by Phil Rickman
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m still at The Glades.’
‘I’m bad news today, Lol. Nothing works out for me. Can’t you do it?’
‘No, I’m … I think I’m getting into something else,’ Lol said.
His voice sounding disconnected, like he was with someone, or his mind was already working on the something else.
‘Sholto.’ Lol folded up his mobile. ‘I think that was his name.’
‘Frightfully good-looking. Essence of Ronald Colman.’ Athena was gazing wistfully into a corner of the room. ‘So few of us remember Ronald Colman any more, even here.’
‘I bet they all remember Sholto, though,’ Lol said.
‘We needed him, Robinson. As I think I told your paramour at the time, who among the living could we attract any more?’
The alleged haunting of The Glades, as described by Merrily, had involved a languid shadow on the landing, blown bulbs. Hadn’t there been a smell of cigarette smoke, the flicking of a lighter?
‘The point being,’ Lol said, ‘that Sholto had no history at The Glades. He was just a face from an old photo album. Someone whose image you’d somehow contrived to … appropriate. And insinuate into people’s consciousness.’
‘What fun he was, though.’
‘But he was a … a product of persuasion?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Oh, come on, Athena.’
‘Well, it’s all so devalued now.’ She looked cross. ‘The techniques of projection. Used to be frightfully effective, but since that annoying young man on the television, Derren Somebody-or-other…’
‘Brown?’
‘Derren Brown, yes. Little twerp. Makes a point of insisting that it’s all psychology and suggestion, because it makes him look cleverer and the whole business less metaphysical and out of his control. Deserves a good spanking.’
‘Can I describe something to you?’
‘Why not?’ Athena stretched like a small cat, purple claws extended. ‘I have all the time in the worlds.’
Still unsure where he was going with this, Lol told her about Tim Loste and Sir Edward Elgar and Wychehill.
‘I’m afraid it’s a very, very different situation,’ Athena said.
She’d made some fragrant Earl Grey tea. They drank it out of small china cups. The teapot had a Tarot symbol on it – the Hanged Man, dangling from a tree by one foot.
‘You see, this place is ideal for it,’ Athena said. ‘Old women living for much of the time inside their own heads, inside their distant memories. Hothouse of hopeless fantasies. Frightfully easy to insinuate an image.’
‘And how exactly would you … ?’
‘Beyond that…’ Athena lifted both palms ‘… I’m revealing no tradecraft. Except to say that it soon begins to generate its own energy. Now, the village you’re describing seems far from a hothouse. If the dwellings are well separated and the residents have little in common and don’t mix socially … hopeless.’
‘It was only an idea,’ Lol said. ‘I was just—’
‘Being a little helpmate?’ Athena squealed. ‘Robinson, you infuriate me! She is a lowly … parish … priest. In the Church of England – half-baked, miserably unfocused, spiritually stagnant and led by a dithering Welshman who thinks that looking like an Old Testament prophet is half the battle. Now— Sit down, I haven’t finished.’
Athena White stood up, plumped out her cushions and curled up again in the window seat.
‘You’ve intrigued me now. Mentioned Elgar. Now there’s a man with problems. Repressed, frustrated … trapped, for much of his life, inside petty conventions and constraints. A spirit yearning for a freedom which he was foolish enough to think was only granted to children. Do you know The Wand of Youth – piece he wrote when young himself, about children and fairyland?’
‘Only read about it.’
‘He kept trying to revive it at various times, as if he could rediscover the oneness with nature that he believed he had possessed as a child. Now. If you were to ask me if Edward Elgar could be summoned back to his beloved hills, I would say that it was quite conceivable that much of him never left. In other words—’
Athena’s head came forward, like a tortoise’s from its shell. She seemed quite excited.
‘… A man who indeed might haunt.’
Not what Lol had wanted to hear.
He watched Athena placing both her hands on top of her head, as if to prevent significant thoughts from fluttering away like butterflies.
