by Kim Newman
Allison looked at the girl and felt warm again. The clouds around Pam’s sister were feathery but thick. Another recruit.
‘Good trip?’ Pam asked.
‘Pamela.’ The new girl sighed wearily. ‘You are a fucking moron.’
Pam laughed.
‘Three hours to get to Alder,’ Jazz said, accent posh and cruel, ‘and two more in a fucking car getting from one end of the village to another.’
Violet flashes danced in front of Jazz’s eyes. Under her shroud, she wore a tight leotard. Her face was made-up white like Pam’s, with black lipstick and eyeshadow.
‘This is Mike Toad,’ Pam said, introducing the boy, who was trying to look cool.
‘Toad, eh?’ She looked him over, unimpressed. ‘Why doesn’t he hop off and croak?’
The Toad grinned, nervously.
‘This is Terry and Allison. They’re local.’
Jazz took a cursory look at Terry, then looked right into Allison’s eyes. Erskine had seen something, but Jazz got the whole message at once.
‘Allison?’ she said.
‘My sister, Jazzbeaux,’ Pam explained.
‘Call me Jazz.’
They shook hands. Jazz wore half-gloves and had black-painted fingernails like sharp little shovels.
‘Welcome to the West,’ Allison said.
‘Charmed.’
It was as if Pam wasn’t there: they’d ditch her soon, anyway. Her purpose had been to bring her sister into the army. Jazz was like Erskine, like Badmouth Ben. A kindred soul.
9
Susan had minions folding the four-page programme leaflets, and gophers came regularly to handle distribution. The system was working. One year, they’d farmed the job out and had the programmes professionally printed a month before the festival. Last-minute schedule changes meant the whole thing had been worthless, and the only way information could be disseminated was by chalking it up on boards all over the site.
‘Lots of helicopters passing over,’ Karen said.
Susan had noticed that too. She assumed David was having her panic checked out.
‘Probably government spies,’ the Sister remarked.
Karen Gillard was a left-behind. She’d come to the festival last year, and broken up with her boyfriend when he got off with another girl. Her lift home lost, she’d hung around the Agapemone afterwards. If she had any other life, she never mentioned it. The kind of blonde they had used to call ‘bubbly’, Karen tried to fit in, but wasn’t quite Sister of the Agapemone material. She’d been disciplined for odd trespasses—keeping a radio, holding back money and going to the pub, persistent lateness—and Susan thought she’d probably get it together to leave if she found someone at this year’s festival to latch on to. Jago hadn’t taken to her the way he did to some of the other Sisters.
The photocopier shook as it retched out programmes. Karen gathered an armful from the tray and passed them to the folding crew. Susan sensed flare-ups at the periphery, and knew things were happening. There was a hotspot out on the moors, perhaps in one of the farms, and the Manor House itself was as vibrant as always, but, despite the thronging crowds, she felt no major agitation. She thought things would speed up after dark. Beloved was gathering his energies, and all things conscious or unconscious around here followed his lead. Another lot of programmes went out, a runner prepared to scatter them to the winds.
‘Susan,’ Karen said, ‘out of paper.’
The photocopier was protesting.
‘I’ll see to it.’
Changing the paper was a job that defeated Karen, but Susan was supposed to be able to handle it. She scalpelled open a wrapped ream of copier paper and slipped it free. Then she shoved it into the feed tray and jostled, hoping it would settle. She printed an experimental programme. The machine tore the sheet of paper and spat it out in scrambled pieces. Susan swore and slammed the tray again, hoping to settle the paper. This time, it wouldn’t even take one sheet. Susan kicked the machine.
‘That won’t help,’ a folder said.
‘It helps me,’ Susan replied.
Besides Jago, she was the greatest Talent IPSIT had ever assessed. She was the most powerful psychokinetic in captivity. But she couldn’t get a photocopier to work.
‘Let it cool off,’ she said.
Kate Caudle came into the printshop. She wore ceremonial blue and radiated excitement. Susan found her easy to read, like most of the more enthusiastic Sisters. It had a lot to do with sex. She carried Jago around in her heart like schoolgirls carry pictures of their boyfriends.
