Jago

by Kim Newman

  Upon hearing the announcement, Marie-Laure swallowed a sniffle but did not look up from the carpet. Brother Mick led the girl to her place, touching her intimately in a manner he must think surreptitious. Wendy guessed that he must find it harder than most to forget the flesh…

  Forget the flesh; for Beloved, the flesh is a temple, or else it is nothing… but not as hard as she herself found that forgetting. She knew things about the flesh that most did not. Things as inescapable as the taste of water in her mouth.

  In fire, flesh can blacken and crackle and shrivel from the bone, and flesh can scream…

  There were many unfilled places at High Table this evening, as if the congregation were sundered and lost. With Beloved gone from his proper position at their head, an air of purposelessness had settled. Other absences went unnoticed. Everyone seemed to be sitting alone. Wendy was sitting alone; not only was Derek not in his place to her right, but Susan Ames was off somewhere as usual, ploughing her own peculiar furrow, leaving a vacant chair tucked under the table to her left. Beyond that were others, but she felt nothing in particular for them. The Love could never be constant, as she had imagined it, like a current in the third rail; rather, it ebbed and flowed like a tide, pulled and pushed by His light.

  Marie-Laure sat opposite, between that bubble-headed Sister Karen and the quietly spiky Sister Janet, head down even before Mick began to read, curtains of hair hanging over her cutlery. She was muttering noiselessly, Ophelia trying not to make a scene. Under the table, her hands would be gripped in a prayerful death lock.

  ‘Brothers and Sisters, by the grace of our Beloved Lord and Benefactor,’ began Mick, flatly reading from a handful of stiff cards that he dealt from top to bottom as he worked through the lesson, ‘we break bread and take wine not only for the sustenance of our bodies but also for the fortification of our souls.’

  Mick had been a performance poet before. He read well, but he wasn’t Beloved. Wendy reached into her head and turned down the volume control on her hearing. Mick’s voice faded to a backing track. Without Beloved, the familiar words were as meaningless as the school assemblies she had endured in her early teens, knees aching, head full of boys and pop music. That was more than years ago; that was decades ago. This wasn’t the life she had expected.

  The hall hadn’t been built with electricity in mind. It needed a row of burning candelabra on the table, and candles in sconces in the many corners. The feeble overhead fluorescents barely established twilight, and the freestanding lamps were lost like streetlights in thick fog. With the altar lights off, the darkness was real.

  Wendy’s sphere of concentration shrank. The walls, the altar and the ends of the table were lost to her. Beyond her field, white face-blobs spooned blood-red soup into mouth holes. Their conversations were muffled like the whispers of ghosts. If she looked up from her soup, she wouldn’t be able to see Marie-Laure as any more than an animated sketch.

  She was tired, but she had to go through with the business of eating. If she neglected it, she would die. Although her perception of the world beyond was vague, everything within her reach was spotlit, as super-real as an IMAX image. Her knife and fork shone silver and were warm to her fingers. A herbal vapour rose from the bowl under her face, curling into her nostrils with stinging strength.

  Could she smell meat? Roasted, burned, charred meat? It was impossible; the communal meals were vegetarian. Here, carnivores indulged a secret vice. There were unidentifiable black bits in her soup. One burst like a hot pepper between her teeth, and taste exploded. For a second, she was sure her shrunken gums had burst. She was harbouring a mouthful of hot blood. A spot of red on the blue tablecloth sizzled and sank in, a dark Rorschach stain spreading. Wendy spat out her soup and took a swallow of iced water. Her mouth chilled, but the stink of meat remained… the stench of burning flesh, the hiss of boiling fat. The memories would always be with her. They had fastened on her brain like black rats, and would not be shaken. Only Beloved could make her forget, His radiance soothing away the fears.

  Before she could work up the nerve to take another spoonful of soup, the bowl was taken away and replaced with a plate of vegetable mix. Jenny was serving this evening. In the Agapemone, there were no novices, no ranks. All were equal in His sight. But Wendy couldn’t help but think of the girl as a newcomer. She envied Jenny her uncomplicated fervour, and felt keenly any instance in which she seemed to get preferential treatment. Everything—Revelation, Salvation, Servitude, Elevation—came so easily to the girl. She was the youngest of the Sisters.

