Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Satan was strong. Figurations of St Michael slaying him – like the one in the church window – were nothing more than wishful thinking made manifest. He was strong, and he was intelligent, like Bex. Killing him would be no easy matter. God knew that already.

  Satan had made Bex immortal. Bex had done the same to Seumas. Seumas was no longer like the others. He and Bex would be caught up in the battle, perhaps for ever; the others could escape it, by welcome death.

  The rain was still falling. In his T-shirt and underpants, Seumas went to the window and put his face close to the leaded panes as if trying to see what he could see in the daytime: the church tower, the ancient yews and to their left an opening view of the valley, with broad meadows and a line of dark alders along the riverbank beyond the farm. But now, of course, he could see nothing but the raindrops streaming down the black surface of the glass and the reflection of himself inside the room. The electrics in the Manor did not run to halogen lighting upstairs. Seumas had found his way using a torch. With his lighter and a taper he had lit the oil lamp on his bedside table. Its yellow glow would be visible outside, from the river. To that distant but percipient pair of eyes he would appear as a silhouette, alone and afraid.

  Did the angel know that he no longer even wanted to be summoned to Bex’s bed? He and Bex would never be together like that again. As recently as this afternoon Seumas had felt a sort of jealous resentment, towards Bex, towards Helen, but now he was glad that Bex had lost interest in him.

  He drew the curtains.

  Something had surfaced in his memory, surfaced from his misery, something he had seen at Pinstead. Hesitantly, self-consciously, he got down on his knees on the bedside rug. He rested his elbows on the blankets, clasped his hands and tightly shut his eyes.

  Images of the tarot would not leave him alone. The Magician with his caduceus. Death on his pale horse. Fortitude subduing the lion. The Magician had merged with Danzo, Death with Bex. And Fortitude, in her colouring, her manner and sweetness of expression, suddenly became, in his swirling, overwrought imagination, disturbingly confused with Helen.

  Trying to shut it all out, he said, ‘I don’t want to be immortal.’

  At Pinstead he had seen a man praying, kneeling in his garden and asking God to forgive them. Gil had shot him in the act, through the back of the head.

  ‘Let me die. Please let me die.’

  A door slammed downstairs. Coco and Matt were setting out to relieve the others.

  ‘That’s all I’ve got to say.’

  The hour was at hand. Seumas climbed into bed and blew out the lamp.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  ‘Yes, Jason,’ Fernihough said. ‘You did it. You killed him.’

  Jason was on his haunches. He seemed unable to stop playing his flashlamp on the damage he had inflicted. The round, shaven skull of Matt, the youth who had arrived punctually at midnight to relieve Stolly, had been stoved with a single blow. There had been no doubt about the result of his unexpected, face to face contest with the forged steel head of a ten-pound sledgehammer. The lifeless body had crashed sideways and back, knocking over and splintering a plant stand.

  Fernihough retrieved Matt’s assault rifle and slung it over his shoulder. John’s shotgun, which he knew how to work and with which he felt more confident, he returned to its place in the fold of his right arm.

  ‘My God, Leigh. Just look what I did to him.’

  ‘We have to go.’

  ‘You don’t think he might still be alive?’

  Fernihough bent down and tried to lift the younger man’s elbow. ‘Come on, Jason. There’s not much time.’

  The smell of the river and the roar of the race pervaded the mill-house. While waiting for the relief guard, having already done the other one to death, Fernihough had remembered the Council’s muddled and oft-postponed plans to install a new wheel, and he had thought of Vernon Howarth, who, having lived in this building ever since the founding of the village, had been murdered by the newcomers on the very first afternoon.

  Each taking an ankle, Fernihough and Jason had dragged Stolly’s ponderous corpse away from the balcony and well into the adjoining drawing room. Three minutes before that, Fernihough had volunteered to wait just inside the French windows with a knife while Jason made a distracting noise deeper in the room. When Stolly, switching on his torch and coming inside to investigate, had crossed the threshold, Fernihough had leapt from hiding and plunged the knife straight into his heart.

  Stolly too had been armed with an assault rifle.

  ‘Jason,’ Fernihough said, more sharply. ‘Stop fucking around.’ This was something the village couldn’t afford. Jason had already had the best part of two hours to come to terms with what, jointly, they had done to Stolly. Their action had been appropriate and correct. On arrival here, Bex and the others had been welcomed by the whole village. It was Bex, Bex and his eleven thugs, together with the two defectors from Shanley, who had determined this. They deserved neither pity nor remorse. And although it was true that Matt had not been quite as evil as some of the others, it was also true that he had thrown his lot in with Bex. He had been one of the disciples, and as such had reaped the consequences.

  ‘Get Stolly’s rifle,’ Fernihough said, with undisguised anger. ‘We’ve got to meet up with John. Right now.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Even at home in Chorleywood, long before the plague, her father had accumulated an extensive library. One Saturday morning, aged twelve and needing a reference for her homework, Helen had taken down a certain volume. In super royal quarto format, thirteen and a half inches by ten and a quarter, it comprised a magisterial survey of the middle ages, lavishly produced, printed on art quality paper and illustrated with hundreds of maps, architectural drawings, woodcuts and photographs, representations of contemporary craftsmanship and art.

