Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘Sixty-four.’

  The handrail had become rickety. He moved even closer to the wall. Dry twigs littered the steps, occasionally paining the soles of his feet. From time to time he was unable to avoid breaking one. At the sound of the snap he would pause, measuring it against the wind and rain, wait a few seconds, and cautiously resume.

  ‘Ninety-nine. One hundred. And one. Two. Three.’

  His head was coming level with the framework of timbers enclosing the bells. The biggest bell weighed twenty-three hundredweight, Matcham had said, and could be heard, on still evenings, as far away as Sarratt.

  ‘Eleven. Twelve.’

  Feeling with his toes for loose or rotten planks, Suter stepped on the platform of the belfry and reached in his jacket for the knife: a horn-handled carver with a ten-inch blade, taken from a boxed set in Sidney’s sideboard. The grip felt flimsy, unbalanced, possibly unreliable. Suter mourned the loss of his own knife, orphaned in the brambles. ‘Now there was a blade,’ said the voice inside his head. He saw himself dribbling oil on the worn India stone in his workshop, the ritual preparation for the act of honing, making the knife so sharp it would slice a sheet of paper dangled in the air. And afterwards, on one mad April afternoon, he had fitted a 50× turret to his dissecting microscope to view the flawless edge he had made, ruler-straight, like that of a new razorblade fresh from its packet.

  He disliked the idea of another man’s knife, one over which he had had no control. Especially a domestic knife, meant for nothing more than carving the Sunday roast.

  He edged forward. It was much too dark to see. Up here the night sight would be useless, unable to focus in the confined space, but it was with great reluctance that he had left it below. He drew out Aziz’s torch and fleetingly pressed the button. The beam darted across the belfry. In the edge of his vision, on the left, he had gleaned a better idea of the cluster of massive domed shapes. Ahead he had glimpsed more stairs, wooden this time, rising to a low, narrow doorway. The door, he thought, was standing ajar. The man behind it was armed and might be wearing a Diurnox headset.

  Suter realised at last that he was terrified.

  Why was he doing this? For himself? No. For Muriel, then? To prove what? That he was brave? Or for Helen, perhaps. His Helen, or the one in the Manor? The two were becoming the same.

  ‘Get on with it.’

  Yes: act now, before Fernihough and Matcham had had a chance to screw up with the other guard, Stolly. Before Stolly could fire a warning shot.

  Suter continued to hesitate.

  Had the door been closed, he was supposed to have tapped on it, drawn the curious guard forth. But it was open, a far more dangerous proposition. He had to gamble that his victim was looking elsewhere.

  ‘Now. Do it now.’

  And besides, wasn’t this just what he wanted? The opportunity for heroic suicide?

  When, with infinite slowness, he came out on the rain-lashed surface of the roof, Suter surmised that Matcham’s wife had been mistaken, that no one was here.

  Thick though the clouds were, the moon was somewhere behind them and the night was not completely black. Suter became conscious of the deeper darkness of the parapet. His gaze ranged along the crenellations, searching for the irregular shape of a standing man keeping watch northwards. There was none. None that he could see.

  Suter wondered whether the man might be lurking somewhere behind the low, lead-covered slope of the doorway. He turned his head from side to side, looking over his shoulders. Still nothing.

  What had happened? Had Dave, David Blackstock, the man he was seeking, had he even been up here in the first place?

  Fernihough had been unwilling to deal with Blackstock himself: for Blackstock had been one of the two recruits Bex had made here in Shanley on the day of his arrival. The other, named Terence Collins, was the youth whom Suter’s rifle had decapitated on Sunday.

  The rain seemed to be falling in diagonal sheets. Water trickled down Suter’s neck as he stood there, immobilised by indecision. Above the ragged sound of the rain he could hear a steadier flow, coming from more than one direction, from each corner of the battlement: a pouring away, a smoothness suspended for a few seconds in space before splashing on the sett-lined channel far below. He could hear the gargoyles.

  The sheet lead under his feet was strewn with wet leaves borne up here by autumn gales, trapped behind the parapet and left to decay. More were probably landing even now.

  He was on the point of switching on the torch when, to his astonishment, almost directly across the roof, he saw a goggled face three-quarters turned away, bending forward, illuminated by the flame of a cigarette lighter. Although Blackstock’s hand was cupped round the flame, it instantaneously died or was swept away on the wind.