‘Tonight there will be a Great Manifestation,’ she announced. ‘We have a new Sister.’
Susan did not need to ask who the lucky girl was. Hazel. Karen clapped her hands, and Susan tried to smile.
‘Wonderful news,’ Karen said.
10
He hadn’t been able to leave the village. With almost three hundred pounds in his pocket, Teddy could go to London, find a hostel, try out for one of those comedy clubs, wait for everything to finish. If he stayed, he expected to get hurt. Terry had hurt him before, and things were changed for the worse. If his brother got to him now, he’d be hurt more than any of the other times. Last night, Terry had started changing, become a thing in the woods that howled. It hadn’t even been a full moon.
He’d walked the length of the village, from the Agapemone down past the Valiant Soldier, past the garage. Walking against the tide of traffic and pedestrians streaming towards the festival, it had been slow going. But he still should have got further than the village sign. He’d left the Gate House, talked to Pam and Mike Toad, some time in the morning, and now it was nearly evening. What was it? Half a mile, less? It had been five or six hours. He wasn’t sure of the time, and his crappy Christmas-present watch was always unreliable. It told him three o’clock, but he knew it must be past four or five.
He put one foot in front of the other, but didn’t go anywhere. People jostled him as they passed. Cars crawled by. It had been hot earlier, and he’d developed a bad headache. Now it was cooling. The insects were out, nipping his face and hands.
He must have stopped and taken rests for hours at a time, but he thought he’d been walking solidly. He’d passed people he recognized, people who recognized him. Gary Chilcot called him over and tried to scrounge some cigarettes, but he didn’t have any. Old Man Maskell’s funny-in-the-head kid was dashing in and out of places, playing hide-and-seek with the Invisible Man. Jeremy wasn’t so bad; last year, in the crèche, he’d liked Teddy’s funnies and got on with the festival-goers’ kids. It was only local brats who picked on him. Sharon was up on a gate, dress around her thighs, french-kissing a darkie. Jenny’s dad was on the garage forecourt, helping Steve Scovelle with the pumps. The guy from the Pottery, Hazel’s boyfriend, was wandering around in a daze.
Teddy’s feet chafed inside his daps, toes blistering, ankles aching, insteps unsteady. His sweated-through shirt was damp on his back as the temperature dropped. The traffic flow carried him back, like a real wave, back past Mr Keough’s cottage and the building site next door, back past the Pottery and the garage, back past the Cardigans’, almost back to the pub. It was as if he were walking up a down escalator and had stopped for a rest, finding himself automatically carried downwards again. He’d have tried hitching a ride, but all the cars were going the wrong way, coming in to Alder, not leaving.
His ears were popping. The pain inside his head swelled, pushing at the backs of his eyeballs, throbbing inside his nose, jarring his teeth. The more he walked, the more it hurt. He stopped and rested, slumping cross-legged on the verge. He was out of breath and had a bad stitch. His mouth and throat were dry. He’d missed his dinner. Get up, he told himself, and walk. The greasy grass of the verge was populated. His legs were covered with crawling red ants. He scratched his thighs and brushed insects away.
He got up, knees popping, and felt as if someone had taken a hammer to his head, fetching him a blow under the eye, smashing a cheekbone, lifti
ng him off his feet. This was what he imagined being shot in the head was like. He looked at the dusty wall, and didn’t see his own brains and blood dripping from a yard-wide splash. He stumbled a few steps in the gutter. Someone beeped a car horn and yelled, ‘Piss-head!’
He stopped stumbling and, very carefully, started walking again. He focused on the backside of the sign that marked the start of the village. Once he was beyond the sign, he was out of Alder, on the open road. It was only a few miles to Achelzoy, and he could catch a bus to somewhere with a railway station.
The front of the sign was fresh-painted, black lettering against a brilliant cream-white background. The backside was dirt-clogged, rusty around the plugs that held the letters on. The sign stayed where it was. Teddy walked towards it but didn’t seem to get nearer. The sign should get larger, but it stayed the same size, shrank a little, even. He passed houses, driveways, people. The sign was fixed.
