by Emby Press
“Weeks notified us that Davenport was the man we were looking for,” Routledge said. “We believe that something came out during the course of the interrogation which supported this belief, and that the suspect reacted violently.”
Details of the investigation have not been made public and charges are still pending as prosecutors continue to collect evidence. Davenport is being held without bail in the county jail.
THE BROKEN CHOIR
David Annandale
The address on Chester Square was across from Saint Michael’s Church. Agnes St John wanted to see a good omen in that fact. She paused with her hand on the bell and looked back at the church. It did not give her the comfort she expected. In the dusk, the façade was an idiot face. The red doors were shocked mouths. The windows were blank eyes. Saint Michael’s mocked her with the wrong kind of symmetry. She had come here to save a church that was falling into shadow. Now another gazed at her as if tainted by the same darkness.
It didn’t follow you here, she told herself. She turned away from Saint Michael’s and rang the bell.
The door was no different from the others in the elegant block of apartments. The man who opened it, though, was not what Agnes had been expecting. He wasn’t in butler’s livery. He wore a dark, nondescript suit that would have made him unremarkable on most of the city’s streets. His frame was muscular, and though his smile was warm, his face was hard. It was scarred, and there was a strange sheen to his skin. Agnes suspected he’d had reconstructive surgery. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, though he seemed older. That was true of many of the men she knew of that age. It was true of her husband. The impact of the Great War was still visible, eight years after its end.
“Mrs. St John?” the man asked. “Do come in. Dame Arabella is expecting you.” He stood aside for her to enter, then led the way up the stairs. “My name is Hardknott,” he said.
Hardknott? Agnes thought. That didn’t seem likely. Though it did fit him more naturally than the suit.
The suite of rooms he brought her to was a large one. They walked down a long hall made narrow by the bookcases that lined both walls. At the far end was a sitting room whose windows overlooked the church. There was a fire in the hearth, and the armchairs drawn around it were an inviting refuge from the early October chill. Less inviting were the trophies on the walls. Agnes saw masks that looked like skulls, and skulls she thought at first were masks. There were other objects she could not identify, but they disturbed her with twisted shapes and perverse intricacy of design. Many of the trophies were surrounded by two concentric circles, between which were symbols that made her even more uneasy.
Every flat surface in the room was stacked high with books, and the woman Agnes had come to see stood beside an overloaded accent table, leafing through a volume with irritated energy.
“He really should know better,” she said without looking up.
“Mrs. Agnes St John,” Hardknott said. “Dame Arabella Letifer.”
“Do sit down, Mrs. St John,” Letifer said, still focussed on the book, still turning the pages as if disciplining them. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” She was a wiry, angular woman in her fifties. Her dark hair was up, and she was dressed, to Agnes’s surprise, in trousers and blouse. Her cheekbones were pronounced. Her eyes were dark and flint-sharp. She snorted as she leafed through the last few pages, and though her gaze was angry, her lips were set in a tight, sardonic smile that suggested she had expected little better from the author of that tome.
Hardknott brought Agnes to a chair on the left of the hearth. The moment after she sat, Letifer closed the book with snap, slapped it down on the stack that teetered, but did not fall, and strode over to the fireplace.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. St John,” she said. “A colleague has just published a very foolish book, and sometimes I can’t tear myself away from folly until I have fully plumbed its depths. You’ve heard of Fulcanelli?”
“I can’t say that I—”
“Good. No one should.”
“He’s a charlatan?”
“What?” Letifer blinked, surprised. “No, not at all. His research is brilliant. But he lacks judgement. His work is not for general consumption. He may think his 300 copies of Le Mystère des Cathédrales counts as limited circulation, but not for what he unveils there. Anything more than a single copy would be madness. He’s taking a chance setting this down at all.” She shook her head. “I fear he will fall into a silence not of his own choosing.” She waved off the subject and stood with her back to the fire. “So,” she said. “You have a story of your own, I understand.”
Agnes nodded. She was conscious of clasping her hands so tightly her knuckles were turning white. Her fingers felt as if they were fused together. “I…” She swallowed and glanced around. Hardknott had withdrawn to a chair near the doorway. He gave her a nod. She looked at Letifer again, finding her more intimidating than the big man who worked for her. “My aunt said I should speak to you,” she began. “She said if anyone knew what to do…” She trailed off at the look of impatience on Letifer’s face. She tried again. “I fear for my husband,” she said. “I fear for his mind. And his soul.”
“If this is a case of insanity,” Letifer said, “I cannot help you. That is not my field of expertise.”
“No, please! I… I think he is being driven insane,” said Agnes, “by something inhuman.”
“Good. That is more direct and relevant. Please continue, Mrs. St John. Give me the particulars.”
Agnes took a breath and launched in. She had rehearsed what she had to say during the train journey to London. Her aunt had warned her to be detailed and clear. But under Letifer’s gaze she found it difficult to compose her thoughts. She kept her eyes on the fire as she spoke, worried that if she looked up, she would start to babble.
