MW 12 - The Magus of Hay

by Phil Rickman

  From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse.

  She was thinking of the figurines in the alcoves in Rector’s library: Isis and the Virgin.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d find that terribly acceptable. I’m just telling you how it was. The concept’s credited to the artist and magician, Austin Osman Spare, whose images you might have seen—’

  ‘In the library, here?’

  ‘The library has drawings by Spare and Eric Gill, who was at Capel-y-ffin.’

  ‘An obsessive Catholic with a taste for breaking taboos,’ Merrily said. ‘I believe incest was a favourite.’

  ‘I can only assure you…’ Claudia was now little more than a shadow ‘… that however much you might reject his methodology, Peter Rector’s intentions towards Hay were entirely positive.’

  ‘Odd, though, how the kind of occultism favoured by neo-Nazi groups like the Order of the Sun in Shadow seems to have absorbed some of the principles of chaos magic.’

  Merrily was shaken. There was a tightrope here between good and evil, and the rope was woven from strands of a disturbingly convincing madness.

  ‘He’d left all that behind,’ Claudia said coldly. ‘As you keep being told.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t still being followed by people inspired by Rector. Do you know anything about Jerrold Adrian Brace?’

  ‘No. Who is he?’

  ‘Forget it. What was your role in the last redemptive project?’

  ‘I was never directly involved. As I’ve indicated, he still considered me a student. He’d tightened up a lot on the people he used. The days of the Convoy were long over. It was all very clandestine – the chosen few. I’ve been mainly the help. The one who helped his solicitor handle his affairs, managed his money, went to his bank, made sure David Hambling and Peter Rector lived safely and happily apart. But he trusted me with knowledge of what was happening. All vibrantly exciting. At first.’

  Headlights in the lane.

  ‘Go on,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Quite dizzying, seeing Hay mushrooming from a forlorn farming town to somewhere known all over the world. I was here when Clinton came to speak in a huge marquee on the green behind the castle. Thousands of people… a limo with smoked glass windows… the world’s media. Businesses booming all over town, you could almost hear property prices blasting through the roof.’

  ‘And Rector actually thought he was responsible, in essence, for all of that?’

  ‘And who’s to say he wasn’t? Who can ever say that?’

  ‘That’s a very dangerous time, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘That explosion of fame and wealth. When all kinds of people come in with their own agendas. When cherished ideals can tumble in the scramble for bigger and bigger profits. People can go temporarily mental. Look at the banking industry.’

  ‘That’s when the creative, energetic role becomes a guardian role. More serious.’

  Headlights turning in.

  ‘So I’m taking it that what you call the poppet was the effigy of the King of Hay.’

  ‘Life-size. Seated on a throne in the circle. So that he was always part of what was happening. Sometimes the focus was purely on the King, if he hadn’t been well or had financial problems.’

  ‘Didn’t manage to stop him having to sell the castle.’

  Claudia didn’t reply.

  ‘So how did he end up in the Wye?’

  ‘Merrily, I don’t know. When I saw the effigy on the TV, I was aghast. Which is why we’re here. Why I’m telling you all this.’

  ‘Where would they have to go to get the effigy, the poppet?’

  ‘That’s the burglary aspect. The King lives in the temple. In a magical vacuum.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The car braked, a red glow, headlights rapidly extinguished.

  ‘Why would someone take him out and throw him in the river?’

  ‘Or, more likely, in the Dulas Brook, swollen by the rain. The poppet flushed down the brook and washed into the Wye. I don’t know.’

  Merrily saw Bliss getting out into the deep dusk, quietly closing the car door. He had some thin packages under each arm, the moon glinting on cellophane. Bliss was walking steadily, better in the dark.

  ‘Evening, girls. Do we have consensus on this? I don’t want to hang around.’

  ‘Let’s assume we do,’ Merrily said.

  Suddenly very insecure, in this place where imaginary worlds were built and broken.

  Bliss gave each of them one of the plastic packages, keeping one back.