‘Elgar’s biographers, you see, tend to be terribly highbrow music buffs with too much academic credibility to lose. His esoteric side is usually glossed over.’
‘You’ve read the biographies?’
‘Robinson, I spend at least seven hours a day reading. I’ve also known several people – some of them in this very mausoleum – who met him when young. Not always the most delightful of experiences, I’m afraid: he could be a rather negative presence.’
‘Someone said manic-depressive.’
‘There you go again with your silly psychiatric generalizations. Stop it.’
‘Sorry. What did you mean by his esoteric side?’
Lol was feeling confused. Everybody seemed to have a piece of Elgar, and all of them with jagged edges. He was a kind man, an inconsiderate and self-obsessed man; he was arrogant, he was insecure; he was a no-nonsense, self-made, practical man, and he was a mental case; he was a patriot and he was an artist resentful of the taint of patriotism. He was a staunch Catholic, and yet…
‘He was, like so many prominent figures of his time, drawn to the otherwordly,’ Athena said. ‘“Fond of ghost stories” is what the books usually say. But it was clearly more than that. His intermittent Catholicism was never enough to satisfy his curiosity. What do you know about The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?’
‘Top people’s magical club,’ Lol said. ‘Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats…’
‘They all began there, certainly. Yeats was prominent in it, and Elgar worked with Yeats. But his favourite was Algernon Blackwood. Did the music for Blackwood’s play The Starlight Express, and the music contained elements of The Wand of Youth. About children and the otherworld. Bit of a disaster, but they had fun. Blackwood was a likeable cove. Met him once at my uncle’s house – my Uncle Thomas was a latter-day member of the GD. Left me all his “secret papers”. Which was what started me off, I suppose.’
Athena smiled at the memory. Lol drank what remained of his Earl Grey.
‘But Elgar wasn’t a member of the Golden Dawn, was he?’
‘I think he might well have joined if it hadn’t been for his wife and her top-drawer conservative family. Alice, to whom he owed so much. Fortunately, however, Alice liked Blackwood and Blackwood liked Alice. She wrote in her diary of the “out of the world” conversations Elgar had with Blackwood. Blackwood…’
Athena pursed her lips.
‘I may have read one of his stories once,’ Lol said. ‘When I was a kid. “The Haunted and the Haunters”? Very scary.’
‘No, that was Bulwer-Lytton – ah, there, you see, Elgar liked his stories, too. Was said to have based one of his piano pieces on a novel of Bulwer-Lytton’s. Oh, Robinson, how intriguing … what is happening here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m trying to think…’ Athena pressing fingertips to her temples. ‘Yes … now … Blackwood wrote a strange novel about music, The Human Chord. It’s about a group of people – singers – brought together by a retired clergyman to intone the constituent notes in an archaic, mystical chord that will allow them to sound the secret names of God and thus draw down immense power from the heavens. It’s a mad, romantic book but – as with all Blackwood’s fiction – was drawn from his personal experience, in this case with The Golden Dawn. Now…’
Athena rose and went to one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. When she opened it up, Lol saw that its sagging shelves were bulging with books. Athena knew what she was looking for, ho
wever, and brought it back to her window seat.
‘We’re looking at Plato. And, of course, Pythagoras. And probably some forgotten ancient Egyptian before that. We’re looking at a time when music was not “a branch of the arts” but a medium of construction … the construction of the universe itself. Pythagoras saw an exquisite mathematical harmony in the universe, and the harmony was held together by music. Music was formed upon strict laws … music was the law. Can you comprehend any of this?’
‘I’m trying.’
Lol wondered what time it was, if Jane and Gomer had gone to find Margaret Pole’s niece, if Merrily…
‘Keep going, Athena,’ he said.
‘Oh, I could go on all night and all through tomorrow. But I think what you need to know is that the planets were said to vibrate and respond to one another in a musical sequence – the Music of the Spheres. You’ve heard the term?’
