Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  Gray crawled to the top of the stairs. His pants were torn, his knees bloody from the long climb on all fours. He didn’t have the strength to walk. He did have the drive to make it back to the surface. It was the impulse of a prophet. He bore truth with him. It was a compound of anger, terror, and triumph.

  The night passed with the suspense of a held breath. Meacham lay in her bed, eyes open, waiting for day. When she lay down, she had reached out to turn out the bedside lamp. Alarm arrested the gesture. Sturghill left hers on, too. “What happens in the morning?” the magician had asked.

  “We leave.”

  “Can we?”

  Meacham didn’t know. She imagined every sort of tangle that might prevent her from completing her escape. As dawn finally broke, she wondered if Sturghill might have meant something else by her question. Could she, in good conscience, leave with something this bad going on, something she had played her own bit in triggering? Girl, can you just take off? Watch me. Watch me fly.

  In the morning, her wings were clipped. Walker, following a chain of command that Meacham had to wonder if he really believed in, had called in reinforcements from outside Roseminster. The Detective Branch was back in town and looking more pissed than thrilled about it. They set up shop in the police station on Edgecomb Close, two blocks to the east of the church. The Gethsemane Hall party was summoned there just after breakfast. The station was squat and had flower boxes under its windows. It looked welcoming. DCI Kate Boulter did not. She was a couple of years older than Meacham. She was a stocky woman whose weight was muscle. She carried it like a club. She wore her brown hair very short, barely long enough to avoid making her look like a skinhead enforcer. Her eyes were lidded, fed up with a career-and-a-half of dealing with other people’s bullshit. She glared at her subjects, had them wait in a station desk area barely big enough for three people to sit, let alone six, and hauled them one at a time behind the desk sergeant to an office that was, as far as Meacham could tell, the only other room in the building. “They don’t speak to each other,” Boulter told the sergeant. Hers was a voice that had reached the end of its patience tether twenty years ago.

  “Yes’m.” The man nodded. He looked like he hadn’t slept well, if at all.

  Gray was here, leaning against a wall while he waited for his turn. Meacham was half surprised to see him alive. She studied his face. It was even tighter than it had been, and she had never seen him relaxed. He met her gaze with a look that struck her hard with its determination. The man had a mission. What happened last night? she wanted to ask.

  Meacham was the last to be summoned. The others had been banished from the station as the interviews were completed. Walker emerged from the rear office to invite her in. He looked exhausted, but also simultaneously nervous and resigned, as if he were going through ordained motions while waiting for a catastrophe. Meacham followed him into the room, where Boulter sat at Walker’s desk. He took a plastic seat beside her, banished to the children’s table at Christmas. Boulter had a digital recorder on the desk and was flipping through a notebook. Without looking up, she nodded for Meacham to sit. The chair before the desk was wooden and straight-backed. Meacham was ten years old again.

  Boulter finished with her notes and looked up. “I hope you’re enjoying being the pain in my arse,” she said, “because one of us had better be getting something out of the day.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Boulter sighed. “I have memos about you. Apparently, I’m to regard you as a colleague. Or something.” Something translated as scum. “So how am I supposed to conduct my investigation?”

  “Why don’t you just ask me what you want to ask me,” Meacham said, just as tired of the bull. The politics were irrelevant now. There was something nasty in the woodshed, and it was breaking down the door.

  “Fine and thanks, then. Just so I can move on, would you mind telling me how your government’s agenda is furthered through hoaxing?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Boulter was shaking her head. “You see, this is the sort of thing that disappoints me. I’m all for extending professional courtesy, but it should be a two-way street. James Crawford is not where you say he is, and there is no sign of anybody having been injured, so can we put a stop to this circus before it gets any worse?”

  “I saw him dead.”

  Boulter picked up her digital recorder and turned it off. “Well, fuck you too, then,” she said. “Just so you know, when the tabs come knocking on my door, I’m giving them your name and where to find you. If there’s anything else I can do to make your life miserable, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. Piss off.”

  Meacham stood up. She noticed Walker staring at the floor.

  Boulter spoke again. “But don’t piss off out of town.” She smiled sweetly. “Before I’m done, sweetheart, I’m looking to charge you.”

  “Thanks,” Meacham said and left.

  The day went from strength to strength. The media had never really left, but their full contingent was back, and a much sunnier and more excited lot they were than the police. The CIA tracking ghosts was the best story of all, but the CIA hoaxing ghost encounters was still hard sexy. Boulter was true to her word, and Meacham spent most of the next several hours trying to counter the awful spin with nothing at all. Evening closed in, promising darkness, and she wasn’t a step closer to leaving Roseminster. Worse yet, Korda called her before she could call him.

  It was dinner time. Sturghill had gone downstairs to the Nelson’s restaurant to try to eat and to bring food up to the room if the reporters were buzzing too thickly. The phone rang, catching Meacham as she was about to follow.

  “You have a funny way of cleaning things up,” Korda said. The man was browned, and then some.

  “The situation is difficult,” Meacham began, wondering why she was bothering.

