A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “Don’t tell me you’re in with this bunch,” is what she actually said, looking him up and down. She had a high-pitched, girlish voice with what he recognized as an American Valley girl accent. “You don’t look like a religious maniac.” Then she hesitated. “Wait. You’re the priest sent to look into all the, like, stuff going on here, aren’t you?” She waggled her blue-tipped fingers on the word “stuff” to indicate the fluidity of the situation. Max wondered how she had deduced his calling, a question she answered by saying: “My mom said there was ‘such a nice-looking priest’ sent to sort things out.”

  This place must rival Nether Monkslip for jungle-drum communiques, thought Max. Her mother must have seen him arrive last night, when he was wearing his collar, but how she had known his mission …

  “And if mom notices,” Xanda went on gaily, “it must be one hot-looking dude. You don’t mind my saying that, do you? You are hot, you know, for an old guy. It’s not like you’re a priest-priest, with vows of celebrity and all.” Max nodded his agreement, biting back a smile at her gaffe. “Anyway, there’s no one else here who fits the bill. I mean, that cop Cotton is good-looking, but I know who he is—he grilled me for simply hours, you know; it was wonderful! So much like Law and Order—do you get that here? Yes? And God knows Piers thinks he’s a gift sent to women from above. But for sure I know what Piers looks like. That’s ‘Piers Montague, Artist.’ Everyone always refers to him this way, you will notice. ‘Piers Montague Comma Artist.’ What a berk. If you hear a lot of commotion at night around here, it’s probably him, meeting up with Paloma Green. Who they think they’re kidding, I do not know. And anyone can hear the bolt to the women’s side of the guesthouse open—it’s like Grand Central. Now, that DCI Cotton is a different story. Hubba, as they say, hubba.”

  “I’ve been wondering exactly why he’s here,” said Max. “Piers.” He looked hopefully at his new source of information. She was hardly a reluctant witness, although how unbiased a one he couldn’t be sure. She seemed to share his withering assessment of Piers, which moved her up several notches in Max’s estimation.

  “‘Piers Montague, Artist,’ you mean? He was part of the fund-raising effort. The idea was that famous artistes would be invited to donate paintings and photographs they’d made of the abbey and religious stuff like that. He’s also studying some paintings in the church—he says. He’s a restor … restorative…”

  “Restorer,” finished Max for her.

  “Yah,” she agreed. “But me, I wonder what qualifies you to be sorting things out at the abbey? I mean,” she added, “no offense, but this can’t be in your usual line of work. Shouldn’t you be baptizing babies or healing the sick or something?”

  “DCI Cotton asked me to be here,” Max said mildly. It seemed best to leave it at that. She struck him as the sort of precocious woman-child who would pepper him with questions given half a chance. He decided to turn the tables.

  “You must be Xanda,” he said. “What an unusual name. Very pretty.”

  “They had to name me something to balance out the last name Gorey. Always makes me think of a horror flick about an alien creature from the planet Zicon or something. And it is not short for Alexandra. For once in their turgid, stuck-in-the-mud lives, my parents anticipated a trend. You know: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  “It’s a very pretty name,” he insisted, thinking her parents couldn’t be all that stodgy or they surely would have put a clamp on her hair and costume choices. Although, when did parents have any real say in those departments? “You are here with your parents, I take it?”

  “As if I had a choice. You don’t seriously think I’d be here without them, do you? It’s summer vacation time back home. I just finished my freshman year in college. I’m studying medieval literature. Not my choice, believe me. Some days I could just die. Die! I’m trying to talk the folks into letting me switch. My mother says he who pays the piper names the tune. But I don’t even know what they’re talking about in class most days. Complete waste of money. I threatened to drop out. They practically commanded me to come on this trip with them. They think it will change my mind. My father especially is a real Anglephile.” Whatever they were teaching her in college, it was not vocabulary. “My parents both love everything about England, beginning with the Queen and that naff son of hers. I could just gag I’m so bored. Harry looks like he could be fun, though.” Max assumed she was talking about HRH Prince Harry. Max still had connections in SO14 who reported that guarding Harry was an exercise in burlesque comedy intermixed with moments of sheer terror. Xanda twirled the end of one blond-pink lock, evaluating Max’s own potential for livening things up.

  “When do you leave?” he asked.

  “Whenever my father’s convinced himself he isn’t being ripped off,” she replied. “Or when he’s satisfied he has been and decides what to do about it. What ‘legal recourse’ he has, as he puts it. But he’s taking his sweet time about it. I mean, they’re nuns, after all. It’s a bit hard to go around accusing them without a lot of evidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Ripped off?” Max asked casually, pouring a cup of coffee for himself and offering her one.

  “Yeah. It’s something to do with money,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning in confidingly. “Money that should have gone into replacing electricity and plumbing and things here in the guesthouse can’t be accounted for. There was supposed to be an addition to the building, too, and there’s no sign of it.” She examined one blue nail and began smoothing back the cuticle with her thumb. “My father is furious and ‘demands an accounting.’ I think he brought Piers Montague, Artist, and that art gallery owner woman on board to back up his protest. That’s just a guess, but my father is good at getting people in his corner.”

