Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘The Anointed One.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘I didn’t say nothing.’

  ‘Ah, but you implied.’

  ‘What did I imply?’

  ‘That my little project is unfinished. That I have failed. I suppose we could always take her with us. But we ought to finish it here. After the service.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We’re having a celebratory bonfire, aren’t we?’

  This was becoming a custom.

  ‘Suggestion,’ Bex said, sitting up in his seat with new energy. ‘We furnish ourselves with sledgehammers. Axes. Chainsaws. We get what wood we can from the church. Anything carved. Sacred stuff. Pew-ends, the rood-screen, crucifixes, all that shite. Then we trash the hymnbooks. Et cetera. The big Bible. The lectern too. Make everything into a big untidy heap. We tie her to a stake in the middle. Maybe dress her up in armour. Wire some saucepan-lids together. Colanders for her tits. Put a saucepan on her head with the handle pointing backwards. Make her into Joan of Arc. What do you say?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Danzo said, wondering who Joan of Arc was.

  ‘Give her something to be saintly about. She wants to be martyred, after all. Maybe we’ll give her a good seeing-to first. Each and every one of us.’ Again he looked at Danzo. ‘Any who feel inclined, that is.’ Bex picked up the Calico and pretended to examine it. ‘I meant to ask you, Danzo. Have you noticed Seumas?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Looking your way. Making sheep’s eyes.’ Bex aimed at the piano. Danzo thought he was going to pull the trigger there and then, to create a cyclone of splintered wood and metal and bullets impinging on strings and wires to produce insane music, condensing into a few chaotic seconds the whole future career of the instrument. But he didn’t.

  Danzo was not sure how, or even if, he was meant to answer.

  Bex said, ‘Would you like to tup him?’

  ‘I —’

  ‘You can’t tell me the idea hasn’t crossed your mind. A boy like that. He’s plainly gagging for it.’ Bex put the gun down. ‘There’ll be no objections from me, provided you’re discreet. He’d be good for you. Get rid of those excess phosphates, if nothing else.’ He took up the banjo opener and levered the cap from another bottle. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you with the thought. You know where his room is.’

  So stunned was Danzo by Bex’s proposal that he was unable to speak. Given what had just passed between them, it was abominable. It was proof that Bex had never cared for him. He felt a rush of anger. His vision even blurred. Danzo was not like the other members of the Order. He was Bex’s second, privy to inside information. Without Danzo, the Order could never have formed and would be unable to operate. There was also the matter of Bex’s public attitude towards homosexuality, something that Danzo had always left undisturbed.

  Danzo felt hatred fulminating in his breast. He did not want to acknowledge what Bex had, obviously, already divined: that he had indeed, for some time past, been musing upon the forbidden subject of Seumas. Could nothing be kept secret?

  Bex was following the changes in his expression with interest. A glint from the halogen lamp beside the sofa struck one of his gold earrings. The widow’s peak of his dark, cap-like, closely shaven hair seemed to have become more defined, like the sideburns and the goatee beard. His face was forming into an ever more mephistophelean smirk. Danzo felt his right hand involuntarily tense, as if it were about to reach under the looseness of his brushed cotton shirt and snatch the .38 from the holster at his armpit.

  The room fell silent. Danzo had almost forgotten about, ceased to hear, Bex’s choice of background music.

  The disc transport slipped into standby mode, awaiting the next beam of instructions from the handset at Bex’s side.

  ‘“Komm, Jesu, komm! ”’ Bex said. ‘That last one. I like that. Catchy. Like the plague.’ He raised the handset and, pointing it at the plate-glass shelves of equipment, pressed a single key and switched everything off. ‘Do you think he’s going to come, Danzo? Tonight?’

  ‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ Danzo said.

  ‘That’s a distinct possibility.’

  Suddenly Danzo saw that he had been duped. Yet again, Bex had run rings around him. ‘Belial, my arse,’ he said and, with a grudging smile, felt, despite himself, his anger ebbing away. Bex’s own smile came back then, perfectly sane, with a flash of his white, even teeth.

  ‘You nearly had me going there, Bex.’

  ‘I meant what I said about Seumas.’

  Coco’s yell carried along the corridor.

