‘The Hanged Man.’
‘Very good.’
All trace of the ridiculous Martin had disappeared, except for a bit of blue nylon cord still attached to the bough from which, by one leg, he had dangled. After Danzo had performed the ritual of taking meat, the corpse had been heaved into the water and left to float downstream.
‘We slaughtered him because we wanted to,’ Bex said.
‘I know.’
‘Because we felt like it.’
‘I know.’
‘“Out vile jelly!”’
Seumas did not even try to understand. Bex was given to uttering incomprehensible quotations, sometimes in foreign languages.
‘We can do anything we want. Anything. That’s the Covenant, Seumas. Do you see?’
Bex had put himself beyond earthly powers. He had made himself invulnerable and immortal. And though they would never become immortal, his followers could share his invulnerability. As long as they swore allegiance and pledged service to the will of Bex, and hence to the will of Satan, nothing could ever harm them. He had proved that over and over again. If they carried weapons at all, it was only as a mark of their puissance.
‘Do you know how the Covenant came about?’
Seumas hesitated. ‘The Dark One … he appeared to you.’
‘I have never told anyone precisely what happened. What he wanted in return. But now, Seumas, I can tell you.’
Bex started walking again.
He said, ‘What is the fifteenth card of the Major Arcana?’
‘The Devil.’ The twenty-two tarot trumps, Bex had taught his disciples, formed a symbolic picture-book. The cards represented the stages of the spiritual journey, or a history of mankind, or an unfolding of the subconscious. In short, a pathway to the Golden Dawn.
‘And the sixteenth card is?’
‘The Tower,’ Seumas said, seeing its image in his mind’s eye: a high tower set on a rocky promontory, its crown dislodged by a bolt of lightning, flames licking from the windows, from which a man and a woman were falling to their death.
‘Forget the other meanings,’ Bex said. ‘The tower is the phallus.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A symbol of the penis.’
‘What?’ Seumas said, unable to help himself.
‘The lightning is puissance. Occult puissance. Where do you think this puissance comes from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘From the previous card. From the Devil. From the flaming brand in his left hand. In exchange he wanted what I took from you last night. So that’s what I gave him.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Seumas said. ‘I mean —’
‘I let him pole me.’
‘What, really?’
‘Really.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He manifested as Eblis. No goat’s head or cloven hoofs. No leather wings.’
‘Did it … did it hurt?’
‘Not much. I was frightened at first but it was OK. Except for his spunk.’
‘What about it?’
‘It felt strange. Inside me. Hot. Buzzy, like something electric. And there was so much of it. He kept coming, over and over again.’
‘Where did it happen?’
‘In the woods. You know about the ceremony, about the way I summoned him.’ Bex paused. ‘When it was over, he told me his seed had made me immortal, and that mine would do the same for anyone I chose. That means you have become immortal, Seumas, just as I did.’
‘Really? I’ll live for ever?’
‘Of course. You can see now why I have to keep this secret.’
Overwhelmed, exultant, Seumas could barely breathe.
Bex said, ‘That’s why the others mustn’t know. They’d be jealous.’
Having left the river behind, they had arrived at the brick dome of the ice-house, which Seumas and Matt and Danzo had explored ten days ago. From the heavy oaken door a flight of brick steps led down ten or twelve feet to a cool, stone floor.
They were completely alone here. The villagers had been sent about their chores, as usual, and the other followers, Seumas guessed, were either in the Manor or in the various houses they had commandeered.
‘Teach me, Bex,’ he said. ‘Teach me all you know.’
Bex looked around. No one was to be seen. The rise of the ice-house was between the two young men and the distant façade of the Manor.
He raised the latch, opened the door, and led the way inside.
∗ ∗ ∗
Bex had known from the start that Seumas was queer. Bex had also seen that he would provide an agreeable way of getting rid of Danzo.