“My husband, Harold, is the vicar of Saint Michael and All Angels, at Fainstowe.” She glanced at Letifer to see if the coincidence of the church’s name being so close to the one outside the Dame’s window provoked a reaction. It did not. She continued, “His posting is a recent one. We moved to Fainstowe less than a year ago. Our first several months there were without incident. Then, at the Easter Sunday service, Harold began to complain that the choir was signing off-key. This surprised me, as he has not had musical instruction, whereas I have. In fact, his tin ear has long been something of a joke between us. He was, however, quite put out, and I made a point of listening carefully to the next few services. I heard nothing wrong, and told him so.
“He was not satisfied. He continued to maintain the sound was discordant. As the weeks passed, the problem became much more than an irritant for him. He began to talk of little else. His nights became restless. I don’t believe he has had more than two consecutive hours of sleep for over three months now. He is exhausted. He barely eats. He dreads performing his duties, but once he is in the church, it is hard to make him leave. Even after the service, he remains at the pulpit, listening. He claims the echoes linger. He still hears something.”
“You said you heard nothing,” Letifer remarked. “Since we are having this conversation, I presume that changed.”
Agnes nodded. “I began to notice something a few weeks ago. The effect is hard to describe. It is as if there were a crack running through the sound of the choir. It is very disturbing. This one flaw makes everything wrong. The hymns sound like blasphemies.”
“What about the members of the choir themselves or the congregation? Have you spoken to them about this?”
“Indirectly. No one has admitted to hearing anything amiss. But our congregation is dwindling, and more and more of the singers, especially the younger boys, are leaving the choir or are absent due to illness.”
“You told your husband that you could hear the discord?”
“I did.” She paused again, swallowing back the tears that rose at the memory of his face. “It gave him no comfort. He barely listened. He is hearing so much more now. He says he has identified th
e flaw in the choir. There is a single voice. It is singing in time with the hymn, but the pitch is wrong, and so are the words.”
“What words?” Letifer’s voice was sharp.
“He doesn’t understand them. Not yet. He feels he is on the verge.” And now tears came. Not of grief, but of fear. “Yesterday,” she whispered, “I started to hear the voice too.”
“Describe it.”
“It seems to be coming from a great distance. I think if it were close, it would deafen us. It rages. I know it is mad, Dame Arabella. I cannot tell you why, but whatever has that voice is utterly mad. And it cannot be anything human.” She looked up from the fire now, pleading to this woman with the dark, unnerving eyes. “I’m terrified that I will start to make out the words soon too. And what will happen to Harold when he deciphers them? Can you help us?”
“I will do what I can,” Letifer said. “We will leave for Fainstowe in the morning.” She turned to Hardknott, “I shall make our preparations. In the meantime, I think Mrs. St John could do with a rest. Will you see her to one of the guest bedrooms?”
“Thank you,” Agnes whispered. “Thank you.” Her story told, her mission accomplished, she felt the exhaustion of months rushing over her.
Standing was difficult, and Hardknott appeared at her side to help her. Dame Arabella left the sitting room through a door to the right of the fireplace. Agnes caught a glimpse of a study even more crowded with books than the other rooms.
As she let Hardknott lead her from the living room, she eyed the trophies again. He must have noticed her disquiet. He said, “Don’t let them worry you.”
“Are they quite safe?”
“They would not be on the wall if they were not.”
“And are they real?” The skulls were neither animal nor human. She hoped Hardknott would tell her they were fakes.
“Dame Arabella says they believed themselves to be real,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. Not completely.” He shrugged and rubbed a finger along a fresher scar that ran the length of his neck. “Seemed real enough to me.” He grinned.
Agnes shuddered. “But why does she keep them on display?”
“Reminders,” he said. He was sombre now. “Reminders that there are such things.”
As they headed down the hall, Agnes spotted a framed photograph on a rare bit of wall not blocked by bookshelves. It was a wedding picture. The man wore a military uniform. The woman bore a strong resemblance to Letifer.
“Her daughter,” Hardknott said. “She met a Canadian soldier at Passchendaele. Name of Blaylock. They emigrated after the war.”
The photograph and its story were reassuring. It meant there were some things about Dame Arabella that Agnes could think of as “normal.” She imagined a wartime romance blossoming between a nurse and an injured soldier. “He was wounded at Passchendaele, was he?” she asked.
“I’m not sure about him,” Hardknott said. “I know she was.”
The fragile illusion of the everyday vanished again. But that was good, Agnes insisted to herself. That was for the best. She and Harold needed someone far from normal to save them from the voice in the choir.
*
The next morning they took the train to the southwest from Waterloo, changed at Exeter, and arrived in Fainstowe, on the Cornish coast, late in the afternoon. The church of Saint Michael and All Angels was at the western edge of the village. It was close to the cliffs. Its cemetery extended to the edge, and some graves had been lost to erosion over the centuries. It had a commanding view of the Atlantic. Letifer walked around it, absorbing its situation, before she let Agnes take her and Hardknott to the vicarage. The geographical and geological variables were important. Before heading out, she had verified that Fainstowe was not in close proximity to any ley lines. But those were not the only form of power that came from the earth. A combination of elements, each present by chance, could, when brought together, have huge symbolic resonance. Letifer had known cases where the right architecture at the right location had the force of the most powerful of rituals.
