by Graham Joyce
My scalp flushed. I stopped. "Seamus?"
Shuffling forward in his greatcoat was the old soldier from the Gulf, his head shaved, his eyes like black caverns. I heard a ringing in my ears. My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
I felt Yasmin's arm urging me forward, but I was cemented to the spot. As the figure came into the light I saw clearly that it was indeed Seamus; then in the next moment a light travelled over his face and he was not Seamus at all, but some other beggar looking for a handout. But I was too chilled at heart to respond to him.
Yasmin stepped forward and handed him a few coins. Then she linked arms with me. "Come on," she breathed.
"You're not having a good night, are you?" she said to me after we'd passed on well beyond the vagrant. "What did you see back there?"
"The old soldier. The one who blew himself up outside Buckingham Palace."
"You hallucinated?"
"Yes," I said. "No. You know what? I'd really like to go home now. I don't feel good."
She looked concerned, but didn't argue. We crossed the road so we could each pick up a taxi to our respective homes. Finally one drew up and I insisted she take it. She climbed inside. I closed the door on her perplexed expression, and the cab pulled away. Well, I thought, at least now she knows what she's dealing with: that's the last I'll see of her.
Chapter 23
Fay telephoned me at work. There had been some trouble: Robbie had been beaten up at school. She wanted me to go round to the house, which I did.
Claire hugged me as she always does. Claire is the most uncomplicated person I have ever met. She is utterly free of demons. They can't find a kink or a bobble or an abrasion to hang on to. They slip from her like water slides from porcelain. She's not the brightest of souls but she is mercifully free. I don't have favourites; but she's my favourite.
Lucien was in the kitchen, uncorking a bottle of wine as I went in. He's had the kitchen completely remodelled, even though Fay and I had had a new kitchen just twelve months before he moved in. The new kitchen has lots of stainless-steel wine-racks and spice-harbours and pan-hangers and utensil-ports and condiment-docks. Lucien is a fucking tart. I don't like to see pear-shaped, middle-aged men with their long, greasy grey hair flapping over their collars. He also has massive balls of ear-hair. Even if he hadn't stolen my wife and family I think the mildest of men would feel compelled to pummel him with a cricket bat.
It was with great pleasure that I rejected his offer of a glass of Mouton Rothschild, opened especially to impress me. "It's a little early for me," I said.
He made a funny noise. It sounded like the word ewe. Drawn out. Fay looked like she wanted to strangle me, especially now that the cork was out of the bottle. "Where's Robbie then?" I said.
"He's in the living room."
I don't know what I expected. Maybe to see him with blood on his shirt front, or with a split lip. He was playing some computer game called Kill the Bitch on the vast flat-screen TV Lucien had installed there. Not a scratch on him.
"Been in the wars?" I said.
He didn't look up from his game. "Bit."
I sat down and watched him for a few minutes as he exacted unspecified revenge on some prancing female electronic ninja, the blue light reflected from the LCD screen washing over his face.
"Are you okay, Robbie?"
He shrugged.
He wasn't letting me in. I couldn't do anything, and the truth was my heart was in shreds. When and where had I lost him? I'd worshipped the boy for the first dozen years of his life, and he'd worshipped me. Sometimes the thing between a father and his boy can be even more tender than the thing with his girls. And then one day he stuffed a lot of attitude into a kit bag and ran away to sea in some distant geography unknown to me.
"Well, so long as you're okay, I'll go, then."
He shrugged again, his thumbs working feverishly on his game-pad.
"Sarah is staying at my place. Come round and see her any time."
"Right."
I went back into the kitchen. Fay and Lucien were waiting with a sense of expectation. Claire was perched in the corner on a high stool, trying to read my face. "He's fine," I said.
Fay bristled. "You didn't see the state he came home in."
"What happened?"
"Some brute pushed him into a wall."
"He looks in pretty good shape to me."
Fay folded her arms and turned her back on me. Lucien intervened and said, "William, we have to talk."
"Go ahead. I'm all ears."
"We've got to pull him out of that hellhole."
"Pull him out? You make it sound like pulling out of Iraq. It's a good school. I checked the stats. It's one of the best state schools in all of London. I wouldn't send him there otherwise."
"We should send him back to Glastonhall. Give the boy half a chance."
"Am I stopping you?"
"It's about the money, of course."
"What did you pay for this kitchen?"
"Oh," Lucien said. "Puh-lease." It was one of his catchphrases from his TV programme.
I made a bit of a show of looking at my watch. "I have to be in town for seven," I said.
Fay turned round to face me. "You gutless worm," she said.
"Mum!" said Claire.
I stared hard at my ex-wife. "Fay. I've never ever laid a finger on you or mistreated you, or even abused you verbally like that in twenty-two years. But if you insult me again in front of Claire or any of our children I'll slap your face very hard."
