by Phil Rickman
But old habits die hard. Once a priest…
Yes, all right, Guv, I confess, I've never exactly been up there with Mother Theresa and Pope John the Twenty-third. I've cut a few corners. I've coveted my neighbour's wife. OK, several wives of several neighbours, and it wouldn't be half so bad if it had only stopped at the coveting stage. I was weak. I used to think it was OK, as long as you left the choirboys alone, but I was never attracted to choirboys, anyway, obnoxious little sods.
Here, Boss, scrap of prayer for you, this'll bring back a few memories.
Oh God, merciful Father, that despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart…
Got the message? I'm sorry… I really am sorry.
Listen, I know about the Sins of the Fathers. I know all about that.
But not Fay, please – look at her; what has she ever done to you?
Thing is – look, don't take this the wrong way, but no God of mine ever took it out on the kids. That's more his god's style. Can you see him there? He represents everything you're supposed to abhor. And he's winning, damn it, the bastard's winning!
OK, here's another bit, how much do you want, for Christ's sake? Listen, this… this is the essence of it.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night…
Lighten our darkness, geddit?
Come on, Guv'nor… we had a deal…
The stone actually broke. Cracked in two.
Split off a couple of feet from the base just as Gomer was getting underneath. Raised the shovel to ground level to have another go and gave it a bit of a clonk, accidental-like, and off it came like a thumb in a bacon-slicer. Gomer backed up, smartish, but luckily the big bugger fell the other way, straight flat across the road. Whump!
'Teach me to rush ihe job, Minnie. 'Ang on to your, er…hat.'
Slipping down to low gear he drove right over the thing. Bit of a bump, but not much worse than one of them ramps they call a sleeping policeman.
'A big fat sleeping policeman.' Gomer burst out laughing. 'Call it Wynford Wiley.'
There were big, fat tyre-marks across the middle of the stone. Gomer accelerated past Keeper's Cottage with a disparaging sideways glance. That could do with knocking down, too.
There was the merest tremor in Trow's gaze; enough for her to pull her eyes away. Turned to her father and found that Hilary Ivory on the other side, had also turned her face, with faint confusion, towards the old man in the Kate Bush T-shirt.
Alex tried to smile. He couldn't speak.
Hilary looked at Fay, her eyes troubled. She didn't understand. The first step to recovery – the moment when, quite suddenly, you don't understand.
But Alex's hands were warm.
Dad?
A deep warmth seeped into Fay's right hand and rippled up her arm and into her breast. She could feel her heart drumming.
Alex's eyes were vibrantly blue. They made the fire in the sky look cheap and lurid. He turned his head towards Hilary lvory and she started to smile, like people smile when they're coming out of anaesthetic.
Alex's hand tightened around Fay's.
Fay grinned.
'You old bugger,' she said, quite easily.
On the other side, Larry Ember, recipient of the warmth from her own left hand, demanded gruffly, 'What the bleedin' hell's this?'
Alex's lips were white. Almost as white as the beard around them. First they tried to smile, then they were trying to shape a word.
'C…'
His hands hot now, but his lips were white.
'Dad?'
Fay squeezed his hand, almost too hot to hold.
She felt strong enough to risk a glance to the centre of the square where Trow was no longer still, but moving within his own darkness. Squirming.
Trow screamed once,
'Michael!'
The cello grotesquely off-key.
Alex found his word.
'Colonel?' he said mildly, and the piercing blue faded from his eyes; clouds were in them now. He dropped Hilary's hand, held on to Fay's for an extra moment and then let that go too.
There was a gap now between Fay and her dad, a clear gap in the circle, and the backcloth, the screen of false reality, was torn away and the flames in the sky were no longer phantasmal but a source of savage heat and acrid fumes.
