Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Danzo had thought that they – Bex and the New Order – were chasing a rogue survivor from elsewhere. But this was no mortal being: and, it seemed, he was chasing them.

  The angel, God’s representative on earth, who had been appointed to use earthly means to overcome the foe, had set an elaborate trap. Why else had he removed his galoshes, if not to identify his first trail? His distinctive boot-soles had led them all the way here.

  Danzo suddenly saw that the gift of the green figurine, the Buddhist thing Suter had handed to Muriel, had been deliberately made. It had not been a mistake, but sucker-bait. St Michael had suckered them all. Divide and conquer. What had happened to Steve and the other two? Why, he had shot them, of course! How else could he have got the Maxi-Kite back? For he must have used the night sight to make his silent way, barefoot, through the house. Earthly means, he had to employ earthly means: Bex had been quite specific on that point.

  St Michael had obviously heard Danzo and Pinch talking in the kitchen. Sneaked up, making no noise. Watched them through his night sight. Got his bearings. And fired. The cat had had nothing to do with it.

  But, if the angel had come down from heaven, what about the persona of John Suter, the man Danzo had inferred from the contents of the house? And what about the building itself? Was any of it real? After all, no one could have survived alone for twelve solid years. Maybe the whole thing had been conjured up by God. Suter, the photos, his background, his possessions – these were all part of an illusion being projected, like Satan’s shadow, for Danzo’s benefit. And now that he understood what was happening, he also understood that it might vanish at any moment, leaving him at St Michael’s mercy.

  Aware that the door to the terrace had almost certainly been left open on purpose, Danzo returned to the kitchen porch. He paused on the threshold. No one was to be heard or seen.

  Without so much as a backward glance for Pinch, he ran out past the woodstore, across the courtyard, and on into the moon-bathed landscape of the night.

  2

  Helen did not want to listen. Bex was talking, holding forth, inflicting again the sort of apparently aimless disquisition which came eventually to a unified point. When that happened, she knew what to expect.

  She was trying to concentrate on her mental image of the Rood. At one time, before, she had entertained only a generalised vision of the Crucifixion. This had derived from all the representations of Calvary she had ever seen. But now a single image had emerged. Intensely detailed, it was all she had left to sustain her. The man on the cross was real. His agony was real. His doubt and despair were those of Helen herself.

  Bex had been talking for some time. So far this evening he had not touched her. Soon he would. She would be compelled to take off her clothes, to lie face up or face down, to kneel, to open her legs, to submit to more and yet more depravity. He would go on speaking. He knew the exact words to cause her the most distress. Even as he violated her, he would utter them in whispers, without hesitation, moving fluently from one source of pain to the next.

  Whenever she submitted to him, she now always found herself unable to stop seeking oblivion in her vision of the cross. Christ in his agony was quite different from the wholesome, white-robed figure she knew from the plates in her Bible. His skinny, contorted body bearing the marks of the scourge, his stained breech-clout, even the iron nails in his palms and insteps, had become irrelevant, just as Helen’s own body had become irrelevant. All his being was concentrated in his face, in his eyes. As, through his crown of thorns, he looked yearningly skyward, Helen knew that soon, very soon, she would be with her heavenly Father. And she would be with Martin again, and all this would be nothing.

  It seemed as if she had been imprisoned in this room for ever. Bex was at present sitting in the easy chair by the window, legs crossed. Helen was in a corresponding chair on the far side of the bed. Both lamps were burning. Whether for his own security or so that he could watch her reactions, he always left at least one alight.

  Across the expanse of the counterpane, she saw him insert another cigarette in his tortoiseshell holder. She had not seen the cigarette holder before tonight, and dully wondered why he had started using it and where he had found it.

  With a soft snap, he shut his gold cigarette case.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard of them.’

  ‘Have you ever read one yourself?’

  ‘Only at school. That was a long time ago.’

  He grunted. ‘As I say, Lear ’s my favourite. Even ahead of Othello. But there’s another you might like. All’s Well that Ends Well.’