  ‘Durex suits,’ he said. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t ask. I hope this is nothing. I hope Claudia’s brought us here on a pure whim. What’s a doll in a river, after all?’

  Claudia said nothing, but her breathing was audibly rapid as she led them beyond the house towards the outbuildings and the engine room.

  55

  Out of blood

  ‘NAME’S SEYMOUR LOFTUS,’ Robin said to Jones. ‘How’d’ya like that?’

  Pretty dark now. Beer-bottle lights on shelves of books, face-out, displaying photos of brooms, pentagrams, the Tree of Life and Stonehenge at dawn. Jones had told him about two missing girls, who would be middle-aged women now.

  ‘You’re saying you think they’re dead?’

  ‘I’m making no assumptions.’

  ‘Like… detritus?’

  ‘People living outside society disappear all the time. They may be dead, they may be living under different identities.’

  ‘Right.’

  Robin was starting to connect with the mindset, and it was both ridiculous and frightening, and it made him mad that there were people like this haunting the beloved British countryside.

  Betty was making more tea. Kapoor was on the road to Brecon to pick up a reconditioned Betacam VCR. Robin picked up the mobile, prepared to go to work, like the stupid cops who’d gone to work on him on the edge of the scenic parking lot.

  ‘Where did you get my name?’

  ‘Seymour… that is you?’

  ‘Who did you say you were?’

  Loftus had one of those downbeat Midlands accents.

  ‘My name’s Robin Thorogood. I’m a PF member and also a bookseller. Thorogood Pagan Books, of Hay-on-Wye?’

  ‘Not heard of them.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have. We only just started up. We were in the Radnor Valley, we had a bust-up with an evangelical priest.’

  ‘I remember that. It was in the papers. That was you, was it?’

  ‘And now we took over a bookstore that once belonged to one of your members.’

  ‘My members?’

  ‘Order of the Sun in Shadow?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Seymour… get real.’

  What you learned about these guys, through all the years of moots and gatherings, was that no matter how they sounded in a ritual, how sinister they looked in a temple, some of the time they were just people, with insecurities, money worries, marriage problems and fears of the past catching up with them.

  ‘That was years ago,’ Seymour said. ‘I don’t do that any more. I don’t even talk about it any more. We started something we couldn’t control. It’s over.’

  ‘His name was Jerrold Brace.’

  ‘He wasn’t a member.’

  Oh, too fast, Seymour, just a little too fast.

  ‘And how does it concern you?’

  ‘We have… found signs of his habitation. Cut in stone.’

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Robin.’

  Not only failed to conceal his number, he’d given the guy his name and address. But it would be crazy to treat him like you believed all the bullshit.

  Seymour said very quietly, ‘Robin. I was pretty young when I was doing that, had extreme views about the way the country was going, and I wrote some
stuff I wouldn’t like to be associated with now. I’ve got kids. I’m on the council.’

  ‘British National Party?’

  ‘No! Green Party, if you must know.’

  ‘And like, do the Green Party know about your roots?’

  ‘Some of them do. And they know I’m not the same person. Half the Labour Party started out as rabid Trots. We all go through these phases.’

  ‘You sure Jerry Brace wasn’t a member?’

  ‘I’m still not getting your angle on this.’

  ‘Seymour, I may have to talk to the cops.’

  ‘Why do I care who the hell you talk to?’

  ‘You’d care plenty when they showed up on your suburban front porch with a warrant for your ass.’

  ‘Are you trying to blackmail me? Because I make a point of recording all my calls.’

  ‘Don’t do blackmail, Seymour, though I will admit to the occasional death-threat.’

  Robin saw Jones smile, looking up from scribbling in a notebook. Remember the main aim is to unsettle this man, Jones had said.

  ‘This is a small town, Seymour, and people have long memories, and your guy, Jerry Brace—’

  ‘He’s dead! He’s been dead years and years. He was a damaged man. And he was not my guy.’

  ‘So you did know him?’