  Somewhat over halfway through the book, on a broad fold-out, Helen had come across a full-colour plate that had left her transfixed. It reproduced a detail, part of the central panel, Hell, from The Last Judgment, an altarpiece painted between 1430 and 1450 by the German master, Stephan Lochner.

  Lit by a nearby window, the vast, silent image had in a flash been transmitted down five centuries from Lochner’s consciousness to her own. She had stared in horror. It had seemed to her that this man had actually been present. He had been to Hellmouth and back. He had breathed the sulphur. Disregarding the smoke, the screams, the crackle of flames, he had worked stolidly on his commission, piling detail upon detail. Detached, professional, industrious, he had observed and sketched the crowds of arriving sinners. From some slight elevation and place of safety, he had watched a platoon of fiends, their eyes glowing with pleasure, dragging naked and swollen-bellied kings, merchants and prelates, even a pope, into the pit of fire. The creatures had been rendered with repulsive, almost pornographic realism. Each one was unique. Most had horns, curved or straight. Many had bats’ or bears’ or asses’ ears, fangs, prominent and bloody tongues. One, with scarlet horns, breathed fire. Some were black, velvet-skinned or furry; others were blond, or ginger, or green, spotted or not with reptilian roundels in red and black; their feet were hoofs, or taloned, with obscenely prehensile toes. Some bore webbed, translucent wings. Some had secondary faces set in their bellies, shoulders, or knees. All gave an impression of uncompromising muscularity, seizing the resisting sinners by an arm or waist or ankle, or herding yet more in chains towards the abyss. One, with a slavering expression, bearing an elderly man on its back and between its wings, its hands greedily gripping the flesh on his arms, carried its burden down a rocky slope leading from a castle gate. Elsewhere, two or even three fiends had overpowered and were setting upon a single sinner. At the very edge of the pit, the throng was being forced on by demons flailing iron hammers or double-pronged goads heated red. A priest’s censer had been hurled into the air above the mêlée. Dice and gold coins strewed the beaten soil. At the bottom left, where angels were trying to drag a few of the damned back f
rom the brink, the ground was covered in grass among which grew isolated, emblematic flowers. Looking closely, Helen had recognised poppies, violets, wild strawberry and Solomon’s seal, all of which were to be found in the gardens and hedgerows of Chorleywood. Over everything hovered the archangel Gabriel, deaf to the despairing pleas of the multitude beneath.

  Although she had subsequently seen other medieval depictions of hell, including those by Hieronymus Bosch, it was the Lochner that had cauterised her young and impressionable mind. For a long time afterwards, months, even years, his painting had surfaced in her nightmares. Whenever she had thought of hell, she had thought of this.

  Tonight, before dinner, the altarpiece had come again to her mind. She had almost smiled at its ingenuousness. The artist, a mere draughtsman, a jobbing painter, had known nothing about hell. Nothing at all.

  It was now a few minutes after midnight. A while ago, Bex had ascended with her to the state bedroom. He had shut the door and, lighted match in hand, had lifted the chimney of the porcelain-bowled oil lamp on the oak dresser. From there, watched by her, he had returned to the door. Locking it behind him, he had gone off to perform his lengthy and fastidious ablutions.

  When he came back, Helen was still standing just as he had left her, fully dressed, in the middle of the room. Wearing only his trousers, he deposited the rest of his clothes, folded, on a brocade-covered chair and against it leaned the sub-machine gun that had accompanied him for most of the day.

  A nauseating thought then struck her unawares, slipping through her defences. She had noticed, as if she had never seen it before, the smooth, firm musculature of his torso. The regularity of his features, the dark eyes, the wispy beard and heavy earrings: all these lent him an air of louche subversiveness which, fifteen years ago, she and her schoolmates would have found exceedingly attractive; and which, she now discovered, to her unspeakable disgust, some small, secret, and loathsome part of her had found attractive still.

  She had in an unguarded instant betrayed everything she held precious. However hard she tried to undo the thought, it could never be expunged.

  He approached. His breath smelled of peppermint.

  ‘You look very beautiful tonight, Helen. Do you know how beautiful you are?’

  She continued to stare straight ahead as he moved behind her. He leaned close to her right ear and began to whisper.

  ‘I’m going to let you into a secret. But before I do, let’s get comfortable.’

  Her flesh had started crawling even before he put his hands to her waist and began steering her towards the four-poster bed. The curtains had been looped back. The bedclothes had been straightened. She did not resist. She no longer knew how to.

  Bex made her lie down on her side. He lay down behind her, so that his mouth was again next to her ear and, in the same creepy whisper, resumed praising her loveliness, her femininity, her grace. He was sorry now that he had caused Coco to cut off her hair. ‘It’ll grow again,’ he said. ‘And then you’ll forgive me. You will. I know you will. Because you love me, Helen. That’s why you’ll forgive me anything. You see, God has taught you that life is precious and sacred. You would never do away with yourself, no matter what happened. Would you?’