Lol nodded. ‘But I always imagined that as a poetic … metaphor?’
‘It is a metaphor, like all these images, for an internal process. As above, so below. A connection between our inner selves and God, forged through the power of music. This was studied in some depth by The Golden Dawn, and Blackwood used some of what he’d learned there in The Human Chord – Blackwood being a writer first and foremost, rather than a true seeker after cosmic consciousness. A romantic, if you like.’
‘Like Elgar.’
‘Absolutely like Elgar. And for Blackwood not to have seized the opportunity to discuss what he’d learned about the origins of music with the most famous composer in the land is … well, so unlikely as to be not worth consideration.’
Lol said, ‘The play – musical, whatever – that Elgar and Blackwood worked on. You said it was called The Starlight Express? The house where Winnie Sparke – Tim Loste’s mentor – lives, at Wychehill, is called Starlight Cottage.’
Athena White squeaked in delight.
‘Starlight, as it happens, was Elgar’s nickname for Blackwood! They used nicknames as a kind of code.’
‘There’s a letter,’ Lol said, ‘in the Wychehill parish records from someone signing himself Starlight … suggesting Wychehill as a highly suitable place for a church because no area of southern Britain was more conducive to the … to the creation and performance of the most spiritually exalted music … does that make any—?’
‘Sounds like something Blackwood would write, and if he signed himself Starlight he could only have been addressing Elgar.’
‘The letter’s to “Sirius”.’
‘The dog star?’ Athena’s eyes glittered. ‘Yes! Elgar was frightfully fond of dogs. That would make absolute sense. Oh, Robinson, I wonder … I wonder…’
Athena began leafing through the book she’d brought from the cupboard, a fairly slim hardback with a plain green cover, called City of Revelation.
‘I think where this brings us,’ she said softly, ‘is to the Whiteleafed Oak.’
43
The One Per Cent
Syd Spicer looked like a priest feeling unwelcome in his own church and uncomfortable – or was she imagining this? – in his own cassock.
‘So he’s out, right?’
Spicer looked pale. Few people, in the current weather, looked pale. Regiment men, always getting dispatched to sun-kissed hell-holes, never did; only their wives. That was the standing joke in Hereford: foolproof way of recognizing an SAS man – suntanned bloke, pale wife.
‘He was released this morning, without charge,’ Merrily said. ‘But I gather they haven’t lost interest in him.’
‘Who could?’
But, for some reason, he looked relieved. Merrily sniffed the air.
‘He burns incense in here?’
‘Not when I’m here, he doesn’t. But, yeah, who else? Or Winnie.’ He sat down in one of the choir stalls, looking down the aisle with distaste. ‘It’s got to end.’
‘What has?’
‘I don’t like this church much – have I indicated that?’
‘A few times.’
‘Sometimes there’s a peculiar energy in here. You can feel it on your skin, abrasive, like on a cold morning when you’ve cut yourself shaving. And sometimes you can still smell the incense when Loste hasn’t been in for days.’
Merrily looked around. With the afternoon sunlight in free fall through the diamond-paned windows, it was like being inside a great stone lantern.
‘Something’s needed doing for a while, but I couldn’t do it,’ Spicer said.
‘Couldn’t do what?’
‘What you do. Maybe that’s another reason I called you last weekend. Maybe I couldn’t admit it to myself, but something needs sorting here.’
She sat down next to him. ‘You trying to make me feel worthwhile or something, Syd?
He was still gazing down the nave, his eyes like currants. She could feel him becoming quiet. The screensaver routine. She looked at him, saying nothing, trying to be as still as he was. But she couldn’t manage it.
‘It’s a technique,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Makes me look heavy. On nodding terms with minor seraphim. I’m just a fucked-up old soldier, Merrily, and coming into the Church was a mistake. I can’t hack it.’
‘What?’
Spicer pulled a box of matches out of his cassock, followed by a packet of cigarettes. He flipped it open, offered it to Merrily. She blinked.