Danzo had become a threat. He was the most intelligent of the disciples and Bex had, albeit long ago, committed the cardinal error of taking him to bed. Though Bex preferred women, he denied himself nothing in that department. Limitless gratification was, after all, his perquisite.
Danzo would inherit Seumas in due course. Then the two would be caught together, in the act, and Bex would have them both condemned.
Of course, there was a risk, however remote, that someone might come now to the ice-house and catch Bex himself. He had wedged a beam of wood against the door but there were gaps around the frame to which an eye could be pressed. They were admitting enough daylight for him to have derived visual as well as every other kind of stimulation from the ardour of Seumas’s embraces, and had just allowed Seumas to find the least uncomfortable part of the floor on which to kneel to receive his due.
Bex’s buttocks were making contact with the rough planks of a sort of low bench, or shelf, which at a convenient height ran along one wall. As Seumas began his work, Bex leaned back and opened his thighs more widely. Part of him remained detached; the rest was becoming intoxicated by sexual pleasure. The neophyte’s technique had already improved.
The cool, earthy air, the diffuse fragments of light reaching the flagstones, the accumulation of dust and spiders and other evidence of abandonment: all these put Bex in mind of a dilapidated potting-shed at Byfield whither he, aged twelve, and a fourteen-year-old girl, named Magda, had been accustomed to repair for their increasingly fervent fumblings. Only in such a place, away from adult supervision, had Bex been able to act without restraint. Its decayed atmosphere was for ever associated with tumescent flesh, the delicious danger of discovery, and the smell of semen.
Bex placed his hands on Seumas’s head and gave vent to a groan.
It would not do to squirt too soon, to vouchsafe so readily, to such terrestrial slobbering, the divine ejaculate. Aware that he was becoming so carried away that he might not even hear approaching footfalls, Bex raised his eyes to the door at the top of the steps.
No one was looking down through the gaps round the frame. No one could see what Seumas was engaged upon with his leader, the perfect being, scourge of all weakness, source of all wisdom, effulgent centre of the universe.
At any moment, that might change.
Risk kept boredom at bay. It was indivisible from fun.
The strategy for disposing of Danzo was in itself risky. Danzo would try to defend himself by denouncing Bex to the others. These echoed accusations would naturally sound as unimaginative as they were predictable and Bex would win the day.
The chance that he might not, that Danzo or even Seumas might be believed, that their word might prevail against his, provided the essential frisson of danger that had set Bex on this course of action.
Danzo was one of the few disciples who could read. Using a book called Test Your IQ, Bex had measured Danzo’s at 121. His own came in at something over 170.
Bex had never met anyone whose intelligence he could respect. He somehow knew everything he needed to know, in an effortless, osmotic sort of fashion. Apparently he had taught himself to read English by the age of four, French and Latin the year after. By the time the pestilence had started he had been reading the easier Greeks – say Thucydides and Xenophon – in the original.
He had been nine then, ten b
y the time the epidemic had finished.
Bex had no feelings about his life as it might have been. He gave it no thought. The past was irrelevant, the present a beautiful illusion, a manifestation of something else. It was like the cleft made in fast-flowing water by a pendent branch. As for the future, that was just another aspect of the thing called ‘now’, and so it too was an illusion.
The future.
At Byfield, his first home after the plague, they had been obsessed with nothing else. And since the villagers there had hated the present so much, since they had so badly wanted to team up with God, he and Danzo, with the help of two HK53s, had decided to do them a favour and speed them on their way.
He could still see their faces, hear their cries for mercy, smell the blood and shit and cordite. That had been his first real taste of his own transcendent power and authority. Everything else had been constructed on the laystall of Byfield.
At first he had thought it all bollocks: the spirit of Aleister Crowley, the Secret Tradition, the pact with Satan, the New Order of the Golden Dawn. He had believed that a virus, not Belial, had brought about the plague. There had been, then, no mission to kill his foe’s believers. Byfield had just been a massacre. An atrocity. Extreme fun.