  ‘Chow time,’ Bex said, obviating Danzo’s need to reply, and hoisted himself from the deep upholstery of the sofa.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When Danzo sat down to eat, he wondered whether he might be drunker than he had thought. He looked with surprise at the elaborate preparations for the meal: a pure white cloth in heavy linen, stiff with starch; matching napkins at each place setting, crystal goblets and silver knives and forks and spoons; and four elegant silver candelabra, each with four white candles, just lit.

  He turned to Bex, who was already pulling a bread-roll to pieces. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘It’s our last supper,’ Bex said, watching for a reaction from Helen.

  There was none. She was at her appointed seat on Bex’s left, hands in her lap, staring vacantly, straight ahead, straight at Danzo.

  He had never seen her in a dress before: this also was Bex’s doing. She was wearing make-up, too. Eye shadow. Lipstick. Perfume. In the candlelight she nearly looked like a woman again, as she had on that first afternoon, on September the twenty-ninth, that windless day of hazy sun, when Bex had first presented to his disciples the peaceful vision of Shanley and vowed to drive from its boundaries all trace of their enemy.

  Helen and her husband had been among the first to emerge in greeting. It had taken Bex, and his HK53, no more than a few seconds to set them straight.

  Danzo regarded the swell of her bosom. His eyes followed the line of her dress, observed the necklace at her throat. He had a vision of Bex standing behind her, fixing the clasp, leaning forward as if to whisper something in her ear, then remaining silent. Much as Danzo had on Sunday night, when helping Bex with the ephod.

  The ephod. The New Order. It was all bullshit.

  Excrementum tauri. And it was all real, and profound, and symbolic of greater things. Every bit of it. Like the angel. And like this, like the way Bex had made Helen get herself up. Danzo felt wired. Not just drunk. He was strung out, floating, giddy with some aphrodisiac excitement he had never known before.

  He glanced in anticipation over his shoulder, towards the corridor and the kitchen.

  Stolly was the best cook, but Coco came a pretty close second. Danzo assumed he was at this moment being helped by Seumas. And by Matt. The other two, Dave and Stolly, were elsewhere: watching for Suter, one on the church tower with the goggles, the other overlooking the lane from Watford.

  Even with her hair shorn, or perhaps because of it, and even after everything Bex had been doing to her, Danzo could see how Helen might yet appeal to the male psyche. Looking at her now, he realised that, while gazing appreciatively, while noticing her perfume and the smoothness of her neck, he had really been mindful, was mindful still, in a blurred, off-centre way, of Seumas. ‘Would you like to tup him?’ Bex had said, placing the word, like a black pebble, at the apex of Danzo’s depraved and gelatinous mind. Bex had opened his fingers and let it go, let it drift slowly down, and now, with the image of Seumas helping in the kitchen, the pebble had reached the bottom and come to rest.

  Of course Danzo would like to tup him. He had been restrained until now only by Bex. But Bex had, five minutes ago, bestowed his blessing on the idea.

  Though he was trying, Danzo could not analyse his feelings. He said, ‘If this is our last supper, which one of us is Judas?’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ Be
x said. ‘As the cat remarked when it shat upon the carpet.’

  ‘What cat?’ said Danzo, seeing again the greenish, unearthly glow of Suter’s tabby.

  ‘You’re pissed,’ was all Bex said in reply. He reached out and lifted Helen’s chin. Danzo noticed that she no longer shuddered when he touched her. ‘Speaking of the Last Supper, do you really know your gospel, my little food-taster?’

  She remained inert. As if she had answered affirmatively, he said, ‘In that case, you’ll be familiar with the central postulate of its protagonist, the noted dialectician and mystic, Mr J H Christ. Concerning betrayal. Of which Judas is the apotheosis and the eternal symbol. Betrayal. Our Redeemer thinks it’s fundamental. Not only to relations between people, but also, and more especially, to relations between man and God. Without betrayal, he says, there can be no release and, therefore, no freedom. Without betrayal there can be no redemption. This he made plain before yielding up his ghost. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Remember?’ Bex let go of her chin. She took the piece of bread-roll, to which he had added a chunk of butter, and put it in her mouth.