Lucien made to speak, but I turned to face him and he got a sudden blast of the heat of my rage. He thought better of opening his mouth and he was right to. I was boiling. "Claire, come and see me to the door."
Claire kissed me before I left the house and I walked down the street trembling. I was on fire. Christ, I could have done with a glass of that very fine Mouton Rothschild.
How many coincidences are we prepared to tolerate, how much synchronicity, how many flukes, chances, twists of fate, what degree of happenstance, how much weird correlation will we be prepared to ignore before we finally throw up our hands and say that cause and effect is not the only ballgame in the universe? When do we admit that rationality is just something useful we made up to help us along? A map and compass don't hold back the night. How much disastrous scientific progress do we make before we stop calling it progress? When do we stop pretending that instrumental reason has no dark side? I was a student at the time, and I hadn't even been awarded my degree: I wasn't posing these questions to myself, I just wanted to figure out how I could save Mandy.
Four girls out of five. Lin, Sandie and Rachel had been snuffed out like candle flames and Sharon's life had been blighted. I stacked it up and resized it this way and that. I told myself it was a coincidence. A freak alignment. I wished I hadn't burned the photographs of them all that I'd taken from the attic. I wondered if there was some way I could undo it all.
I nursed murderous notions about Fraser. I actually did contemplate ways in which I might kill him and try to make it look like an accident. I really did. I wondered if he might be taken in a trade-off. Of course there was never a possibility of my coming close to doing him any real harm. Just because I harboured these thoughts didn't mean I was about to enact them. But the more I thought about Mandy, the more I needed to protect her.
It occurred to me to try to offer myself.
I was winging it. I didn't really know what I was trying to do, or undo, or re-do. All I had was the fake manuscript of rituals that I'd concocted only for Fraser to get his diseased hands on. That and the attic venue.
I stopped having sex with Mandy: I felt like I was a contamination. I made up some excuse about having the flu. Then I made up some other lie to put her off the scent: I said I was going home to see my mother for a couple of days. In fact I went back to my room in Friarsfield Lodge and pretty much locked myself away from everyone for three days.
There was a plague of notes pushed under my door, al
l from Fraser. I didn't read them. I didn't even want to touch anything he'd touched. I scooped his notes into the metal waste bin, squirted them with lighter fuel and incinerated them. Then I washed my hands.
I only left Friarsfield Lodge on one occasion, and that was to buy a loaf of bread and some tins of soup, all of which I could eat cold in my room. I had such little appetite anyway, and I'd genuinely developed a light fever that was preventing me from sleeping well. Each morning I'd wait for the Lodge to empty as the students went off to lectures before I would use the bathroom. The cleaners only entered our rooms on a weekly basis, so they were easy to dodge. Of course, there were always a couple of malingerers who couldn't be bothered to get up for lectures but even these tended not to hang around the Lodge during the daytime.
I spent my time studying the manuscript I had forged. I also made a few preparatory visits to the attic. The door was locked still, but of course I knew how to get in by the side panel.
The place was creepy and stale. Each time I stole in by lifting the panel a kind of desperate sigh of fresh air went around the attic room. I re-chalked the pentacle and set candle holders and my ceramic pots of salt and sandalwood, etc. on the points of the star. I couldn't stretch to a goat. I didn't know whether the head was necessary or just ornamental in these circumstances.
On the third day I was coming down with a touch of the flu I'd lied about to Mandy. I didn't like the thought that I'd wished it on myself, but I knew that I had. Despite running a fever I knew I had to go ahead. It was a Friday, and my last chance for a few days: the Lodge would be busy and active over the weekend and I wouldn't have the quiet to get on with things.
A night of terrible dreams of utter carnage had mostly kept me awake, so I was up and about long before my fellow students were making their way to breakfast at the refectory before lectures. I propped a mirror on my desk and looked hard at myself. I had planned to cut off all my hair, before very carefully shaving my head. There is a very strong ritual argument for this. Given the state of mind I was in at the time, I wanted to take all precautions and follow all instructions to the letter.
But at the last minute a kind of resolution, an abandonment to the inevitable, washed over me. It hit me with unstoppable conviction that the ritual stuff was all window dressing, or at the most a kind of training for the mind. I felt beyond all that. I believed I was so connected with the forces at large that all I would have to do was sit down and wait for them to come to me.
After I heard the last inmate of the Lodge slam the door closed behind him, I changed my clothes for a thick woolly dressing gown. My head was throbbing so I took three aspirin tablets and washed them down with a big glass of supermarket whisky. Then I went up to the attic.
I think it must have been quite cold in the attic, but with my fever I barely felt it. I lit the candles around the five points of the pentagram star and I placed a photograph of myself in the place where I'd found the photographs of the five girls. Then I lowered myself to the floor, sitting cross-legged in my dressing gown, in the middle of the pentacle.