  The flame flickered into life a second time, just long enough to leave an orange spot, moving upwards and back. For a moment the spot glowed more brightly, then disappeared, sheltered by his fingers. His rifle, if he had one, must have been left leaning against the parapet.

  Suter waited for the indirect glow of the second drag to guide his approach. His left hand grabbed something confusing: close-cropped hair, an ear, a buckle and part of the elastic webbing of the goggles. His right had already driven the point of the carving knife upwards, through several layers of clothing, a waxed cotton jacket and its lining, a sweater, a shirt, and onwards, deep into the right flank where the kidney lay.

  As Suter extracted the blade there was a hoarse, garbled cry of indignation and surprise. He struck a second time, just as powerfully, higher up. The point drove slantwise through the ribcage, into the body cavity, into the lung. Simultaneously he pulled as hard as he could with his left hand. A clump of something, perhaps the ear itself, came free.

  ‘What? What?’ Blackstock shouted. ‘You what …’

  The delay before realisation, Suter’s advantage of surprise, was suddenly terminated by an insane frenzy of resistance. Hot, slippery blood welled over Suter’s hand: he was trying not to let go of the ribbed horn handle, but felt it beginning to slide from his grasp. His other hand, also bloody, now dropped the goggles. He had torn them wholesale from Blackstock’s head. As the two men struggled, moving somewhat away from the parapet, Blackstock’s fist struck Suter full in the face. Suter wildly attempted to find and seize Blackstock’s errant forearm, but the next punch, much harder than the first, caught him on the left cheekbone. He lost his balance, slipped on wet leaves and, staggering backwards, still clutching the handle of the knife, brought the entire weight of his victim down with him.

  There was a liquid quality to Blackstock’s grunt. Even as Suter understood that the blade had snapped in two, as the knife-handle came uselessly away in his grasp, the back of his head struck the leaf-strewn leaden sheeting and he felt a rush of warm and viscous fluid on his neck.

  Blackstock would have guessed by now that he had not merely been punched, but stabbed. He was on top of Suter, bearing down on him. His hands sought Suter’s throat. He gave another retching grunt and more blood issued from his mouth.

  ‘You … what …’

  Use a knife, Suter had told Fernihough, use a knife, preaching what he himself had meant to practise, the slick, pre-emptive dispatch of two more of Bex’s disciples. Not that he’d had any idea what he’d been talking about. In untrained, irresolute hands, a knife was neither quick nor silent. Instead it opened up a whole new world of horror.

  Suter knew he was grunting too, fighting back, fighting for air, the taste of his victim’s blood on his teeth and lips. He remembered his faithful Browning, far away, unreachable in its holster, unable to come to his rescue; never mind the noise of the shot, even if it brought all the demons running from hell, even if they broke the earth itself asunder and let loose the living dead: for he wanted only to breathe, to take down into himself just one more draught of cool air, night air, October air, the same sweet and natural air that in its passage had snatched aloft the autumn leaves of oak and beech and cherry, broug
ht here from the woods above the escarpment, from the deeper forest far away where he belonged, where his other, older self yearned to be. But Blackstock’s grip had tightened. The stricken man was inhumanly strong. Though Suter could get no air through his nose, he could still smell blood and the reek of sweat, commingled with another suffocating odour: that of the proofing wax used on Blackstock’s jacket.

  The sound of his voice reached Suter then, thick, congested with blood. ‘Barss … barss … bastard …’

  Suter felt himself becoming light-headed. Much more of this and he would pass out. His inefficient, ineffectual grip on Blackstock’s arms was growing ever feebler. For two or three seconds now he had even stopped arching his back and trying to bring up his knee or use the strength in his legs to tip his burden aside.

  Then it happened. Blackstock let go, seeming to fall away into the darkness. Suter did not at first understand why.

  He heard Aziz speaking close by his side. ‘Are you all right?’

  Suter could not answer. He managed to get up on one elbow, coughing and choking, ministering to himself with his right hand. His eyes were watering. His face and chest were covered in sticky blood. A bitterness ascended his throat and brought with it a rancid taste of vomit. He recognised the chicken tikka he had eaten earlier: he instinctively drew himself higher, his head away from Aziz, and threw up.