  Danzo had not understood what he had said, but thought it probably nonsense. Bex seemed unusually expansive tonight, almost happy, and Danzo suspected that he too had become drunk. His dark eyes were shining. He looked more beautiful, more magnificent, more lustrous than ever.

  It was impossible to be angry with him for long. His outrageousness was part of his allure, like his independence and his intellect. All were bound up with his physical beauty. To tup Seumas would be vicariously to tup Bex himself. To do all the things with Seumas that Bex had once done with him, to do all the things that, since Byfield, Danzo had only been able to do in his head, to do them at last, soon, tonight, with a good-looking boy who was ‘plainly gagging for it’: this was the genie that Bex had released from Danzo’s bottle. It was expanding still, looming over him, enveloping him in its dark-green miasma, raising the pitch of his excitement. He had already left discretion behind. He no longer had any choice. The genie was Bex. Its stuff, its intoxicating, gaseous tentacles, had invaded and infected every cell of his body.

  This room, with its low ceiling, with its heavy beams and stone floor, was at once timeless and ancient. No wonder Bex liked it so much. The lamps and candles were illuminating a present that belonged simultaneously to the far future and to the distant past. Anything might happen this evening: terror, vengeance, requital for all the madness since Byfield. The angel might show up, or he might not. Stolly or Dave might kill him, or they might just fire the warning shots that would alert Bex to his arrival.

  Danzo put a hand to his brow and ran it across the bristly resistance of his scalp. He looked up and encountered Helen’s eyes. Still chewing, she was again staring straight ahead, straight through him.

  There was no doubt about it. Danzo was drunk. He should have been afraid, like the three in the kitchen, like Coco, and Matt, and especially Seumas. He should have been afraid, but he wasn’t.

  ‘You see,’ Bex went on, addressing Helen, disregarding Danzo, ‘human beings are essentially apes. As soon as you know how apes behave, human nature becomes understandable. On the one hand, apes are social. On the other, they are self-seeking and venal. One ape will betray another for nothing more than a quick poke in the bushes. Or for thirty pieces of silver.’ He studied her for a moment before eating a piece of bread himself. ‘Jesus knew this. He couldn’t escape it, because he was human.’

  Danzo said, ‘But you can.’

  Bex apparently failed to hear: for at that instant Coco, coming through the doors with his helpers, heralded the arrival of the food.

  5

  The smell of the wet, invisible foliage of these yews reminded Suter of the garden of his childhood in Gerrard’s Cross. He had almost forgotten the faint pungency of yew needles, subtly disinfecting the surrounding air and so hinting at the toxicity of the foliage. Taxus. That was the botanical name. Taxus baccata. ‘Baccata’ meaning ‘set with pearls’, referring presumably to the unripe arils. How did he know this? Why did he have no control of his head? Twice a year, in May and August, the yew hedges in that far-off, sunlit garden had been trimmed. He remembered the sound of his father’s shears and could see again the clippings as they tumbled to the groundsheet below. The oil responsible for the smell had been used in cancer therapy. And now, after thirty years and more, this selfsame chemical was again stimulating his olfactory membranes, his sense of smell, his whole cerebral cortex, generating spontaneous and invasive associations, visions, sounds.

  His sanity was on the verge of crumbling into dust, dust as fine as the powdery soil under his father’s yews.

  In an attempt to regain himself, Suter stopped moving forward.

  ‘What is it?’ Aziz whispered.

  ‘Nothing.’ Suter raised the night sight.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No. Are you sure he’s up there?’

  ‘I can’t say I am.’

  Suter could not get over the sensation of being in the company of, still less cooperating with, another human being. He had known this Paul Aziz for less than two hours, but already liked him, liked him much better than the other one Fernihough had produced. He had lived in Britain since the age of two and spoke with a Midlands accent, Coventry or Leicester. About fifty, he was round-shouldered, but at least as tall as Suter, with glasses, and had lost most of his glossy black hair. From a couple of remarks he had made, even in the circumstances of the grim conference over Sidney’s kitchen table, Suter had seen that he was funny as well as intelligent.

  They reached the church porch and moved inside, out of the rain.

  ‘Let me,’ Aziz said, operating the latch on the iron-studded door so carefully that it made not the slightest noise. ‘There’s a couple of steps down.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Suppose he saw us?’