  Eyes tightly closed, she was concentrating with ferocious intensity on her image of the Crucifixion.

  ‘Suicide is for cowards and unbelievers. Not for those who put their faith in the Resurrection. Not for those who serve both God and Satan. For Satan needs the faithful. Evil must have its vessel. You are that vessel, Helen. Without you I could not be bad. And without me you could not be faithful. That’s why you love me. More than you could love any mortal man. Are you beginning to guess it, my darling, who I am?’

  There had been three crosses at Calvary. How she yearned to be nailed to one of them!

  ‘But you know my name already. When you serve your Lord, you’re also serving me. You know who I am. You know who’s inside you, who’s up you, spending his seed, making you complete. Just the way we’re going to be tonight.’

  She longed to be at Christ’s right hand, her head hanging, yielding up her spirit, rising just before him to the gates of Paradise.

  ‘All your life you have been expecting me without knowing it. Every day, at the back of your mind, you have been expecting completion. He may be the Alpha, but I am the Omega. I am that which awaits. I occupy the end. I am your fulfilment. You know who I am.’

  She felt his fingers on her neck.

  His was the same flesh, the very same, that had sought out and, through humiliation and degradation, had touched the unthinkable.

  His fingers, fondling, obscenely prehensile, in moving to her cheek, now triggered in her mind, in explosive and eidetic detail, every brushstroke of the Lochner altarpiece. Here, she realised, was the landscape of the thing that Bex had reached in her. The pink, squirming, orgiastic bodies, the gleeful infliction of pain, the overt, domineering bestiality of the fiends: these, truly, were sexual images of the most filthy and perverted kind. That was why it had fascinated her so. That was why, as a girl of twelve, she had stared and stared and stared. The painting had been commissioned by the Church at the very pinnacle of its wealth. Lochner had worked in Cologne, site of one of the most ambitious and vertiginous cathedrals ever built. The cathedral not only exalted the god of its bishop; its splendour also intimidated the credulous peasants who had paid for it all. Ordinary communicants would never have got close enough to the altarpiece to see that every class of cleric, including the Pope himself, was bound for the pit. And, high above this private joke, there would have loomed a colossal sculpture of Christ in his agony. With a sense that her mind was coming undone, Helen saw that this too was an object of secret fetish: the scourged contours of his ribcage, the nails driven through his hands and feet, the folds of his breech-clout slipping ever lower on his hips. Most of all, the submissiveness of his upturned eyes, of his supplication to God, this too was perverted and wrong.

  Bex was still whispering. ‘And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

  Helen, forsaken too, could stand it no more. She had just lost her faith, and now she was losing her mind.

  Bex continued breathing in her ear. ‘If ever I am to be defeated, you must leave it to the Lord. Remember the ninety-fourth Psalm: “O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself!” But when? When will he come? Why is he so reticent, Helen? Why does he never answer your prayers? Because he is afraid.’ He leaned yet closer and whispered the words again. ‘He is afraid.’

  She understood then that he was unfastening her dress.

  Pulling on her shoulder, his face coming into view, he said, ‘Not even St Michael and all his legions will dare come near. Not while I have you.’

  7

  Suter did not know what to make of Leigh Fernihough. With his compact physique and his self-effacing manner, he seemed one of the least likely champions the village might have produced. At Sidney’s house he had given no indication of the chilling ruthlessness with which he had set about his evening’s work.

  Suter heard him say, quietly, ‘Looks like they’re all upstairs, then.’

  The two men had nearly finished exploring the ground floor of the Manor House. In trying to keep up with the beam of Fernihough’s torch, Suter was finding his legs reluctant to respond. His knees felt weak. He was afraid he might collapse.

  Congealed blood had encrusted his beard and covered the front of his jacket and part of his trousers. His head ached. Blackstock’s first punch had left his eye puffy and swollen; the second, with its legacy of tremendous, throbbing pain, may have broken, or at least dislocated, his jaw. And, whenever he felt with his tongue, one of his left upper molars waggled alarmingly. The thought that he might have lost such a tooth distressed him out of all proportion.

  Matcham and Aziz were waiting outside in the rain, one on the terrace, the other on the shingle drive, eac
h armed with an assault rifle. Fernihough still had the shotgun, Suter an L85 that he and Aziz had taken in the belfry from the one called Coco.

  From the scullery, Suter and Fernihough had descended a stone stairway to the cellar and there found, wrapped in a blood-soaked Chinese rug, the body of the head man. Only part of the head remained. He had been shot four times in the face. ‘I knew it,’ Fernihough had said. ‘He’s been dead since Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Why you say that?’ It now so much hurt Suter to articulate his jaw that he was abbreviating his speech, and what came out sounded forced and stiff.

  ‘We heard the shooting. O Jesus. Poor Helen.’

  They were still working on the assumption that she was alive. Had it not been for that, the job of killing the three surviving gang-members would have been much easier. From the identities of those who had already died, Fernihough and Aziz had deduced that, besides Bex, the survivors were his second in command, called Danzo, and a youth named Seumas.