'Now.' Col Croston's crisp voice, and the Crybbe hordes poured through the gap, bearing their flaming torches, farmers in tweed trousers and sleeveless body-warmers over their vests, Bill Davies, incongruously clad in his butcher's apron, Wynford Wiley ludicrously wielding his truncheon. Faces she'd seen on the streets – 'Ow're you, 'ow're you' – now hard with determination below the blazing brands. The circle in disarray.
Lights appearing in windows. From somewhere in the innards of the Cock, the sound of a generator starting up.
Col Croston, bringing up the rear, scanning the square.
'Over there! That's the man. The Sheriff! Don't let him…'
The Sheriff?
'Right!' Fav was screaming. 'The Sheriff! He's in the cen…'
But she couldn't, in fact, see the man they were looking for. Andy Boulton-Trow had gone from the square.
He's taken his darkness back into the night.
'Larry! Camera!'
Guy was in a mess. He'd lost his jacket, lost his cool, lost his hair. 'Larry, we have to get this…'
'Piss off, Guy,' Larry Ember shouted happily, from somewhere.
Fay found she was giggling. Hysterics. Absurd.
'Dad?'
Alex managed a smile.
'Dad… We did it! You did it.'
Alex touched her arm, stumbled. Sat down quietly on the cobbles. Fay went down beside him, taking his hand.
Which was not so hot any more, not very hot at all. The blue in his eyes had drifted away. Far away. Gently and discreetly, Alex slid over on to his side. He was breading. Just. Hilary Ivory crouched down next to Fay. 'Is he OK? I used be a… a nurse… Well, sort of alternative nurse, really.'
Fay didn't reply. She pulled off her cotton top, rolled it into a ball, slid it between Alex's head and the cobbles.
'Dad?' Softly.
Fairly sure he couldn't hear her.
She picked up his hand; very little warmth remained. Alex's lips moved and she put an ear to his mouth. One word came out intact.
'Deal,' he said.
Alex's breathing ended almost imperceptibly.
Fay sat for a long time on the cobbles holding her father's cooling hand under the hot red sky.
CHAPTER II
A single candle burned in the attic at Crybbe Court. It was two inches thick and sat in a blackened pewter candle-holder with a tray, laid on the topmost stone step. It was a tallow candle and it stank; it filled the roofspace with a pungent organic stench; it reeked, somehow, of death.
Or perhaps this was because of the wan and waxy aura it gave to the rope.
The old, frayed rope which had hung from the central joist in the attic was gone. Its replacement was probably just as old, but was oily and strong. An inch thick, it dangled four feet from the apex of the roof, and at the end was a noose, a very traditional hangman's noose secured with ten rings of rope. It was into this noose that Andy Boulton-Trow fitted his head.
He had, it would emerge, studied hanging.
The original short-drop method, with the rope only a few feet long and the condemned person's feet almost touching the ground, resulted in a rather prolonged death by slow strangulation. Whereas the long-drop system, introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century, by which the subject fell about ten feet, perhaps through a trapdoor, brought about a swifter and more merciful death by fracturing neck vertebrae. In the sixteenth century, it appeared. Sir Michael Wort had experimented with both techniques and others besides.
A trapdoor had been constructed in the attic floor, originally to dispose of bodies after execution by dropping them into a narrow, windowless, well-like
chamber directly underneath.
In later years, more squeamish owners of the house had boarded over the trapdoor space, but the floor remained weak at this point, the boards had rotted, there were cracks. When Andy Boulton-Trow stood on the beam, nearly two feet thick, from which the executees – and Sir Michael himself – had taken a final step, he could see a few jagged black holes below his feet.
First, he had taken off his shoes and his trousers, so that he stood naked now in the candlelight with the noose loosely around his neck.
For the purposes of magical projection, a modification of the short-drop method was the most appropriate. That it had worked, to a significant extent, for Michael had been amply demonstrated to Andy tonight. Andy, who had spent twice as many years as Michael in study and preparation, was warm after his sprint through the wood, still angry at the damage to the stone and the debacle in the square. But the night was churning with chaos, and out of chaos…
There was little time to waste. He was hot inside, with excitement and anticipation.