  She must have looked at him uncomprehendingly, for he said, ‘That’s the title. Of the play. By William Shakespeare. The excellent Master Shakespeare. You know. The Elizabethan playwright and poet, said to have slept in this very house. The fellow we’ve been discussing for the past ten minutes.’

  She said nothing.

  Bex affably continued speaking. ‘The play – All’s Well – it’s about this bint. She’s creaming herself over this bloke. Trouble is, she doesn’t think she’ll get a look-in. Her old dad’s dead, you see. She’s a lot like you in other ways, too. Big on Jesus. Guess what her name is.’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Helena.’ Bex struck a match. ‘I expect the Immortal Bard named her after St Helena.’ He inhaled. ‘“Who was that?” I hear you ask. Well, she was big on Jesus too. In fact, she’s the Mother of the Church. O yes. She’s the one who found the sepulchre. Also the original cross, and the three nails, some do tell. You’d never have thought she was married to a Roman emperor.’

  His tone was changing.

  ‘They had a son, you know. In 272 AD, if my memory serves. Named him Constantine in honour of his pop. Now, when young Constantine got to be caesar, things weren’t going too well for the Roman empire. He asked his minister what to do. “Well, sire,” says the minister – that’s the way they talked back then, in Latin and everything – “Well, sire,” he says. “I’ve got an idea. There’s this obscure sect out there. They believe in some prophet who’s supposed to have risen from the dead.” “Risen from the dead, you say?” says Constantine. “Yes, Your Emperorness. Risen from the dead. They’re called Christians.” So Constantine says, “Not the ones we feed to the lions, by any chance?” “The very same,” says the minister.’

  Helen looked down at her skirt. Make him stop.

  ‘Then Constantine says, “My ma was always on about them, but I never listened. What’s their angle?” So the minister says, “They think the meek will inherit the Earth.” Constantine says, “All the meek ever inherit is a boot in the neck.” The minister says, “You know this, mighty Caesar, and I know it, but they don’t.” So Constantine says, “Let me get this straight. You can do what you like to a Christian and he’s happy because he thinks he’ll get his reward up there while you’ll be eternally tormented down below.” The minister says, “You’ve got it in one, sire.” So Constantine says, “This Christianity sounds just the ticket for my ailing empire. Get my secretary to found the Holy Roman Church first thing after lunch.”’

  Bex was smiling thinly. ‘Of course, they didn’t have it all their own way for ever. In 1517 Martin Luther started the Reformation in Germany. Over here we had Henry the Eighth. Who also slept in this very house. Whose groaning shade, with limping footfalls, stalks the gallery at night. Why limping? Because his leg was ulcerated at the time. It helped do for him in the end. And why does the ghost groan? Because in this house his second queen Catherine was humping one of his courtiers. Namely, Thomas Culpeper, esquire. That was in 1542, in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘I know about the ghost,’ Helen brought herself to say, hoping the subject was now moving away from religion. ‘But I’ve never heard it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. You’re too pure. Like Catherine. Her name means “pure” in Greek. She was so pure he cut her head off. Like Anne Boleyn in 1536. Whom he secretly married in 1533, when she was alr
eady up the spout with Elizabeth. They came to Shanley Manor in 1534 with the babby in tow.’

  Helen had read the guidebook too.

  Bex went on, ‘You want to know what he did that same year? He passed the Act of Supremacy. Told the Pope to go fuck himself. Grabbed the monasteries for himself. Started the Anglican Church.’

  He lazily scratched his left armpit. ‘That’s right. Your precious Church of England was founded by a serial killer.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No, my dear. You’ve got to face it. Christianity is just so much doo-doo. Political expediency. A power game. That’s all it ever was, and remains. Those self-serving bastards made it up as they went along. Even old Helena wasn’t real. She was only loosely based on a historical figure. Have you read any Homer?’