  “I’m not interested in hearing that. I’m interested in hearing that you’re about to turn things around.”

  She went for the Hail Mary. “I need reinforcements,” she said. She didn’t know what good they would do, but she wanted them. Maybe sheer numbers of skeptics and game-players would shut the Hall down.

  “You didn’t just say that.”

  Desperate: “If you knew what’s been going on —”

  “I don’t need to. I need to know that it’s all going away.”

  She spoke her fear and the truth: “It won’t. Things are going to get a lot worse.”

  “Do your job,” Korda snapped. “Clean up the mess.” He hung up.

  She sat on the bed, his last words a sudden, unexpected call to duty. Yes, she thought. You helped create the mess. Clean it up. Don’t run. Fight.

  Determination. Purpose. She would fight. For the first time in her adult life, she felt the fortifying iron of belief. She would fight.

  Come the morning. But right now, night was coming. Darkness was closing its fist around Roseminster.

  chapter fifteen

  the long arm of the night

  Evensong was over. John Woodhead, the parish priest of St. Rose’s Church since 1962, had retired to the rectory for the night. He’d had plenty of comforting words for his colleague, but he wasn’t here now, as Roseminster lost the last of its light. Patrick Hudson knelt at the altar. He had his head bowed and his eyes closed. Shutting out the external world helped him to focus on his prayers. Keeping his eyes closed also meant, he hoped, that he wouldn’t fixate on the altar and think about how much its shape resembled the tomb in the Gethsemane Hall caverns. Thoughts like that would lead to others that considered the way Crawford’s secrets had been draped over stone and posed in exultant impossibility, and then he would start wondering if the monument was a tomb, after all. Maybe it was an altar. Or, worse, maybe it was both. So he kept his eyes closed and put all of his energy into a concentrated plea for strength. He needed the plea to be very, very big. He needed it to be so huge that it filled his ow
n head and left no room for listening, in case he heard the absence of an answer.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  Hudson opened his eyes and turned around. Gray was seated in the rearmost pew. He had his eyes on the altar’s crucifix. His expression as he looked at the icon was a mixture of superiority and anger. Hudson stood up. His knees cracked. He walked down the aisle to Gray. “You would have been here, too, not so long ago,” he said.

  “That’s true,” Gray said. Implied: I also once believed in the Easter Bunny. He changed the subject. “Did the police speak to you?”

  “Yes. They weren’t pleased with me. What happened to Crawford’s body?”

  “I think it was consumed.”

  Hudson felt a wave of spiritual vertigo. How can we be having this conversation? he wondered. Its terms were perverse. Its ramifications were unspeakable.

  Gray continued. “You left a job unfinished,” he said.

  “I was afraid for my life,” Hudson replied. That was the simple truth.

  “You were afraid in Sudan. You didn’t run then.”

  That was true, too. “This is different.” He hadn’t feared spiritual harm in Africa. He’d had the backup of faith’s strength. Now, his crutch was splintering badly.

  “You should come back to the house,” Gray said. His tone was quiet, almost casual, as if suggesting a grand day out.

  “Why?” Hudson couldn’t see what good that would do. He was with Meacham on this. He wanted to get as far away from Roseminster as he could, as fast as possible. Maybe, just maybe, once he was back in London, he might be able to start the healing of his spirituality. He might be able to hear the calling once more.

  “There are things we should see. There is truth there.”

  “I doubt it.” He was lying now. He was scared Gray was right.

  “Come back with me,” Gray insisted.

  “When are you going?”

  “Now.”

  At night? Hudson felt his bowels loosen. “Not now,” he said. There was no debate. What Gray was asking was impossible and obscene.

  Gray shrugged. He stood up. “I’ll be there when you change your mind,” he said. He headed for the exit. Hudson followed him onto the porch. The lights of Roseminster were weak embers in chilled coal. Gray took a couple of steps, then looked back over his shoulder. “Walk with me,” he asked.

  Hudson sensed it was the last thing his friend would ever ask of him. “No.” He wasn’t strong enough.

  Gray turned away and moved into the night with the confidence of a man among friends.

  Meacham said, “I need to know if you’re with me.”

  Sturghill was sitting on her bed, back against the headboard. She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them She bumped her chin against her knees with a steady beat as she thought. “Can’t see what good this is going to do,” she muttered.

  “We have a responsibility. We triggered something. We have to stop it.”

  “Since when are you so big on doing the right thing and acknowledging responsibility?”

  “Since last night.”

  A trace of humour re-entered Sturghill’s eye. “Ever hear of death-bed conversions?”

  “Very funny.”

  Sturghill sighed, hugged herself more tightly. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ll go.” And the thing that Meacham admired, and that pleased her, was that Sturghill didn’t hesitate.

  “Thank you,” Meacham said.

  Sturghill was the easy part. Pertwee was the challenge. Meacham found her pacing. Corderman was splitting his attention between watching her and the arrival of night outside. Meacham couldn’t tell which made him more nervous. Pertwee flashed her a stricken glance as Meacham stepped into the room, and she paced even faster.