  The accidental touch of her sleeve on Wendy’s face was like sandpaper. As Jenny apologized, Wendy flinched. She tried to compose herself, rubbing out any evil thoughts in the ledger of her mind. Unless she was perfectly serene and without blame, the ceremony of breaking bread would be tainted. Jenny didn’t even need a moment of reflection: she was either virgin-pure to her soul, or else so unthinking in her errors she didn’t recognize them as such. Wendy wondered if she had ever been like that, even in the distant Eden of childhood.

  The food was warm and mercifully tasteless. But it was like a filling with no piecrust, generic food for those who thought eating no more a pleasure than brushing their teeth. Without Beloved, there was no real conversation. Private businesses were being settled by groups of two or three: festival arrangements, decisions about which channel to have on in the television room. Sisters Cindy and Kate were off together as usual, gossiping. But there was no communion. The Brethren could have been strangers sharing a restaurant. Wendy missed the feeling of community.

  It was no surprise they should feel His absence. Beloved worked so hard, and there was no one who could take His place. He had to take three quarters of the responsibility on His shoulders. Beloved needed devoted disciples, but there were many things a disciple couldn’t do. Even Mick must have the humility to realize he couldn’t hope to be a genuine substitute.

  Wendy was fiercely humble. She’d been torn apart too often to be certain of much, but she knew with a desperate surety that the Agapemone was her only chance. The Agapemone was Anthony Jago or nothing. Sometimes, she thought she was nearly there, the baggage of the past left behind, but there was always something to remind her.

  A tone of voice, a swastika on a paperback, the smell of petrol in a garage, a motorcycle passing in the night, the creak of stiff black leather. A detail would swim out of a formless background, and she’d be fighting nausea. It happened, was happening now, even when she was safely surrounded by friends.

  Black leather.

  Someone at the table was wearing a black leather jacket, some Judas among the Apostles. An arm reached for a pitcher of water, a useless zip fastener dangling from a gash in the sleeve. Who was it? The face was a liver-lipped blur. There was a retch of laughter from the people around the figure, and Wendy looked away, fixing her eyes on the high back of Beloved’s chair, hoping He would manifest Himself.

  It could not be…

  It was not. It wasn’t anybody. When she looked back, there was an empty place. There had been no laughing. She’d been the victim of another stubborn memory gobbet.

  She dared hope Beloved would see her later. She needed to talk with Him, to receive His counsel, to find safety in His Love. She shouldn’t make demands on Him. But He always had time to Love, time to help.

  Wendy couldn’t finish her food. It had gone cold in her mouth. She spat a shapeless lump quietly out, and it settled on the already crusted mass on her plate. She pushed it away and poured herself more water. She drank, but her head would not clear.

  After the evening meal, there was a period of prayer. Like all women present, Wendy had to cover her head with an appropriately anointed cloth. She always kept her scarf with her, in case she felt the need. When Beloved spoke, prayer was the gem-shining high point of the day, the one time when she could forget, really forget, the flesh. Without Him, the ritual was futile, an alarm clock sounding in a tomb. Mick droned, reading without real fire from one of B
eloved’s texts. Wendy tried to listen for the truth behind the voice, but her thoughts kept skittering off the lesson like a breadknife off a coconut. Rather than be taken out of herself, she was plunged back into the pool of her memories.

  The crime had been her idea but, as in everything, Derek had gone along with it. He’d been her unquestioning instrument and, once set the task, had worked out the practicalities. Sometimes, lying awake while he slept in untroubled quiet, she came near to hating him for his acquiescence, for his guiltless complicity. Afterwards, they’d been together but adrift. Until Beloved.

  She told herself she had no special claim upon Beloved. She was one among many. But she and Derek had been nearly the first, and she’d been with the Agapemone since its founding. In her secret, selfish heart, she felt those things should count for something. Her mind and body were vessels for His Love, had been since the stormy conversion in that semi-derelict Brighton chapel. She had been chosen. She had an important part to play in the visitation that would shortly be upon the world.