  Turning away, she started rooting around in various cupboards, opening the small fridge to pull out a milk bottle. She proceeded to pour half the contents into a large glass and took a sip, eyeing him over the top.

  “You didn’t know all this?” she asked. “I would bet you did.”

  “I know there is some question in your father’s mind, and presumably in your mother’s, about the dispersal of various funds he’s provided the abbey.”

  “Big question, yep. Mucho problemo with the missing dinero, yessiree. He’s rich, you know, my father. He actually believes God wants him to be rich, which probably helps, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it does, rather,” said Max.

  “He’s an investor. Meaning, he invests other people’s money. In what, I don’t know. Just stocks and stuff like that. But he’s pretty good at guessing how the market will move. And just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he is okay with being ripped off. He hasn’t half been torqued since we got here. ‘Where are the earth-movers?’ he wants to know. She lowered her voice to a basso boom, in what Max was to learn was a fair imitation of her father. “‘Men with shovels? Pitchforks? Something?’”

  “He came here to investigate, did he?” Max prodded. “To determine whether his money was in good hands?”

  “Yah. But he and my mom come here at least every summer, anyway. Have for years. It’s their idea of fun, this sort of religious fandango. Just imagine. Well, I guess you can imagine, but.… They used to leave me with my aunt in Boston, thinking that was safer somehow. They had no idea—my aunt is forty but she rocks. I mean really—she sings in a band. But this year, as I say, my father decided it was time to ‘expand my horizons.’ Ugh. Shrink them, is more like it. No computer, no cell phone, no television. Jesus. Oops, sorry, Father. No disrespect intended. But I am just about reaching my limit, you know? The animals are not as much fun as I was led to believe.”

  “Animals?”

  “Sure. It’s a working farm. They have goats, and the nuns make cheese and things. The goats creep me out. Those eyes!” Hunching her shoulders around her ears, she shivered with distaste. “Even the little ones.”

  Max was sympathetic. It had not been all that long since he him
self had been a teenager. He could imagine that Monkbury Abbey held little scope for someone her age.

  “And they barely have electricity,” she went on. “The lights went out the other night. The hamster or whatever turns the wheels that make the generator go must have escaped.”

  “They are somewhat off the grid out here,” agreed Max.

  “Are you going into the village soon?” she asked.

  “Erm. I just got here,” said Max.

  “I don’t suppose I could…”

  “Borrow my car?” Max laughed. “No. But if I go into the village you’ll be the first to know. You can come with me, but with your parents’ permission, of course.”

  “I’m eighteen,” she insisted.

  “Still,” he said. Better to keep the peace with the Goreys, whom he had not even met, than disturb the peace in anticipation. Her father didn’t sound like the type of man to approve a joyride for his daughter, particularly in a foreign country with a strange man.

  A big sigh at this from Xanda. Apparently this Max person was going to be as tedious about everything as her parents were.

  Clearly playing her trump card, she said: “I don’t know how much more I can take, you know. They communicate with these elaborate hand signals at meals on Sundays—the nuns, I mean. The only sound you can hear is a spoon striking the bottom of a bowl, or the occasional crunch of a raw carrot or a stick of celery, or the clacking of someone’s dentures. It’s too horrible for words. Ghastly, as the English say. But worse than the silence is the readings the nuns do at dinnertime. Stuff from the scriptures, and ‘uplifting’ advice from martyrs and hermits and the utterly clueless, all delivered in this, like, monotune. God!”

  “Monotone,” corrected Max automatically. “I’m sure it’s a bit boring. But there is the fresh air and the little sheep, right? And perhaps fishing if you’re so inclined … I suppose…?”

  He trailed off. She looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

  “I hope you’re joking. Do I look like a fisherman to you?”

  “I just meant, there must be compensations. The peace and quiet. Those are hard things to come by, day by day. Perhaps it’s something you’ll appreciate more as you get older.”

  “Not I,” she said flatly. “I never want to get old, not like this bunch. Even the postulant—she’s not much older than me, and what a drip she is. She doesn’t even know who Eminem is. I want to live my life in, like, the fast lane—you know? If I ever get out of here alive, I mean. At least the attempted murder livened things up.”

  “Who told you it was attempted murder?” he asked her, rather sharply. Then more gently, he added, “I mean, what makes you think that?”

  “Dunno.” She twirled one of the pink-tipped strands at the side of her head. “Stands to reason. I mean, have you met him?”

  She would not be drawn further on what exactly stood to reason. After a few delicately phrased attempts at pinning her down, Max returned his attention to his granola.

  “My father is always on about the mandolin,” she said conversationally after a while. She began picking through the bowl of fruit on the table. “He collects things, my dad.”

  Max imagined he could afford to.

  “That’s an interesting hobby,” he said.

  “I guess. He likes religious art. You should see our house. It’s like living in a cathedral.”