To make sure everything was still in working order, he and Humble had once hanged a fisherman Humble had chanced upon, casting alone into the upper reaches of the river. It had not really been necessary, but Humble had enjoyed it.
Just as Humble would enjoy watching Andy hang. So why wasn't he here?
Perhaps he was. Humble could be quite discreet.
Andy put both hands behind his head and tightened and adjusted the noose under his chin. It was so easy to make a mistake.
He stood on the floor-joist in the candlelight and began to visualize, to bring himself to the necessary state of arousal.
He visualized the woman who'd looked at him across the square, telling him with her eyes that she was slipping out of the enchantment. Andy smiled; he would return for her one night, quite soon perhaps.
A small wind drifted through the holes in the slates; there was no wind tonight.
'Good evening, Michael,' Andy said. 'Again.'
He closed his eyes, and Michael was within him once more – a now familiar sensation. In his solar plexus he felt a stillness which was also a stirring, and there was the familiar small tug at the base of his spine.
In time, the walls of the Court evaporated, and he saw the town at his feet. He held back, and the vapours rose within him. He felt the blazing chaos that was Crybbe, the dissolution of barriers, the merging of the layers, one with another, the lower levels open to the higher levels, the atmosphere awash with spirit.
He felt his destination.
And when the time was right, he stepped lightly from the beam.
There was a bright light, a widening carpet of light, and something rolling along it, towards him.
This was the first thing he was really aware of after he stepped into space and the noose tightened above his Adam's apple.
There was no pain, only darkness and then the carpet of night and the thing that was rolling.
Rolling very slowly at first, but its momentum was increasing. And then he was staring into the face of Michael Wort.
The eyes had gone. The lips had gone. There was some hair, but not much; most of the beard had disappeared. There were gaps in the ghastly brown and yellow grin; few people in Michael's day had kept their teeth beyond middle age.
'Michael,' he said eventually.
The noose was still around his neck but it was slack. There was no pain in speech.
Behind the lamp, he saw a pair of sneakers and legs in muddy jeans.
'He came with me,' Joe Powys said. 'He couldn't manage the steps on his own.'
Andy had smashed through the floor, spinning and twisting. He'd screamed once, but it had sounded more like triumph than terror, suggesting he was unaware of anything having gone wrong.
Well, you wouldn't be, if this was the first time you'd hanged yourself.
The way he was lying in the centre of the windowless, stone chamber was bent, unnatural. Powys said, with little concern, 'Can you move?'
'I don't know,' Andy said, his feelings sheathed. 'What did you do?'
'I saved your life.'
'Thanks,' Andy said. 'You fucker.'
Powys said nothing. He was shaking.
'Humble,' Andy said, after a while. 'He was supposed to have killed you.'
'Yeah?'
'He will.'
'Can't see it,' Powys said, 'somehow.'
He had the feeling both of them were in shock. He put a hand out to the wall; it was dry again, and dusty. The Court was a dead place again. The room was narrow enough for there to be an enforced intimacy, and yet there was a distance, too, because the Court was dead.
'I nearly killed myself, though,' he said, still appalled enough at what might have happened to want to hear himself talk about it. 'Seems absolutely bloody insane when I look back, but I had this idea that the only way I could straighten this out was to take the head up to the prospect chamber and hurl us both out. I couldn't have been thinking straight. Well, obviously. But you don't, do you, in these situations?'
'And what stopped you,' Andy asked him, 'from killing yourself?'
Powys smiled weakly. 'Couldn't get in. The door in the alcove was locked, and there was a sign that said: Danger. Keep Out.'
The final bitter irony. Rachel had saved his life. He'd stood outside the door, on the greasy stairs, and felt her there again, cool and silvery. You really can do better than this, J.M.