You have to understand that I was merely going through the motions of ritual in lighting the candles. I'd lost all faith in the improvisations of my fake manuscript. I was committed to summoning whatever entity I was about to encounter by mental force alone. I had some mantras I planned to use simply to stop me from losing focus or falling asleep.
I'd taken off my watch, but the church clock sounded a dull nine bells from somewhere near the town centre, and it was at that time that I began to repeat to myself the mantras, or rather the incantations that I had either been given or I had devised (by now I'd forgotten myself which was which). I knew that persistence was the absolute law, and that while I might be allowed a moment to pause for, say, the taking of a sip of water, any serious break or punctuation would send me right back to the beginning of the process. My faith in all of this was that something that had no basis in authentic ritual—if there is such a thing—had worked for Fraser; therefore something similar would work for me.
I had in my knowledge a key, which was not something of my own invention, but which I'd stumbled across in at least two different sources. It is very difficult over the course of several hours to stop the mind from wandering from its focus. There come moments of distraction, blankness, instances of almost forgetting what one is doing. These lacunae can be plugged or turned by the key I'd discovered, which is to repeat the numbers five, six, seven, and in any language. Five being the number of Man; six being the number of Hell; seven being the number of Heaven. I could do so in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German and of course simply in English. And in those moments when the mind has strayed from its purpose the key is a great comfort, and one almost hears and feels, distantly as it were, the tumbling of the chambers of a lock of cosmic proportion.
Fünf, sechs, sieben.
This device becomes an important reassertion of brain rhythms, and the use of different languages reawakens the supplicant out of the trance which is inevitable but counter-productive.
Pende, exi, efta.
This three-beat count was a lifeline whenever I felt myself coming adrift. It was a yardstick. It was like coming up for air. It was also a numerical amulet.
I broke my chanting only for an occasional sip of water, and used the key to restore the rhythm of the chant. After two or three hours of chanting the mantras and repeating the movements and gestures, the mind becomes open to the most terrible visions: ugly, leering creatures climbing from the silt of the bottommost reaches of the unconscious mind. I was led to understand that the chants and gestures were each a knot in a silver rope that would stretch out until the appointed moment, and that these loathsome creatures represented the weakening of resolve in the psyche, an attempt to loosen each knot, and the numerical count held them at bay before the tying of the next knot.
Cinque, six, sept.
The perspiration was pouring from me. I felt it trickling along my spine and down my neck and in my groin. I sneezed heavily, and became frightened when I thought there was no one to say "bless you." Here I was abasing myself before demons and worrying if my sneeze would open the door to them.
I heard the church bell toll at midday. It felt comforting but enormously distant. Somehow a great, mountainous landscape with brooding skies had opened between me and what should have been the urban location of the church. But it had receded, fallen back deep into inner space; or I had. I persisted.
At one o'clock I heard the bell again, a far-off single toll. My bones were aching and my brain was on fire. I thought I couldn't go on. My throat had swollen and dried. I struggled to swallow a teaspoon of water.
At two o'clock I was brought back to my senses not by the church bell but by the slamming of a door somewhere in the Lodge. By now I was hallucinating. Just across the attic floor I could see another version of myself, speaking the mantras, seated cross-legged inside a pentagram, candles burning at all five points. This other version of myself suddenly became aware of me, mouth horribly agape, tongue waggling lasciviously in its mouth.
In the next moment there was a woman—or a naked creature, for although I want to think it was a woman, it might have been a fat maggoty creature—copulating with him, sitting in his lap, gazing lovingly into his eyes. I remembered to make the count.
Quinque, sex, septem.
And the nightmarish vision disappeared.
I reapplied myself. Then at three o'clock I heard the church bell clonk, hollow in the distance, like a bell that had cracked in the casting. At four o'clock the sound wasn't even a clonk; more like the sound of a creature trying to clear its throat. My skin flushed horribly; not mere goosebumps but a rippling as if some live things had found their way under my skin and were racing around trying to get out. Then the sensation suddenly stopped instantly.
It was over. The sky outside had gone dark. I knew the ritual was done.
The moment was almost one of anticlimax, but not quite. There was no sudden or dramatic
event; the candles neither guttered nor flared; the temperature didn't dip. But something about the attic had changed, beyond my comprehension but not beyond my apprehension. Something about myself had changed, too. Some weight inside me had shifted. Some density had realigned.
And something swarthy was gently pouring itself into the room, like black sand through the neck of a timer, as if through the tiniest fissure, a crack forced in the fabric of the world by my concentration alone.
There was a sense of slow decanting, as if some presence had dissolved in one space and was reconstructing itself in another. My apprehension of it was more intuitive than it was visual, and even so, there was a smokiness to my vision, as if something unclean had been smeared on my retinas. The room became denser with what I want to describe as soot particles, and this sootiness began to resolve itself into a set of frightening chevrons pointing like a dart right at me. I felt a huge pressure, an enormous solidity of the air. The pressure on my ears was similar to that experienced in an aircraft cabin.