  The sudden change of direction caught her by surprise. ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘Not “what”. “Who”. He’s an epic poet. Greek. Makes Shakespeare look like an amateur. Provided you read him in the original. Which I can.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘So you’ve never opened the Iliad.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even though you’re in it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Leda. Wife to Menelaus, King of Sparta. She’s trouble. Big time. But even Homer didn’t get her from nowhere. She goes right back. In European mythology she’s the queen of the dead. She’s goddess of the ninth earth. That’s the nether world. Hell. Hence her name. Her bed is called Kör. That’s their word for sickness. Disease. Pox. Cock-rot. She lives under the roots of Yggdrasil.’

  Helen gripped her thumbs.

  ‘What is Yggdrasil?’ Bex went on. ‘The sacred ash-tree. You’ve got a nice specimen here, by the river.’ He paused, the smile still on his face. ‘It was no coincidence I had him hung upside down where I did.’

  Make him stop.

  ‘A handy word, kör. It’s the stem of the Attic Greek koré. A noun of the first declension, meaning “girl” in the sense of “maiden”. Or “daughter”. Like Persephone, another of Zeus’s nippers. Zeus being the supreme deity. Head man up there on Olympus. Sometimes Persephone was just called “Koré”, meaning “the Daughter”. The head man’s daughter. She was that tasty, she got herself dragged down to the underworld by its ruler, Hades. Pluto of the Romans. Satan, if you like.’

  Bex examined the ash on his cigarette, revolving the holder in his fingers, then looked up and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘To be his queen.’

  Make him stop. Dear Christ, please make him stop.

  ‘Words reveal everything. Every symbol lies hidden in language. All you have to do is look. “Hell” is the same word as “hole”. At least, it’s cognate. In Anglo Saxon, say, Dutch and Icelandic, it’s hel. German: Hölle. The verb “hele” means “to hide or cover”, and “hell” means “that which conceals”. Concealment is the essence of woman. Deceit. What is her secret garden, if not a hell-hole where cock-rot lurks? Far from being the Mother of the Church, you’re the Queen of Hell. Of course, you know that already, you fuckworthy slut. That’s why you enjoy it so much. Although, true to your nature, you persist in pretending otherwise.’

  Bex stood up. The smile had gone.

  ‘You know what to do,’ he told her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Suter reached his kitchen a long time later. As best he could, he had used the Maxi-Kite to make a careful search of the house. Though he was by now sure that none of the intruders remained inside, it still took all his courage to switch on a torch.

  Pistol in hand, the shotgun slung over his shoulder, he shone the beam on the body slumped up against the armchair. The deformation of the youth’s cheek and jaw, pressed into the fabric of the chair-back, reminded Suter of the one he had shot outside the hospital.

  He crouched down beside the body and moved the torch closer, causing the passage of enormous, infinitely mobile shadows on the alien walls and ceiling of his kitchen. These bloodied teeth and swollen tongue, the bulging eyes starting from their sockets with the impact of his bullet, had remained like this all evening while he had been searching upstairs and down. His house had already been polluted by the mere fact of its discovery, but this corpse, exuding the poison of its presence for hour after hour into his favourite and most personal room, this made it uninhabitable.

  Suter’s anguish was complete.

  This boy’s skull, too, was shaven. The mousy hair had grown since the razor had last passed across its skin: was growing still. The bullet had entered the back of the head at an angle, off-centre, and had emerged through the left wing of the nose to disappear into the upholstery. The broad, irregular stain there consisted of more than mere blood. Suter felt his gorge rising.

  But it was the other one who mattered, the one wearing a Diurnox headset and wielding a machine gun. Suter’s failure to kill him had been a catastrophe. Always assuming there hadn’t been a third, or even a fourth.

  He extinguished the torch, stood up, and took an irresolute step away from the chair. His universe had turned in on itself and collapsed. The sanctum of his house had gone. He could not stay here. He had been cast upon the wind. As in the days of the plague, he had nowhere to go. Nowhere, and everywhere. Twelve years down the line, he could never hope to establish another residence, still less duplicate this. Left alone, he might have seen out his natural term. Not now. His foreshortened future would be a miserable affair, curtailed by dogs.