  Presently, when the last of Suter’s convulsions had ceased, Aziz said again, quietly, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘Blackstock’s done for.’

  Clean, heavy, welcome rain was falling on Suter’s face. He dragged a hand across his mouth. The pain in his jaw was growing worse. It hurt him to speak. ‘What … what did you do to him?’

  ‘Hit him with the rifle butt. I knew it was him. I could see his head. You’d been gone such a long time I thought I’d better come and find out what was happening.’

  It was too dark to see much of the body lying beside them. Suter could imagine the gory outflow from the terrible wounds he had made, from the shattered skull, merging with the rainwater, finding its way past sodden leaf-litter and sliding in all four directions down the slightly peaked incline of the tower roof. Diluted, the palest pink now, like an infinitely faded cross of St George, Blackstock’s blood was already being projected by the gargoyles into unconsecrated space.

  Suter’s hands were trembling, just as they had at the hospital. He felt cold and drained, weak with shock: so weak that he seriously doubted his capacity to see through the rest of the nonsense that he and the other would-be men of action had so airily concocted in Sidney’s house. This, what had just happened here, this was the reality of hand-to-hand combat, of trying to kill another man. And there were five, perhaps six, more to go.

  Aziz said, ‘Maybe I’d better watch the stairway.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘About ten-thirty. No more. You still think midnight for the changeover?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘No sign of anything from the mill,’ Aziz said. ‘I think Leigh must have connected.’

  The goggles had been ruined. Aziz found the torch and then Blackstock’s gun. He said, ‘You’re covered in blood. Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks to you.’

  ‘I’ll do the rest up here, if you like. You go back to Sidney’s.’

  ‘I need to see this through.’

  Aziz tried to dissuade him. Suter refused to listen.

  ‘Let me get your boots, then, if nothing else.’

  ‘All right,’ Suter said. ‘But mind how you go.’

  Aziz departed.

  Suter pushed back his bloodied hair and rose slowly to his feet.

  6

  Heavy with dread, Seumas escaped to his room at about eleven-forty. Bex had also just retired, with Helen, to the state bedroom, but Danzo had remained downstairs with Coco and Matt, smoking the head man’s cigars and surveying the ruins of the evening meal.

  Tonight Bex’s blasphemy had exceeded even itself, entered an unknown territory of sacrilege where no one had ever before dared to tread. He had taken as his text St Matthew twenty-six, the story of the Last Supper, which he knew by heart. Seumas could no longer remember all the clever things he had said, but he could still see the lifeless expression on Helen’s face, and he could still hear the tone of Bex’s voice when, on getting up from the table and taking hold of her arm, he had instructed his followers, ‘Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand.’

  The hour is at hand. What had he meant by that?

  At midnight the guards were due to change.

  Seumas could not understand why the Order hadn’t already, this evening, packed up and left. It was almost as if Bex wanted the angel to come. What use were two mere sentinels, one on the church tower and the other at the mill?

  And why had Bex refused to call upon the tarot to predict the outcome?

  At supper they had drawn lots for guard-duty by cutting the cards. This had left Seumas even more frightened than before. Bex always kept his pack wrapped in a scarf of purple silk and unveiled it only for a divination. The strange designs on the cards, fused in place with their own intense, theatrical light, had burned themselves into Seumas’s imagination. The people and things represented there inhabited a world too sacred and profound to be exposed for such a trivial purpose.

  The tarot, Bex had taught him, was Satan’s picture-book, a sublimation of the Great Book of Thoth. Its tradition stretched back through the Gypsy Kings to the Albigensians in the thirteenth century and the Bulgars in the twelfth, to the Crusades and the Baphometic idolatry of the Templars. The Greeks had acquired it from the Phoenicians, who themselves had drawn the veiled secrets of Thoth in a tenuous line from the priesthood of Isis. The tarot had been old even at the time of the pharaohs: its Satanic origins lay much further back, even beyond Gilgamesh, in prehistoric India. The word ‘tarot’ was itself Sanskrit, an esoteric inversion of the Indo-germanic ‘rota’, meaning ‘wheel’. The Wheel of Fortune occupied the tenth place of the Major Arcana. It informed and influenced the rest. The Hermit, the Emperor, the Hanged Man, Justice, the Tower: all revolved around it and were brought to culmination in the twentieth, The Last Judgment, which showed Gabriel with his trumpet and the world’s dead rising from their tombs.