She stood for several minutes at the cliff edge. On either side of her, tombstones leaned into space. Hundreds of feet below, the waves crashed against the rocks. The beat of the ocean was deep. It was the slow pulse of Leviathan, and the roar of the surf was its rasping breath. She turned to look at the church. The human monument to the infinite overlooked the slow inevitability of decay. The pounding of the waves would be audible inside as well. The grinding sound of everything passing was inescapable.
She did not know if her reading of the land was significant. It was suggestive, however. She would do well, she decided, to keep it in mind.
She closed her eyes and examined her mental image of the church and its surroundings. She opened her eyes and compared the reality with her memory construct. She made a few more mental notes on the details of the graves and the height of the spire. Satisfied, she left the cemetery to meet up again with Hardknott and Agnes by the front door. Agnes, who had seemed almost hopeful on the train, was looking very anxious again.
“I went to the house while we were waiting,” Agnes said. “Mr. Hardknott said it would be all right. Harold isn’t there. He must be in the church.”
“Normally he would not be?”
“Not this long before Evensong.”
Letifer nodded. “Then let us go in and meet your husband.”
Unlike Saint Michael’s in Chester Square, this church was authentic Gothic. It had lost its stained glass windows during the Civil War, and it was in need of restoration. The walls were dark with candle smoke. The lines of the vaults were gnawed by time. More erosion, Letifer thought. More signs that the human conception of eternity was lacking.
The Reverend Harold St John stood in the pulpit. He gripped its railing hard so hard that even in the dim light, the trembling of his arms was visible. He had always been a thin man, Letifer knew from the portrait Agnes had shown her, but he was far past gaunt now. His cheeks were sunken. His eyes appeared to have receded deep into his skull. His hair was lank. His clerical robes hung from his frame like vestments of the grave. His head was cocked to one side, and he was frowning in concentration. His lips were moving, like a child sounding out unfamiliar words.
Agnes staggered as soon as they crossed the threshold. She collapsed in the nearest pew and covered her ears. “Can you hear it?” she cried.
Letifer could not. She glanced at Hardknott. He shook his head. There was nothing audible to either of them. Given time, there would be. Time neither of the St Johns could afford. Letifer closed her eyes and listened at a deeper level. She was taking a risk, potentially opening herself to whatever influence was at work in the church. But the risk was a calculated one. The force had taken months to tighten its grip around its victims. She had spent much of the previous night going through her files, and there were no records of prior trouble in Fainstowe. Something had entered Saint Michael and All Angels recently. She could, she was reasonably sure, take the chance to learn something of the nature of her adversary.
She listened with all the discipline and rigour acquired from decades in the occult battlefield. She listened to the space of the church. She listened to muffled pounding of the ocean. She thought about the slow fall to ruin of the cemetery. She let herself feel the immanence of decay. And there, very faintly, at the very limits of her perception, she found the flaw. It was beyond sound, but a phenomenon that would manifest itself first to the human consciousness as sound. It was discord. It was the symptom of something that should not be the thing it had become.
She opened her eyes. Hardknott was watching her. “Were you successful?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” She felt she had brushed against a contradiction whose existence was a great threat. “There is something here that is awry,” she said. “And not in any sense that I have encountered before.” She needed to know more in order to act, but she did not dare expose herself more than
she had. Already she could feel a tightened expectation in the air of the church, as if something had noticed her.
She turned to Agnes. “Mrs. St John,” she said. She had to call her two more times before the other woman looked up. “Leave the church. Wait for us at the vicarage.”
“But Harold…”
“There is nothing you can do for him here. But he may well need you later, and you cannot help anyone in this place. It has too strong a hold on you now.”
Agnes nodded, slowly, as if her skull was made of lead. She staggered to her feet. Hardknott moved to help her, but Letifer put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “She will manage. Go to Reverend St John. Bring him to the altar.”
Hardknott did as she asked. The doors of the church closed behind Agnes with a hollow clang as Hardknott guided the vicar from the pulpit. Harold did not resist, but nor did he notice the other man’s presence. His concentration did not break. He was still trying to sound out words.
“Make him lie down on it,” Letifer said. While Hardknott manoeuvred the unresisting vicar into a prone position, Letifer pulled chalk out of her travel bag and began to draw a circle around the altar. Protection upon protection: she was reinforcing the locus of the church’s strength. She made two concentric rings. Between them, she began to inscribe the runes prescribed by the Key of Solomon. But then the Reverend St John spoke, and stopped her cold.
She rose from her crouch and stared at the man. Her fingers were numb and tingling. She must have misheard. He couldn’t have said what she thought. His face was contorted in agony as his lips struggled to give birth to more syllables.
“What was that he said?” Hardknott asked.
Letifer held up a hand to keep him quiet. She approached the altar and knelt beside Harold. She held her breath and listened. He spoke again. The sound was barely louder than a whisper. It was more groan than speech. But there was no mistake this time.