afraid. Yes, a very convenient human resource in the nineteen eighties. Introduced to Peter by… who was that chap?’

  ‘Jeremy Sandford?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Supporter of the homeless. Expert on travellers and magic mushrooms.’

  ‘Then it would have been. The mushrooms were never used in the actual working but seem to have been useful for pre-conditioning. Opening people’s minds to the limitless possibilities. The wider your horizons, strange as it may seem, the easier it is to sharpen your focus.’

  ‘I’ll work that out sometime. What about Beryl Bain-bridge?’

  ‘You’re very well informed.’

  ‘Psychic powers, Claudia.’

  Claudia didn’t smile.

  ‘Beryl was… a natural. I met her once. Entrusted with the old marketplaces – the Buttermarket,
which even looks like a temple, and the square below the castle. She was famous for liking a certain clutter – house like a Victorian museum, full of statues and icons and stuffed animals. Think of Beryl in the town on a market day, absorbing the atmosphere. Hay market representing commerce – local commerce. An unusual talent for projecting herself into a place and time and then condensing it into the essentials. Surrounded herself with chaos, yet her books were models of concise precision – like sigil-magic, where everything is reduced to a symbol.’

  ‘I kind of remember reading once that she was an atheist.’

  ‘May well have been. But when she died, in 2010, her funeral was at the church of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town – a service so High Church that some of the mourners didn’t realize it wasn’t very traditional Roman Catholic. No one has quite managed to explain that.’

  Merrily stared at the moon. Miracles and magic.

  ‘Take me through this, would you, Claudia? On a particular night…’

  ‘Might be the night of the full moon or the equinox. But you have a group of people, all over the country, alerted these days by email, who go into some private place in their home at the appointed time… and are sent a specific phrase or a clearly defined concept or an image, and… begin.

  ‘There’s a temple. You’ll see. A proper temple. With a magic circle and cardinal points, all the necessary stuff. And sympathetic props. The most significant of which was a poppet. You know what that is?’

  ‘That’s a witchcraft thing, isn’t it? A doll.’

  ‘You take what you need for the purpose, from any tradition. It’s become known as chaos magic. Customized ritual, virtually nothing forbidden. Peter liked the idea, whilst believing it was terribly dangerous for a novice magician, on the basis that you can’t break the rules with the necessary confidence if you’re not fully conversant with the rules you want to break.’

  Merrily was thinking of what Athena had had to say about chaos magic.

  ‘So you can take the Christian tradition and marry it to something… else.’