  “Would you mind sitting still for a minute?” Meacham asked.

  Pertwee glared but perched on the bed. She was taut enough to suspend a bridge. “What is it?” she snapped.

  “I want to talk to you about the Hall.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because something terrible has happened, and maybe rubbing my face in it and gloating about the collapse of my belief system will make you feel better, but I’m not going to help you out with that, I’m sorry.” Pertwee stared straight ahead, through Meacham’s chest and beyond the closed door of the room.

  “That isn’t what I’m here for.” Meacham glanced up at Corderman. He wasn’t positioning himself to act as Pertwee’s guard dog, which was what she had expected. He hadn’t moved from his station at the window and was keeping his back to the room now. The set of his shoulders read, Keep me out of this.

  “Oh?” It was the first syllable Pertwee had uttered that wasn’t spoiling for a fight.

  “Of course not. If anything, you were closer to being right than the rest of us. You at least believed there was something active there. You believed in ghosts.”

  Pertwee nodded slowly. “I just never thought ...” she began, and trailed off.

  “Has your faith collapsed?” Meacham asked.

  Pertwee thought before answering. Her hesitation made Meacham respect the answer. “No,” she said. “I never pretended that there weren’t dark spirits out there. I’m not going to pretend that there was anything good in what happened. But I don’t understand why it did. There can be dangers in these sorts of investigations, but why at Gethsemane Hall? Its reputation doesn’t suggest anything like this.”

  “I was thinking about that,” said Meacham. “When we talked about the reputation earlier, I reminded you that none of the stories about miracles and such were from first-hand sources.”

  “So?”

  “So you felt pulled to the house, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve wanted to go there for years.”

  “I mean really pulled, like something was physically hauling you in.”

  Pertwee said it very slowly: “Yes.”

  “Too fucking right yes,” Corderman said, sounding harsh and frightened. He didn’t change his stance or turn his head.

  “So did I,” Meacham said. “I’m feeling it right now. Don’t you? Don’t you need to go back there, even though you don’t want to?”

  “Yes.” Pertwee said it more quickly this time, as if relieved. “One of the locals spoke to me about this. I think he was very frightened of the house.”

  “Smart man. I’d like to meet him. So this is what I think. Many people over the years have felt that tug. If you’re in the town, you’re close enough to the house to be wary. But if you’re not, and all you know is that you want to go there, then ...”

  “‘One feels drawn to a place one is convinced is holy,’” Pertwee quoted. “That’s what Mr. Bellingham said.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I’m not sure. But I think we stirred up a hornets’ nest. We should try to make amends.”

  “You want to go back there.”

  “No, I don’t. But I’m going to. I don’t know how to fight this, but I want to try. How about you?”

  “Yes,” Pertwee said.

  “No! ” Corderman shouted at the same time.

  Pertwee turned around to stare at Corderman. Meacham marked the moment. Open rebellion from the sidekick. The world was coming to an end.

  “No,” Corderman repeated, more softly, but more desperately. “We have to leave.”

  Meacham sympathized. “The police won’t let us,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t you believe we can help heal this place?” Pertwee asked.

  “No,” Corderman told her. “I thought you knew what you were doing. I believed in you. But you’re just full of piss, Anna, and I don’t want to risk my life for your theories.”

  “They’re all we have now.”

  “Well that isn’t very
much, then, is it?” He shook his head, emphatic movements left and right. “I’ve been listening to you for years. Look where that got me. This time, no.” The denial was absolute, irrevocable. He turned back to the window, conversation over.

  Pertwee faced Meacham again. She looked miserable. “I’ll do what I can,” she said.

  “Thank you. Any ideas?” She didn’t trust Pertwee’s notions, but she wanted to hear them. She hadn’t progressed beyond Clean up your mess herself.

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Meacham went back to the room. “Well?” Sturghill asked as Meacham closed the door behind her.

  “She’s in. Corderman’s out.”

  “What about Patrick?”

  “I’ll speak to him.”

  “When?”

  Meacham almost said, “Now.” She almost stood up to head over to the rectory. But then she looked outside, at the night that coated the window, and didn’t like the idea of walking outside, of touching the night itself. So she said, “In the morning.”

  Sturghill appeared satisfied, even relieved. “Mind if we sleep with the lights on?” she said.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Meacham lay back and stared at the ceiling. She glanced at her watch. Barely past ten. It was going to be a long countdown to dawn.

  Pertwee came up behind Corderman. She touched his shoulder. It was rebar rigid. “I’d rather do this with you,” she said.

  “I’d rather live.”

  Give it up, she thought. She’d lost him. For years she’d taken him for granted, when he wasn’t driving her crazy. She’d never been truly angry at him; that would have been too much like kicking a puppy. She’d never given him his due, either. She had wished for a different ally, one she could take seriously. She had thought that was what she wanted. But what if all she had really wanted was someone to lead around? What about that? Corderman had filled that bill quite nicely. And now, worse than mutiny, he was simply turning away. The loss was a big hurt. “Louise was right,” she said, trying one more time. “We have a responsibility.”