'So then I saw the light in the attic. Thought maybe you were up there, but there was only one rope. Hate nooses. Went back outside and broke into the stable-block, through window, with a brick. I pinched a bread knife. Brought it up to the attic and sawed through most of the rope until it was just hanging together by a few threads. Where I'd cut it, I covered it up with the coils of the noose.'
He saw that Andy was thinking very hard, the muscles in his face working.
'I figured it out,' Powys said. 'It came clear. When I saw the noose. You were going to do' – he pointed a foot at the head – 'what he did. On the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. I couldn't believe it at first. I can't understand that level of obsession.'
'Of course you can't.' Andy glanced up at him, eyes heavy with contempt. 'You puny little cunt.'
'We're talking sex magic, aren't we? I was once at a signing session for Golden Land. Some regional book fair, and one of the other writers there was this retired pathologist. He said, apropos of something, that a remarkable number of hangings which look like suicide are actually accidents. Blokes – or teenage kids in a lot of cases – trying for this uniquely mind-blowing sexual buzz you're supposed to get from hanging by the neck.
Like, when the rope jerks, you jerk off down there, too. That it?'
Andy said nothing. Powys could see him trying surreptitiously to move different muscles.
'And with sex magic, you use the build up of sexual tension to harden and focus your will. And then, at the moment of orgasm… whoosh. Max Goff used to play about with it. Who taught him? You?'
Andy was stretching his neck, easing it from side to side.
'Sex and death. Hell of a powerful combination. This was how Black Michael pro…'
'Don't call him that,' Andy snapped.
'This was how Sir Michael Wort…' Bloody hell, Joe Powys always does what he's told… 'This was how Black fucking Michael projected himself into Crybbe, fused his spirit with the spirit of the town so that the town is the man is the town is the…'
Andy stopped trying to flex muscles and stared at Powys in the electric lamplight, and his eyes were so strange that Powys wasn't sure any more which of them he was talking to, Andy or Michael. But, clearly, the stage Andy had been striving to reach was something that went beyond personalities.
'What did it really mean, though?' Powys said. 'Was it simply a quest for eternal power? Some kind of semi-physical immortally?'
You have to fracture the cool, he remembered telling himself. To damage this guy, you have to tip his balance, dislodge him from his menta
l lotus position. Even lying there, with unknown injuries, he can, maybe, still take you unawares.
'Or is it,' Powys said casually, 'just the ultimate ego-trip? Getting your end away from beyond the grave?'
He had to look away. The blackness from Andy's eyes came out like iron spikes.
Iron spikes. Images of Rose cruelly speared his own cool and he stared back into the eyes of the thing that had dispassionately manipulated their fate.
'I can't move,' Andy said suddenly, the first sign of human panic, 'I can't fucking move, Joe. I can't move my arms or legs. I'm fucking paralysed.'
'What I think…' Powys remembered conversations with Barry the osteopath, his neighbour in the Trackways building '… is your back was broken in the fall. You can obviously move your neck. What about your shoulders? Try shrugging your shoulders.'
Andy's shoulders convulsed. There was a sudden sheen of sweat on his body.
'How's your breathing?'
'I can breathe.'
'In that case,' Powys said slowly and callously, 'you'll probably be what's known as a tetraplegic. It won't be much fun, but no doubt a lot of innocent people'll be saved a lot of grief by your confinement in Stoke Mandeville or wherever you wind up.'
'You're a worthless piece of shit, Joe.'
'Me? I'm shit?'
'You couldn't even kill me.'
'You're safer like this. Dead, you could be a problem.'
Andy turned his head and looked into the eye-sockets of Black Michael. As an exercise in mummification, Powys thought, Michael had turned out to be rather less impressive than Tiddles.
He said, 'Where are the other bits buried?'
'Why should I tell you that?'
'The head, naturally, was in the Tump. Did you ever go into the Tump? Physically, I mean.'
'No.'
'And the genitals are under the Cock. Walled up somewhere in the cellars, I'd guess, somewhere directly beneath that passageway leading to the studio. The heart under the church – is there a crypt?'