  ‘I knew him by reputation. I can’t talk about this, it’s futile.’

  ‘And I’m guessing you also know about two girls he used to hang out with who went missing?’

  ‘You’re making no sense. I think I’m going to have to end this call. Come back to me when you know what you’re talking about.’

  Robin stood up.

  ‘Seymour…’ He was in pain ‘… it’s not too far for me to drive up there, and if I have to I will. And, boy, am I loud on a doorstep.’

  Pause.

  ‘He was full of shit,’ Seymour said. ‘He said he wanted to join the Order. I didn’t particularly like the sound of him, and we knew he was doing hard drugs. We said come back when you’re clean. Clean and cold. When you can deal with your emotions. When you can prove to us you’re ready to move up. Move up. That was how we talked, back then.’

  ‘You ever talk to Brace in person?’

  ‘He rang one night. You could tell he was on something. He offered me…’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘He was offering the town. He said the town had been magically separated from the rest of Britain and was somewhere we could… establish ourselves. Through him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Let me finish. He talked about a remarkable vibe being wasted by useless hippies and if the new aeon was going to start anywhere it was there, and it would start around him because it was his destiny, and we could help each other achieve our mutual aims.’

  Jones had pushed the notebook in front of Robin.

  ASK HIM IF STILL ANY OSIS-LINKED FARMS OR COMMUNES. SAY IF CO-OPERATES MIGHT LEAVE HIM ALONE.

  ‘… how he’d chosen his place of habitation with great care,’ Seymour was saying. ‘All the border strife, all the killing it must have seen. How it had grown out of blood and fire. He said he…’

  Jones pulled the notebook back.

  ‘What did?’ Robin said. ‘What grew out of blood and fire? Hay?’

  ‘Its castle.’

  ‘What?’

  Jones pushed the notebook back in front of him.

  ASK HIM ABOUT THE BOY. WHO WAS LOOKING AFTER THE BOY?

  ‘Brace is long dead,’ Seymour said. ‘None of this matters.’

  ‘Then you might as well talk about it.’

  ‘He said it was his home. His ancestral home.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Work it out.’

  ‘Who was looking after the boy, Seymour?’

  Robin mouthing to Jones, Who’s the boy?

  ‘I’ve had enough of you. I don’t want to hear from you again.’

  ‘Seymour, just unload it.’

  Dead phone.

  56

  Vision and need

  MERRILY’S ONE-PIECE protective suit was too hot and far too big. She kept stumbling over its floppy folds.

  Claudia Cornwell had stopped at the barn doors, was looking back towards the bungalow.

  ‘In case either of you doesn’t know, this was the site of a large farmhouse called Bryn-y-castell – Castle Hill. Reference to the castle mound. The house was left derelict then pulled down, I suppose about fifty or sixty years ago. Some of the stone went into the bungalow and also these outbuildings. But an important part of the old house remains. Important for us, anyway.’

  The doors weren’t even locked. Bliss had a torch, which showed there was nothing here to steal. It had a layer of bales of straw, obviously old, more of them in the loft. But none of the expected smells of new hay and old manure.

  ‘You can see this place got no more than a cursory going-over from the search team,’ Bliss said. ‘But then, why should it? How many barns have cellars?’

  A few bales had been thrown out of the loft to expose the corners. But nobody had bothered with the floor.

  ‘The barn was simply built over the entrance to the main cellars of the demolished house,’ Claudia said. ‘Root cellar for apples, wine cellar.’

  Bliss said, ‘How many times you been here, Claudia?’

  ‘Here… many times. Down there… once. Yesterday. So my DNA’s going to be everywhere, isn’t it?’

  Merrily said, ‘So the cellars conceal…’

  ‘The temple, yes. The temple was constructed over about a year. After what happened on the Bluff, Peter wasn’t going to take chances any more. Only he and his innermost circle ever came here. A sealed chamber. There was only a handful of them and most of them were over seventy. It’s a measure of how important he thought this was.’ Her voice faded, as though talk was only delaying the inevitable. ‘Could I…?’