He put his hands into his pockets, feeling the crushed-up notes, and leaned forwards, as if walking into a gale-force wind. He passed the garage and the Pottery again. The sign lurched larger, nearer.
His whole face was throbbing as if it had been pounded against his skull with a meat tenderizer. He ignored the pain. He reached the building site. There were cats in the works, mewling and hissing threats at each other. Pain slipped down his throat, swelling his neck, sliding into his whole body. His leg muscles were stretched, sharp jabs of agony where they promised to snap.
Mr Keough’s house was quiet, no lights on yet, shut up tight against invaders. Teddy wondered if the old man had mined his garden path. He hated the festival more than anyone. Teddy wondered whether Mr Keough mightn’t have been right. His front door was graffiti-struck. Someone had carved a Jewish star into it, and squiggled in Arabic or Hebrew or one of those languages with sloppy alphabets.
The sign was near now, barely ten yards away. Beyond, it wasn’t Alder any more. It was the Achelzoy road. He wondered how his mum and dad would get on. Five yards. He didn’t think Terry would hurt their parents, no matter how much he changed. Dad could still take a belt to him. Closer. A yard? They probably wouldn’t notice Teddy was gone.
He drew level with the sign, reached out, touched it. The metal was warm from a day of direct sunlight. A thrill coursed up Teddy’s arm, through his entire body. The pain lessened. He gripped the sign, pulled himself past, and turned to look at the lettering, ALDER. He was out of the village. He looked back and saw the road running towards the tree outside the Valiant Soldier, splitting there. He saw the Agapemone.
Jenny. Jenny Steyning had barely spoken to him in five years. He should walk on, get to Achelzoy before it was too late for a bus. Jenny in her white dress, seeming to float, golden hair a halo, lips a whisper apart. He should walk. Jenny. Walk.
He stepped past the sign, back into Alder, and it was as if he had stepped off a cliff.
11
For Wendy, the Agapemone was a safe haven of order. She knew what she had to do, when it had to be done, how long it was supposed to take. Services and meals were scheduled. Duties came around on a roster. The little unstructured time she had was filled with supplementary committee meetings, organized readings or simple prayer. She recognized that, for some of the Brethren, the Agapemone was a God-given excuse never to think for themselves. Marie-Laure, with her convent experience, probably hadn’t made a decision since joining the community. And Derek, whose entire life involved going along with things, thrived on imposed routine.
It was simple to live by the rules, but today Wendy had failed. Having missed the breakfast ceremony, her whole day was out of whack. She had a nervous spurt of sinfulness at the neglect of her duties. At the festival, her special province was the crafts stream; jewellers, silk printers, wood-turners. This morning, she was supposed to have visited the field where the stalls were to be set up, checking that each was in its place according to the prearranged pattern. She hadn’t gone.
With all the Brethren about their particular tasks, regimented by Mick or James, Wendy was alone, at a loose end. It was as if she had used an excuse to get out of a PE lesson. Unsupervised, she was free to do whatever she wanted. But she had never known, not as a schoolgirl and certainly not now, what she wanted. She wandered through the third-storey gallery, an empty and rarely used space that ran the length of the Manor House, and let herself out on the balcony.
She was facing away from the festival site, in the shade, looking further up the hill towards the woodland. The festival had spilled around the house, and she could see people exploring the woods. There were marked areas off-limits to the crowds, but the boundaries would become blurred over the next couple of days. A couple of bikers were pissing against a tree. The shade became colder. They saw her and roared drunkenly, shaking cocks at her with feeble pelvic thrusts. They had beards, proper faces. Laughing, they zipped up and went away. Badmouth Ben was out there somewhere, but Wendy felt safe in the Agapemone itself, as if Beloved radiated a protective shield.
Wendy explored her own feelings, mingling guilt with excitement at her bewildering freedom. Derek would be organizing the traffic patrols, shepherding cars and vans. Karen and Susan would be in the printshop, cranking out programmes. James would be bossing the stage crews, supervising roadies assembling the cliff-face of amplifiers. Away from the festival, Sister Jenny would be with the postulant, Hazel, seeing her through her anointment.