  She needed at least part of Beloved for herself, for her particular troubled soul. It wasn’t a humble thought, and she must have humility or else all her Love was spent, wasted on herself. She prayed hard, pain in her fingers and temples. The pain fuelled her prayers, forcing her thoughts heavenward, thrusting daggers of purity through the red fog of frustration. If Beloved were here, things would be different. Prayer wouldn’t be such an effort. It was easier to be humble in His presence. The shade would be dispelled. Beloved, with His hawk face and angel eyes.

  Marie-Laure looked up and smiled as she had been taught. Her mouth opened. ‘I Love,’ she said, ‘I Love…’

  The statement was enough. The sentence needed no object. Marie-Laure Loved. It was enough.

  ‘We share Love,’ said Sister Cindy. Marie-Laure trembled.

  ‘We share Love,’ Janet joined in, touching Marie-Laure’s arm.

  When she straightened up, Marie-Laure was a fairly pretty girl. But when her head was down, as it almost always was, her chin squashed into her soft neck and creases marked her cheeks. Her face was perpetually in shadow. It was a miracle she wasn’t always walking skull-first into walls and closed doors.

  Wendy tried to Love back. Usually, with Beloved there, she could channel herself into the feeling. It was one way of fleeing from memories, fleeing from the flesh. But now all she could manage was an uneasy wellbeing. She could not Love, but she could long. She longed (ashamed and disgusted) for the flesh, and the joys beyond. She longed for the Beloved.

  Marie-Laure’s sleeveless blouse left her arms bare. Old scars traced her like a join-the-dots puzzle. She’d been an addict once, and a prostitute to support the habit, and, at another time, for other reasons, a novice nun. No one could remember the order of Marie-Laure’s traumas, least of all the girl herself, and when she was encouraged to talk out her unpleasant experiences in the community’s regular discussion meetings, they tended to get mixed up. She remembered a brothel and a convent as one institution, and her progress from ecstatic religion to heroin as one long period of pain and suffering.

  Pain and suffering.

  At the last moment, long after she had given up trying, Wendy felt a brief flare of Love (mostly fuelled by pity, but love all the same) like the flickers of orgasm she had once derived from sex. Wendy’s fingers, interlocked in a worshipful lattice, would not come apart easily. Her knuckles were meshed like gears, her rings scraped together. She pulled her hands apart. White pressure points faded on their backs, and the aching in the bones slowly died away. She reached out and held Marie-Laure’s shaky hand, gripping harder than she had intended, as if to still her tightening of desire.

  ‘We share Love,’ she said.

  Marie-Laure looked up, and Wendy saw twin red flames reflected in the girl’s eyes. Involuntarily, she darted a look over her shoulder. There was nothing in the doorway behind her, but in Marie-Laure’s eyes she had doubly seen the figure in the fire.

  She’d seen him dwindle to cinders and ash, and scattered his still-warm bones the length of a Welsh valley. Long ago and far away…

  Badmouth Ben was buried and dead, there was no doubt about that. But for Wendy, he’d never be gone.

  8

  It was Hazel’s turn to make supper. She warned him it would be leek soup, so Paul had a few hours to get used to the idea. He tried not to feel as hungry as he was. The sun wasn’t down yet, the air thick with midges. His bare arms were badly bitten. Several varieties of cream had been no help.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, he had done structural work. He cut up three photocopies of his Wells essays and stapled the paragraphs together in a new, reshuffled, order. The bundle had some repetitions, but they could easily be snipped. Strangely, he felt he’d achieved something. Retyped, with a bit of tinkering, these pages could account for over a third of The Secular Apocalypse.

  Finished, he lay on the orange blanket spread out by the wooden garden table. There were no clouds. The sun was behind the house, but not below the horizon. The Pottery was fringed with what looked like an orange matte line in a cheap superimposition. It was a still, End-of-Time evening. The birds hadn’t yet shut up, but he heard no cars on the road.