But now he knew differently. His account of his date with the Devil may not have been literal, but, in the language of symbolism that had come to inform his life, it rang true. Something remarkable had happened, was happening still, was just beginning. Bex had left them behind, the philosophers, the Nazis, the gangsters and conquistadors, the dabblers and half-hearted fakes. The whole course of history had been a prelude to this era of silence and depopulation. Nurtured by the apparatus of civilisation, yet also overwhelmed by its hubbub, the collective human consciousness had been brought to its maximum pitch: then set free. Only now, in the sudden absence of clamour, of external control, of morality, was it possible for a superior man to explore the infinite and make it his own.
At an early stage in his development, Bex had recognised the unique qualifications that he possessed. Just as language and emotion had differentiated humans from beasts and allowed them to evolve, so did silence and contempt differentiate the superior from the inferior man.
Bex’s heart was made of the coldest, smoothest stone. Each day he checked its surface for pitting or fault-lines and found none. Each day he became purer, more polished, more befitting his destiny.
His talent was evolving. Years ago, he had disencumbered himself of what little emotional baggage he had been born with. Aged six, he had seen off one of his more kindly and enduring ‘uncles’ by planting, in his mother’s mind, the idea that the fellow had been a latent paedophile. Bex’s innocent questions had been fabricated with masterly skill. Or again, at Byfield, when Magda had become pregnant, Bex had successfully implicated a much older boy, a booby who had once dared to slight him. Forced by the elders into betrothal, Magda had fatally tried to induce her own abortion. The putative father, blamed and shunned by the whole village, had hanged himself in the church. Standing beside the suicide’s grave at the crossroads, Bex had felt his stature grow. He had deftly disposed of three impediments: Magda, the unborn child, and the protesting groom.
Blunt the sharpness; untangle the knots; soften the glare; let your wheels move only along old ruts. Thus spake Lao Tzu. Disentangle, simplify; get rid of all encumbrance. In his quest for purity, Bex had become streamlined. He left a clean, untroubled, otter’s wake. It closed immediately after he had passed, concealing for ever, in dark, weedy depths, the chaotic rubbish of the past.
He groaned again and turned his gaze from the ice-house door. The ecstasy Seumas was generating could no longer be resisted.
Bex let his fingers tighten on the plush surface of his victim’s skull, holding him firmly down, and for the next fifteen seconds abandoned himself entirely to simplicity: extreme, selfish, and absolute.
3
Philip Davies opened his eyes. How long had he been asleep? A few minutes? Longer than that – the light in the cellar had changed. From the small amount leaking in he could tell that sunshine was now illuminating the valley outside.
He knew its slopes so well that he no longer needed to see them to take his leave. He would never see them again. Soon, Bex would send someone to kill him. Davies expected it every time he heard the key in the lock.
Lying on his bunk, the hostage closed his eyes once more and allowed his thoughts to drift. He no longer needed to stand on the bridge to draw comfort from the river, or to watch the freshly fallen alder-leaves, still green, sliding singly or in unrelated groups towards the weir.
Maybe he had dreamt it all, the whole passage of his life: his work as an economist at the Treasury, his marriage, the plague, the years in the village, their trials and rewards.
It no longer seemed even plausible that there had been another world before. The daily journey by tube. The people, the crowds. London. All gone, overwhelmed by decay.
The landscape spread before him in his mind. Where once there had been well-ordered farms, gardens, metalled roads, weed-free pavements, now there was chaos, various and vigorous and full of life.