  Merrily took a step back. Claudia had pulled a bale to one side, pointed at three or four others.

  ‘The trapdoor’s under those. There’s a blue plastic sheet we need to take up. Peter showed me how to get in if there was an emergency. I was the nearest, at Talgarth. He knew I wouldn’t just go down there.’

  ‘But you did yesterday?’ Merrily said.

  ‘He was dead. The future was uncertain. As I say, most of his… people… are old. I was the youngest and still outside the core. I came back and wandered around. Shed a few tears, wondered how it could possibly go on without him, even if Athena White could gather a few more suitably qualified people together. I wondered, like you’re probably wondering now, if we hadn’t all just succumbed to his… his vision… and his need.’

  There was the trapdoor, plain oak, sunk into the flags, an iron ring sunk into the oak. Bliss slipped his white-gloved hand under the ring.

  ‘There are electric lights,’ Claudia said. ‘On the wall on your right when you get to the bottom of the steps. Small narrow ante-room and a plain white door. Here’s the key.’

  A plain Yale key. She gave it to Bliss. He stood looking down, the big numbers on his baseball sweater just visible through the plastic. He’d tied a white mask over his mouth and nose.

  He said, ‘You want to go first, Claudia?’

  ‘I think it should be you.’

  ‘Yeh.’

  Bliss pulled on the ring. The trapdoor came up easily, with a low, hydraulic whine, Bliss’s torch downlighting a rough pine stairway, with a rail. He went down about three steps, looked back, pulled down the mask.

  ‘Just tell me briefly,’ Bliss said. ‘What will I see? What’s the layout?’

  ‘A ceiling of midnight blue.’ Claudia’s voice was firm, as if she was reciting poetry. ‘A black and white floor, like a chessboard. Circles, one inside the other. A triangle. An altar. The coat of arms of Hay above it. On the altar, a chalice of water from the confluence of the Dulas Brook and the River Wye. And a chair. A stiff-backed chair with arms, like a throne. Inside the circle where it would be protected.’

&n
bsp; ‘And that’s where the dummy would’ve been.’

  ‘Where the King sat. His crown askew. Baggy trousers tied at the waist with red and yellow binder twine. All the energy channelled through him, and he never knew. Never even thought of it. God…’

  Merrily said, ‘Why did you go down there? When you were here on your own?

  ‘Because… because I’d walked all around and couldn’t sense Peter anywhere, I just… He’d gone, you see, and suddenly I couldn’t stand that. The man who’d had more impact on my life than anyone at Oxford, any head-of-chambers. I wanted to be with him, one more time. To get some guidance.’

  ‘And was he there?’

  Claudia was sitting on a bail of straw, as if she’d felt suddenly weak.

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t know.’

  Bliss looked irritated.

  He went down.

  Presently, the lights came on in the cellar. Sounds of Bliss unlocking a door, but there was a long period of hush before Merrily heard his moan.

  57

  English corruption

  BETTY SAID, ‘FUNNY how you don’t see things. Really obvious things.’

  Robin held tight to his mug of tea. He’d been resistant to tea for so long; now, sometimes, he couldn’t get enough, and it couldn’t be too hot, couldn’t be too strong.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Betty said.

  Looking at Gwyn Arthur Jones, an old golem in a drooping suit. A discontinued line in cops.

  ‘Actually, Betty, I didn’t. When you have a name like Jones, these conceits seem so far removed from your own kind of reality as to appear quite nonsensical.’

  ‘You think it was a conceit?’

  ‘Perhaps a genealogist would say otherwise, I don’t know. Anyone can prove anything. If I had the money and the patience I could demonstrate my own line of descent from the Princes of Dyfed. No, no—’ He lifted a hand. ‘I’m not serious.’

  ‘But something lit your lamp,’ Robin said.

  ‘Yes. Something did. Been on the back-burner for so long that I lacked the courage to approach it. What business was it of mine, an old copper with a long nose and too much time on his hands?’