‘We’re, erm, in church.’
‘Don’t go spiritually correct on me, Merrily. You think he cares? It’s smoking, not sex.’
‘You’re right, but I don’t think I will right now, all the same.’
‘Fair enough.’
He lit up, the striking match a sacrilegious gasp. He stretched out his legs in the direction of the central aisle, watching the smoke float up and dissipate at pulpit level.
‘At the core of the Special Air Service, there’s a harsh kind of mysticism. Kind you won’t find in any other area of the armed forces. Connected with survival. I used to think survival was ninety per cent training and preparation, nine per cent luck, and one per cent … one per cent something you could call on when you were at breaking point.’
‘I can imagine the closer you get to—’
Merrily shut up. She didn’t know. How could she possibly know?
‘I’m not gonna tell you when and where this happened to me,’ Syd said. ‘But there’s always one time when it all drops away – all your training and your discipline – and your insides turn to water. At first you’re just afraid of dying. Not death, dying. The way it’s gonna happen. The fear of … of fear itself, I suppose. Of giving in to fear. Of dying in it. Dying as someone who you can only despise. And when you’re suddenly confronted with that sorry person – with the sight and the smell of your own terror … that’s a big, gaping moment, Merrily.’
She nodded. She kept quiet. They didn’t know one another, not at all. All they had in common was the one per cent.
‘So I started to pray,’ Spicer said. ‘Prayed the way those poor buggers probably prayed when they jumped off the twin towers, out of the flames.’
Merrily nodded.
‘And something happened. Not a flash-of-lightning kind of thing … just a bloke behaving in a way he wouldn’t normally behave in the circumstances, and me finding a sudden unexpected strength. I won’t go further into it … except I thought, afterwards, I can respect this. A source of strength infinitely greater than your training’s ever gonna give you – and in the Regiment, training’s all, to a level of aptitude and precision that you believe makes you equal to anyone. Any one. But in that moment, the one per cent had become a hundred per cent. And I suppose it still is.’
‘Yes.’
‘What I’ll admit to being good at,’ Syd Spicer said, ‘is helping the dying. Having been there, very close, twice, I can find them strength. I know there’s gonna be help for them, and I can take the weight off just enough for them to feel it. The way you help your mates in a shit situation. So the dying … they’re the only people I
tell exactly what happened at my times. Times and places, nothing concealed. It’s me passing on something precious, and they value it, and I think they take it with them.’
‘Syd,’ Merrily said, ‘how on earth can you say you can’t hack it?’
‘Because I could do that without being a priest.’
The phone was ringing when Lol got home. He caught the call just before the machine lifted it.
‘Lol, Dan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘From Much Cowarne?’
‘Sorry … out of breath.’
‘Me too, I expect, by the end of the night. Look, when you talked to Mr Levin, did you know something was about to happen?’
‘Like what?’
‘Just had a call from Tim. I’m glad to say they let him out – did you know?’
‘I’d heard. But I don’t know much more than that.’
‘Reason he was calling … I’m one of the three coordinators of the choirs. I told you about the three choirs, who did the three churches simultaneously?’
‘You did.’
‘OK, well, there’s a pool of about sixty of us, right? Three coordinators who can each pull twelve compatible choristers together at short notice. Twelve out of twenty’s usually a safe bet. Tim called me about half an hour ago. They’re trying to arrange Redmarley and Little Malvern Priory to join in with Wychehill again. Another simultaneous chant.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Like we did before, only longer. It has to last, somehow, from nine tonight until three a.m. Luckily, it’s Saturday tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what I’m ringing for, Lol. I wondered if you knew.’
‘He won’t tell you?’
‘He never tells you. He rambles. He gets incoherent. You stop asking because you think maybe he doesn’t know the answer anyway, but it don’t matter, you know you’re gonner get something out of it. Bit of a coincidence, though, ennit?’