Only she had broken the pattern. Wendy wondered whether, without her, the crafts fair was a free-for-all, stallholders smashing each other’s merchandise, getting into fist fights. More likely though things had gone smoothly, suggesting all her work really did not do much. Once people signed up for their stalls and plots, all they had to do was arrive with their goods and set up. They shouldn’t need a traffic cop.
The Agapemone wasn’t like Rivendell. Ben’s whispered words could hurt but not wreck. Rivendell had been weak before Ben turned up. The Agapemone was strong. Rivendell had no Beloved. Suddenly, Wendy felt an overpowering kinship with Beloved. She felt closer to Him than she had since the Great Manifestation that had brought her into the Agapemone, since the days—before Kate, Marie-Laure, Janet, Jenny, Hazel—when she was the most favoured, the Sister-Love.
Her duties had been a distraction, absorbing too much attention, preventing her from concentrating on the true purpose of the Agapemone. Liberated, she felt herself back in the centre. Beloved was in His rooms, she knew. She was closer to Him than anyone else, perhaps twenty feet away. Wendy had been His first Sister-Love, the first of the Inner Circle. She’d been among the first in the Agapemone. She took off her band and shook her hair free. Ben might find her. Today she might die, but she would have been first.
* * *
When Badmouth Ben died, Rivendell broke up and the remaining members scattered. Wendy held on longer than most, not wanting to disappear immediately after the ‘accident’. She and Derek stayed for a few weeks, while her hair grew out. The police came round, more concerned with discovering exactly who Ben was, so they could notify his next of kin, than in finding out how he’d died. They thought he’d taken a turn badly and his petrol tank had exploded. Now he was dead, everyone realized how little they knew about Ben. No one even knew his surname or where he’d come from.
With Ben dead, Rivendell fell apart, but not before the repercussions and reprisals. Gareth Madoc and Christopher Pringle, Ben’s lieutenants, unable to keep up the reign of terror, fell from power. Christopher left and never came back, but Gareth was local and had to stay around. Two weeks after Ben’s death, a couple of boys kicked some of Gareth’s ribs in and dumped him on his parents’ doorstep. Wendy and Derek left after that, hitching for Liverpool.
While they were on the road, the summer finished, a spectacular thunderstorm putting an end to the drought. Stranded out in the open between lifts, Wendy and Derek were soaked. Wendy thought of it as a cleansing of her sins. She’d thought it would be the end of Ben, the end of her fears and guilts.
*
* *
She looked up at the sky, china blue above the chimneys of the house, and wondered how long they’d have to wait this summer. Eventually, the weather must break. It must rain.
* * *
In her memory, the thunderstorm lasted for days, weeks. They travelled the length of the country, clothes plastered to their bodies, emptying and discarding vodka bottles, and ended up on the south coast, in Brighton, where a river was running down the road to the seafront. Washed along in that stream, they reached the beach and stopped running. The only people in sight, where a week earlier there’d been thousands of sunbathers, Wendy and Derek sat down beyond the tarpaulined playground, watching the rain making orange puddles, constantly speckling the sands. They finished their last bottle and rolled it into the waves. Derek gave up eventually and huddled under the West Pier, smoking soggy cigarettes. But Wendy stayed, lying face up like a sun worshipper, rain slapping her face, getting in her eyes, filling her mouth. She felt empty.
* * *
High in the sky, she saw a vapour trail. It was a small aeroplane, passing over the Agapemone. She sat down on the balcony, putting the building between her and the plane’s sightline. She remembered the emptiness.
* * *
Her entire life had been a matter of trying to fill the emptiness. She’d been aware of it since school. She tried to fight. First, she went against parents, teachers, friends. She tried to fill the void with disobedience, thick lipstick, eyeshadow, short skirts, undone blouse buttons, loud music, notes to boys. Her body started getting heavier, her arms and legs chunkier. For a few months, she stood out because she had breasts and wore a bra, but then all the other girls did too. Empty again. She tried working, expending bursts of energy on essays, exams, revision, projects. Her parents and teachers approved, and her reports said she’d settled down. This phase carried her through O and A levels and got her into Essex University, reading geography.