  And the four suits of the Minor Arcana, the Rods, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, from which modern playing-cards were derived: these portrayed, buried deep in symbol and meaning, every permutation of the endless, repeating spiritual journey embodied in the twenty-two trumps. The twenty-first trump, The World, effectively depicted the bribe offered to Jesus in the wilderness, by Satan in the guise of Arch Tempter: and the zero card, which then followed, was the Fool, which Christ, in rejecting the world, duly became.

  The tarot subsumed every religion and every metaphor. At its heart lay the majesty of numerology. Seumas now regarded its puissance with such awe that, when Bex had shuffled his pack and unceremoniously laid it among the debris of the meal, he had felt his blood run cold.

  Coco had turned up the Nine of Swords, but Seumas had drawn the Page, so Coco had lost, and would be relieving Dave on the church tower. Matt had lost to Danzo, who had drawn the King of Pentacles. Matt would soon be setting out for the mill.

  The mill was elegant and spacious and full of antiques, fitted throughout with polished flooring or white, pure wool carpet. It had belonged to a man called Howarth. Stolly had shot him on the first day. Since then a number of the disciples had used it for sleeping or as a sort of clubhouse. They had done a great deal of damage. Seumas had been there when Carl, amid laughter, had stuck his bare behind over the open edge of the chest freezer and defecated.

  The first-floor balcony gave the best view of the lane down from Watford and, a hundred yards along it, the stile to the footpath from Frith Wood. This was the earthly route, Seumas knew, somehow, that the angel would take. St Michael could assume any shape or form, could sprout wings
and fly, or he could disappear and reappear the next instant a thousand miles away, but God had charged him with using mundane means, and so he would walk, without effort or fatigue, his feet making no sound.

  Bex had explained about angels and their place in heaven. There were three circles, each of three orders. The first circle, the lowliest, comprised the seraphim, cherubim and thrones. The second circle consisted of dominions, virtues and powers, while the third, the most exalted, held the principalities, angels and archangels. Of the third circle, the three most important were Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel. The archangels Michael and Gabriel were among the seven spirits standing before the Throne of God.

  Archangels did not breathe air but cosmic ether. Quicksilver flowed in their veins. St Michael had at his command the whole heavenly host. He was commonly depicted with a sword or lance, slaying the dragon, Satan. Here again he had been charged with using earthly means. He was conflated with the Knight of the Red Cross, St George, the patron saint of England. That was one reason why the church in Shanley had been dedicated to St Michael, making him the patron saint of the village.

  Talking with Stolly and Matt and Dave and Coco, Seumas had become convinced that St Michael had already killed Steve and Carl and Gil. At a paranormal house downstream he had shot Pinch in total darkness and scared Danzo out of his wits. Danzo had run all the way back here to Bex.

  Bex had announced that the Order would be leaving tomorrow. To Seumas, that meant only one thing. St Michael would be coming tonight. He was on his way, eerie and silent, moving physically along the valley, mile after mile. That was the solid St Michael, the fleshly St Michael, the one who had been up on the rise and left bootprints in the mud, but there was another St Michael, who was everywhere, watching, listening in the dark. He had heard and noted each of Bex’s jokes about transubstantiation, watched his pranks with the fried potatoes and the port, seen Helen’s dead, reactionless gaze. He knew what Seumas had done with Bex beneath the four-poster’s fustian canopy. His eye had been pressed to the crack in the ice-house door. He had been watching that night at the barn when Coco had led the cart-horse Amos to safety. He had been there when they had opened up Muriel’s side, when Bex had eaten the eyeballs, and when he had shot the head man full in the face. He had been there at the very moment when they had hung Martin upside-down; he had been there while they had mocked and tortured him; and he had been there when, finally, Danzo had opened up his throat with an expert, fluid swipe. He had seen the body splash into the river and drift away. He had seen everything. God had seen it too. And now God was sending him here tonight, direct to the Manor House, to do battle with the entity the Order had raised and from whose scaly presence Bex drew his power.