  He did not know what to do. He wanted a hot shower, a proper meal, and then, above all, clean sheets. He could not remember ever having felt so tired as this, but he could not rest. Nor could he risk showing more than a few glimmers of light. The other one, and his possible companion or companions, might be only a few yards away in the dark, choosing a moment to return. Alternatively, he or they might already be returning to Shanley to render an account to Bex.

  As long as Bex and the others remained alive, Suter could never sleep in this house again. Nor could he come back once he had left it. He could not even risk going upstairs one last time. The ammunition chests were out of reach. Effectively, the whole house was ceasing to exist.

  He padded to the drawing room and through the open door to the terrace. His feet were already freezing, but the York stone slabs felt especially cold against his soles. In the moonlight, avoiding the bramble-runners, he descended the steps to what had once been a lawn.

  It took a minute or so, and a few probing flashes of his torch, to find his boots and socks, hidden in the shadows of a viburnum bush. He had lain here for over an hour with the L85 aimed at the terrace door.

  Distractedly, he pulled on both pairs of socks. His left foot found its way into its boot. He took the ends of the lace and started winding them alternately across the cleats, slowly ascending his instep. With each turn, as if in self reproof, he yanked with unnecessary firmness. Why hadn’t he let go of that rope? If only he had let the body go, grapnel and all, it would have been carried half a mile down to the weir, bobbed clear of the backwash, and continued south to the Thames.

  He thought, ‘Regret, where is thy sting?’

  It was here. Here in his heart, dug in like one of the steel points of his grapnel. It had caught and could never be dislodged. The nylon line stretched all the way back to Shanley. Taut, tugging. The single straight line in a sea of fractals.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘That’s what you said before.’

  He pulled on the right boot. The terrace rose above him, the balustrade, the house itself. He took one last look.

  ‘What about Rees?’

  ‘He’ll have to find a Mrs Mog and settle down.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much like him.’

  Suter tied the bootlace and refastened his canvas gaiter. His jacket pockets were bulging with the booty he had been able to collect during his search: AA batteries for the torch and the night sight, two clips for his Browni
ng and a hundred and twenty rounds for the captured Enfield.

  His pack was still down by the river. The dead youth’s haversack and AK47 were here under the viburnum. He decided to leave them where they were.

  Suter stood up, mindful of a bungalow ten minutes away on the other side of the canal. It was hard to find, dry and dog-proof. There might even be some tinned food left in its pantry.

  He started for the river and his pack.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  At mid-morning, presaged by thunder, a mountain of dark cloud overtook the village from the north-west. Rain arrived with it, soon becoming heavy, falling so densely that it dimmed the view of the church tower from the Manor House.

  Leaning on an upstairs windowsill and staring out at the storm, Seumas saw movement in the graveyard. A solitary figure had climbed the waist-high flint wall on the far side and was taking a shortcut among the yews and headstones. Seumas recognised Danzo’s gait, his shaven head and broad shoulders: but where was Pinch?

  Danzo’s clothes looked sodden. He was carrying an unfamiliar machine gun, his haversack at his side. He strode through the open wrought-iron gates of the Manor, crossed the shingle to the main entrance directly below, and disappeared from view.

  By the time Seumas got downstairs, Danzo was standing by the long kitchen table, rubbing at his head and face with a fluffy, peach coloured towel. Stolly was with him, holding the machine gun by both grips and aiming at the nearest window. He turned to greet Seumas. ‘Seen one of these before? Calico M-960. Danzo brung it back. Put a hundred up your pipe in eight seconds flat. Puissant, or what?’ He squinted along it again. ‘Pinch really fucked up this time. He’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bullet through the brain. The angel done it. Danzo reckons he hosed Steve’s lot and all.’

  ‘Where’s Bex?’

  ‘Coco went to find him.’

  Danzo emerged from the towel. Seumas said, ‘You OK, Danzo?’