  ‘Then he’d already have fired. Besides, he’ll be looking the other way.’

  ‘Maybe he’s not there at all.’

  Word that two of Bex’s men had been posted guard had come from Jason Matcham’s wife, who at six o’clock had watched them leaving the Manor carrying haversacks and assault rifles. Since then they might have changed position, or gone back to Bex.

  The man Suter had shot at and missed in his kitchen had been equipped with a Diurnox headset, probably Suter’s own. Thus at least one of the guards might have night vision, perhaps both.

  One of them had gone to the mill-house, which overlooked the lane from Watford. Fernihough and Matcham had undertaken to deal with him, while Suter and Aziz had set out for St Michael’s and its tower.

  The interior of the church was almost lightless. It smelled of stone, of musty hassocks and hymnbooks, of old wood polished with beeswax. The cool, tranquil air felt somehow spacious, as if Suter could feel the upward thrust of the pillars following through to the vault high above. In here, any sound would be attended by an echo.

  During his childhood and adolescence Suter had visited the environs of the church several times, but he had never before set foot inside. He knew only the skin of the building: the flint facing, set in age-hardened cement; the three black dials and faded gilt numerals of the clock; the tarnished weathervane, revolving aimlessly and inaccurately in the breeze. He had been much taken with the four stone gargoyles, one at each corner of the tower, their cheeks produced forward into leaden spouts. Each of the demonic faces was different, hideous in its own way. They were part of the church, made and fixed by the same medieval craftsmen who had fashioned the gutters and downpipes and the leaden sheets on the roof; and they were also alien to it, sinister and profane, belonging to a parallel, much older tradition. Such visages might have figured in the occult ceremonial of the Rosicrucians or Knights Templar. Blank-eyed, they spewed the tower’s rainwater away into the half-points of the compass, where it vanished between the straightforward, cardinal dimensions of everyday life. Looking up at them with his new Kershaw 6×30s, seeing them
for the first time, the innocent Suter had felt fear as well as wonder. There was more to Christianity than the morning assembly or the platitudes of Sunday school, and he had received an inkling then that he wanted no part of it.

  The gargoyles, he now realised, made him think of the little soapstone man he had handed to Muriel. Even here, in God’s house, the crinkled eyes were still laughing at him through the dark.

  ‘Ready?’ whispered Aziz.

  ‘Yes.’

  Suter kept close behind him. Aziz turned to the left, took half a dozen short paces, passed through an unseen archway. Finally he switched on the needle-thin beam of his torch. In Sidney’s kitchen they had hastily improvised a cardboard shade and glued it to the lens.

  The beam found the iron ring-handle of the narrow door to the tower. Suter began unlacing his boots.

  Even more quietly than before, Aziz whispered, ‘Are you still sure about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m ready to do it. Or I’ll come too. I’ve no love for Blackstock.’

  ‘We’ll keep to the plan.’

  Suter placed his boots side-by-side and into them stuffed his socks. He gave the night sight to Aziz and unfastened the flap of his holster. Aziz, shouldering the L85, handed him the torch.

  ‘Don’t forget to count,’ Aziz said.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘See you in a bit, then. Good luck.’

  The wall of the tower, massively thick, was pierced by six lancet windows open to the air. A cramped stairway ascended it anti-clockwise by means of eight flights, each with fourteen risers, bounded on Suter’s left by an iron handrail. His hand touched the rail. His bare left foot made contact with the dished stone of the first tread, and he began.

  ‘You’re going up in the world,’ he told himself.

  He knew he mustn’t lose count.

  ‘Thirteen. Fourteen.’ The first turn: the first lancet, facing north over the valley, admitting damp air and the sound of rain.

  ‘Eighteen. Nineteen.’

  He knew what awaited him at the top. Fernihough, Sidney, Matcham and Aziz had coached him exactly. He could visualise the beams of the belfry, the suspect floorboards, the cobwebs, the clock-case with its long-silent mechanism, the fallen sticks and droppings from the jackdaws’ nests. And then, the final short stairway to the roof: and out upon the oxidised leaden sheeting, contained by a battlement with lightning-rod and worm-eaten flagpole from which, long ago, had drooped the cross of St George. In daylight, they had told him, you could see to Watford and beyond.