  She had sat down across the table from him, and using the knife he’d left lying there, began trying to peel an apple without breaking the skin. She got about halfway through.

  “Rats,” she said.

  Max, still puzzling over what on earth she was talking about, finally put it together.

  “You mean Mandylion,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s it. My dad’s obsessed with the mandolin. He’s not the only one.”

  “A Mandylion,” Max repeated. “It is thought to be an image of the living Christ. There are several versions, none that can be authenticated.” He thought of the reappearing image back in his own church of St. Edwold’s, which stubbornly reemerged on the wall despite his best attempts to eradicate it with paint and plaster. As little Tom Hooser loudly and repeatedly insisted, it bore a strong resemblance to the face on the Shroud of Turin.

  “Of course,” Max added, “it is all the purest speculation. Wishful thinking at its most intense. Everyone wants to know exactly what Christ looked like when he walked the earth. And there is no one who can know.”

  “Didn’t the apostles or somebody leave a description in the Bible? Didn’t anyone make a sketch or something?”

  Max smiled. A child of the Internet age, she would find it hard to grasp that describing the physical Christ would not have occurred to anyone. Also that he didn’t leave written words or autographs.

  That photography had not yet been invented.

  That, in any event, much that was recorded in the scriptures had been recorded long after the fact.

  Max merely shook his head. “No such luck,” he said. “So I am to take it you are not religious yourself?”

  “No. I leave all that to the people who go in for this sort of thing.” With a wave, Xanda indicated the other inmates of the abbey. Realizing what she’d just said might have sounded rude, considering her audience, she added, with the urgent gaucheness of youth, “I didn’t mean you, of course. It’s your job, like, and I’m sure you’re really good at it. But my parents … I’ve just had it up to here with being told what Jesus said and what Jesus thought and how I’m breaking the rules all the time. And my hair! Why do adults always make such a thing of hair? Besides, you should have seen it before. Curly, but not in an interesting way. More like escaped-lunatic curly.”

  “They’re very devout, your parents?”

  “What a nice way of putting it. They’re crazy, actually. Our house also looks like a gift shop in Lourdes. They dragged me there when I was ten. Let me tell you, there is no plastic left in France that hasn’t been melted down into a statue. I don’t know why my parents don’t just convert over to the Catholic side. They’re so—what do you call it here? High Church? Yeah, so High Church it practically makes no difference.”

  There was a movement outside the window overlooking the cloister. Xanda pointed and said, “There they are. Meet the parents. If you dare.”

  Max stepped over to the window and saw the couple walking in the cloister, near the north alley that ran beside the church. The cloister was actually a large square garden with fruit trees and flowers, now coaxed into bloom by the summer heat. The U.K. as a whole had endured a rainy spring, but now the Monkbury Abbey garden seemed to be reaping the full and glorious benefit. The cloister was surrounded in traditional style by a roofed arcade on all sides, with the nunnery buildings opening off of it. There was what appeared to be a stone well in the center of the garden. Max remembered reading somewhere the waters of that well had miraculous healing powers.

  The couple were near enough Max could see them clearly over the top of the muslin curtain. Clement was a large, tuna-headed man with a shiny bald pate and round wireless spectacles perched precariously on the bridge of a fleshy nose. He had small teeth like rows of baby corn kernels, misshapen but gleaming white. He wore what Max thought of as the uniform of the travelling, well-off tourist, genus American: khaki pants with large pockets on the legs, and a short-sleeved polo shirt unbuttoned at the neck to reveal a clean white T-shirt. He had on expensive white trainers with a tread fit for an all-terrain vehicle.

  Mrs. Gorey—Oona—was, like Piers Montague, dressed in black, but in some drapey fabric that hung loosely from her shoulders to cover what looked to be a substantial frame. Somehow Max didn’t think this was an arty choice on her part, as it was in the case of Piers. She may have thought of it as proper nunnery-visiting garb, but, although black was all the rage these days, this clothing was funereal rather than stylish. Her hair was like a balled-up fist, the blond curls tightly corkscrewed to her head. She had a pretty little face but it wore a mean, p
inched-in expression.

  Max was reminded of one of those grand ladies whose effigies could be seen carved on medieval tombs, her husband lying beside her and perhaps a little dog curled at her feet. Her expression stern and forbidding, just knowing she was on her way to meet God in person at last. Judging by her strong visage and the sturdy walk of this living example of grit and fortitude, Max imagined Oona Gorey could easily hold her own against her powerful husband.

  He turned back to Xanda.

  “The fun couple,” she said. “As I told you, they adore this place, which gives you some idea of the limits to their definition of a fun vacation.”

  “Perhaps you could learn a craft while you’re here. The sisters are famous for their skills at pottery, just for one example.”

  “Oh, yeah. I suppose. I was helping Dame Potter the other day. But that is so not me.”

  “What is you?” asked Max gently.

  For that she had a ready answer, surprising Max somewhat. Generally, at her age, the answer was more about what she did not want to do. “I want to study fashion design. In New York, at the Fashion Institute. My father ‘won’t hear of it.’”