  Hazel, he gathered, was still rattled by her trouble with bottles and the rumblings Patch had relayed to her. She came out of the house with two trays, and disconcertingly was different again. She put the trays on the blanket, and Paul saw bowls of steaming grey-green liquid with broken-off lengths of French bread and thick smudges of butter on side dishes.

  Hazel sat near him, and inclined her face to be kissed. It was awkward at first, their necks not stretching the right way, and she tasted slightly of insect repellent. He eased closer and put a hand on her ribs. He licked her lips and sucked her tongue into his mouth. In his vision, her eyes shut.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Wrong answer, but never mind.

  It was still quite uncomfortable. His neck ached slightly, and, with their legs crossed, they found their knees got in the way. She twisted away from him and got comfortable. He picked up his bowl, cupping its warmth in his hands, suddenly aware of the semi-cool.

  He gulped down large, lumpy spoonfuls. To get it over with. He tried to soak up and deaden the salty, nothingy taste with the bread. For dessert, they would have ice cream from the freezer and the blandness of the main course would not matter.

  Individually, they were indifferent cooks. The only decent meals Paul could remember them preparing had been collaborations. That had been nice, with her giving serious orders and him making silly jokes, and having to improvise the ingredients the books said they needed but which they did not have. Recently, they hadn’t had the time to devote to cooking as a joint exercise. They both had work to do.

  Leek soup was easy, and the larder well stocked with leeks and potatoes. Hazel had made a huge vat a week or so ago, and was doling it out whenever nothing else occurred to her.

  Crack!

  He spat soup. A caterpillar-shaped stain crossed the edge of the blanket and sank into almost bare earth. He tongued his teeth. It had been at the back, one of the grinders. On the upper left side.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He licked a chip of enamel on to the back of his hand.

  ‘A tooth. There was a stone in the soup. A bit of grit.’

  She spooned in her bowl. Nothing came of it.

  ‘It must have been in one of the leeks. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘You’ll have to get it seen to.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said, still poking his tongue into the rough break.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  Much.

  9

  ‘At laaast,’ said more than one person as they drove into the village. Jessica kept quiet; her mapwomanship had turned a two-hour drive into a full afternoon of touring the countryside. Outside the city, everywhere was the same: fields, trees, hedg
es, cows. Signposts bore three or four unfamiliar names and contradicted each other. It was as if, within the county boundaries, Somerset had decided to repeal the laws of space and time. For the last twenty miles, they’d been able to follow bright-yellow special signs for the festival. Otherwise, they’d be well on their way to Cornwall.

  Alder was built around a Y-junction: right fork curling up over the long, loaf-shaped hill; left trailing off across the moor. At the parting of the roads stood a large dead tree straight off the cover of a horror paperback, and across from that was the Valiant Soldier. On the coffin-shaped sign, a redcoat stood to attention, musket on his shoulder, demonstrating the raw courage that had put the wind up Bonaparte and lost the American War of Independence.

  ‘Pub,’ Dolar burped, trying to hold in a lungful of dope smoke.

  ‘We should find a campsite first,’ said Syreeta.

  She was disagreed with loudly. At least by Dolar, Mike Toad and the girl hitchhiker, a friend for life after the smoky afternoon. Ferg, head thick from sweet fog, would have gone for anything that got him out of the enclosed space. At a nod from Dolar, he pulled the wheel over hard, circling the tree on its asphalt island, and bumped across the low pavement into the pub car park. He was sure he heard the exhaust pipe scrape ground, but kept quiet. If Dolar’s van got them back to town in a week’s time it’d be a miracle, but that was an unimaginably distant future. And someone else, he’d decided round about Andover, would be driving.

  The double doors at the back were opened and everybody piled out. Cool air filled the van. Ferg braked, switched off the engine, and pulled the keys. Outside, he could hear groans and creaks as his passengers straightened out after the long trip and got their limbs used to working again. Jessica sat in the front passenger seat, not making a move.

  ‘You all right?’