It had fascinated him to see how systematically nature was winning back the works of man. So little was needed to claim another building. A door left open, a broken pane or missing tile, a blocked gutter or ventilation brick, even flaking paint, would let the damp come in and spell the end. Damp allowed the omnipresent spores of dry rot to germinate and flourish. This alone could destroy a house, digesting it with smothering masses and festoons of spongy white, yellow, grey and cinnamon. Or a single conker, squirrel-brought, might sprout in the soggy compost of rotten furnishings and collapsed timbers by the dining-room window, filling the space with branches, reaching up for the holes in the roof, distending the foundations, until the whole structure cracked and sagged and gave way. Tumbled masonry then fell victim to lesser plants, to goosegrass and ivy and bramble. Runners of buttercup and barren strawberry crept across paths and hardstanding, snagging and consolidating the debris from autumn upon autumn of eddying leaves. Soon no trace of habitation would be visible, and another house had gone.
Thus it had been with Davies’s own house in Chorleywood, with the whole of the affluent village that had once been his home.
All had been reclaimed, even the M25 motorway orbiting London. Silence hung in the branches of larch and birch, in the wellingtonias by the ruins of the tennis club. Season after season drifted unwitnessed through Chorleywood. Its air was transparent, utterly pure. The Milky Way, which had been hardly detectable from his garden in the latter years before the plague, now arched triumphantly across the night sky. The moonlight had been purified, rendered brilliant, bone-white, falling through an atmosphere so clean that the population of visible stars had doubled, quadrupled, octupled. And when the air moved, it was redolent of far-off places, estuaries and the sea, pine forests, deserts, tundra; or it smelled of nothing at all. Passing among the sagging boughs of the wellingtonias, it released and carried onward their aniseed fragrance. Sometimes, in the fields, when the wind was in the east, Davies fancied his nostrils could, just faintly, register the scent of anise, and he thought again of the tennis club where he had met his wife.
She had died soon after the start. She had been comparatively lucky, spared what was to come. At her death she had still been part of a civilisation. She had had doctors to tend her, hospitals, a grief-stricken family; she had had journalists demanding that science provide, if not a cure, then at least an answer, or even an estimate of how far it would eventually go.
It had not been until he had been some time at Shanley that Davies had begun to chronicle the plague. When, Crusoe-like, the earliest villagers had made repeated sorties to gather supplies from the wreck of civilisation, they had assembled a reasonably complete series of the more intelligent newspapers and scientific journals containing facts about the disease.
He had written on acid-free paper, in permanent ink, with the sa
me pen he had used at the office. The process had been soothing as well as cathartic. His script had become steadily more flowing and regular, as it had been in the old days. After several drafts he had completed what he had perceived to be an impartial account of the epidemic. He had bound the fair copy into a lever-arch binder, together with newspaper and magazine cuttings presented in date order, and prepared labels for the spine and front cover that simply read:
THE PLAGUE
Together with the Bible, this document had given authority to and formed the foundation of village law. Lodged in the Manor House library, it had been available to everyone, young or old. Though no one much looked at it any more, Davies occasionally took it down. Every time he did, the story seemed more unreal.
Some time before the autumn of 2016 a virus endemic in the crested mangabey, a monkey native to Central Africa, mutated and jumped the species barrier to man. Bush-meat hunters were believed to be the first to be infected. The mutation also changed the behaviour of the pathogen, and IVN, Infectious Viral Necrosis, was born.
Symptoms of infection bore little resemblance to the general debilitation produced in the mangabey, and were so remarkable that the disease immediately came to scientific notice.
Infection was first manifested by a feeling of lassitude and despair. At this stage the disease also became contagious. The salivary glands enlarged, distending the face and neck. The tongue, gums and cheek linings turned black, the breath smelled foul, and in some cases the teeth became so loose that they could be painlessly pulled out with the fingers. By now the kidneys, liver and lymphatic system also started to deteriorate. Prostration soon followed.
Death was preceded by rapid and widespread necrosis of the flesh. The actual cause of death was usually heart failure. The period from infection to death ranged from four to sixteen days, with an average of about a week.
By 1 November, 2016, twenty-three cases had been reported from Equatorial Guinea and two from Libreville, just over the border in Gabon. By the 12th, the outbreak had spread as far as Nigeria: seventy cases had been notified in urban Lagos alone.
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