Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Observed by Suter from the gardens and Aziz from the church tower, lamplight had shown in the windows of three first-floor rooms: the state bedroom, the Chinese bedroom and one of the guest bedrooms on the north gallery. It was reasonable to suppose that Bex was occupying the largest and most luxurious bedroom. The Chinese bedroom was almost as commodious, which suggested that it had been taken over by Danzo. That left Seumas in the north gallery. A male silhouette had appeared at the window. Its left arm had tugged on the cord to draw the curtains, but not before Aziz had got the binoculars on the face. It was indeed Seumas in that room.

  But where, if anywhere, was Helen?

  Unless she were alone in some dark, fourth room, she was probably with Bex.

  Suter and Fernihough had originally entered the house via the broken French window, the one that had been thrown back on Sunday to allow Muriel to be dragged down to the river. From the white drawing room – no longer white, but spattered with red, with a black bloodstain in the middle of the carpet – they had travelled the corridors to the Long Room, the billiards room, the blue drawing room, the morning room, the library, the kitchen and scullery, and the cellar.

  Many of the rooms had been wrecked. In the blue drawing room, for example, the china cabinets had been shattered, with shards of Ming and Worcester and Staffordshire strewn on the once-polished boards and on the Mirzapur carpet, upon which someone had also deposited a drying pile of human faeces.

  From the cellar, Fernihough led the way upstairs and towards the dining hall.

  This room, in which two halogen lamps had been left burning, produced the strongest impression yet of occupation, of nearness. The table, improbably spread with white linen and bearing the remnants of an elaborate meal, had been vacated so recently that the smell of fresh cigar smoke still lingered. Two or three stubs of candle were guttering in their stands.

  The malignance was very, very near. Suter’s gaze rose to the ceiling.

  ‘That’s the state bedroom,’ Fernihough whispered, pointing upwards.

  ‘You hear it?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  Suter looked up again. Almost at the limit of human audibility, he had detected a rhythmic creaking overhead.

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  Suter moved to the table and fetched one of the Chippendale-style chairs. Setting it where he had been standing, he climbed up and placed his palm on the low, uneven surface of the ceiling. He felt the regular, telltale pressure against his hand. It was being transmitted through the carpet and floorboards, through the ancient laths and plaster, from some solid, extremely heavy framework, such as that of a four-poster bed.

  Fernihough suddenly seemed to understand.

  Suter got down. ‘Where next?’

  ‘Music room.’ This was all that remained to be searched.

  It was empty. Another halogen lamp, on a long, curving neck overhanging the biggest sofa, had been left running here. It cast a big shadow as Suter crossed the floor and crouched to scrutinise the plate-glass shelving of the hi-fi stack.

  Joining him, squatting too, Fernihough whispered, ‘What have you got in mind?’

  ‘Seumas in north gallery.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Take him first.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Knife again, maybe. Then we go for other one.’

  ‘Danzo?’

  Suter nodded. ‘Bex last. Need him on his own. Away from Helen.’

  Fernihough nodded.

  Suter touched a small, round button on the fascia of the CD transport. The display lit up. ‘Disc already in there,’ he said. ‘Play it very loud. We wait outside his door. With shotgun.’ He met Fernihough’s approving eye, and noticed to his surprise a gleam of admiration there.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ Fernihough said.

  Using his eyes, Suter agreed.

  They both stood up. Then, slowly and painfully, Suter said, ‘Let’s get Paul and Jason inside.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Danzo could restrain himself no longer. Having already visited his room and taken off his overshirt and boots, he was proceeding, like the supposed ghost of Henry VIII, along the ramshackle gallery towards the north wing. He had left behind the AK with which he had replaced the Calico commandeered by Bex, and was armed now only with his revolver.

  He had to be quick, before Dave and Stolly returned. They would probably get themselves some grub and stay downstairs for a while, but there was no guarantee of that.

  Fuddled as he might be, Danzo felt confident that Suter wasn’t going to show. It would be insanely dangerous to attack the Manor, even for an authentic archangel, still less a dim-witted hermit operating on his own. Posting the guards had been a waste of time, although the temporary absence of everyone but Seumas and Bex had, at least, worked in Danzo’s favour.

  Drab oil paintings, ancestral portraits of centuries-dead toffs, lined the right-hand wall of the gallery. On his left the oak balustrade, lit by the moving yellow cast of his flashlight, divided the gallery from the unseen space above the flagstoned hallway below. The pattern on the carpet at his feet was now too faded to make out. Enhanced by the rain and the dampness of the air, a mildewed smell rose from its fibres. The whole building was like this: rotting, beetle-infested, quietly being eaten to oblivion. Toadstools sprouted in the crypt where Bex had stashed the head man, where his corpse was even now adding to the general run of decay.

  Well, tomorrow all that would come to its timely end, purified in flame, like Joan of Arc.

  Danzo’s eyes gleamed at the thought of it.

  He would have preferred not to pass the room being occupied by Bex and Helen. He would have preferred that Bex’s acute hearing did not detect the stealthy creak of floorboards, that his lips did not form into yet another omniscient smile.

  Light was showing under the door. Danzo switched off his torch and paused. He could hear a low voice. Bex was talking. Danzo listened further. He could make out no distinct words. His eye fell on the porcelain swing-cover of the keyhole. Might there be a similar cover on the other side of the door? If not, would the four-poster’s curtains be drawn? Would he be able to see what Bex was doing to her?

  He decided that he didn’t want to know. He moved off.

  The idea that, at this moment, Bex was subjecting Helen to some odious act was simultaneously sobering and stimulating, just like his giving Danzo permission to go ahead with Seumas. This conspiratorial ambivalence, this ambidextrous manipulation of Danzo’s motives and feelings by the bisexual Bex, this, he thought, was what had hit the spot. This was what had caused his smouldering libido to catch fire, and this was what gave such mounting excitement to each illicit step along the gallery.

  During dinner he had studied Seumas with keen yet apparently offhand interest. Once or twice he had caught his eye. Seumas too had seemed distracted. Though he was meek and quietly spoken, he was not obviously effeminate. Yet there was something about him which proclaimed his predilection. His mouth, perhaps; the lily-white texture of his skin; the suggestive slenderness of his well-kept fingers. Even his clothes had struck Danzo as erotic. His T-shirt was there for no purpose but to be removed, to reveal his anaemic, underdeveloped chest and the small, dark-brown nipples that last summer had excited Danzo’s notice.

  The spell had been building all evening, all week, ever since Michaelmas, ever since the summer. It could not be resisted. Danzo was firmly in its grip.

  Like static before an electric storm, inevitability had charged the air. It had been exactly the same at Byfield, in the potting-shed, when he had understood that Bex had wanted just what he did, and now it had guided his steps to this third door along the north gallery.

  He reached for the handle and was about to turn it when he froze. He had glimpsed a flicker of light at the end of the gallery, in the stairwell.

  Someone, Stolly or Dave, was coming up.

  A monosyllable escaped his breath.

  Two stairways led from the ground
floor to the first. The far end of this gallery was served by the lesser of the two, a spiral staircase, enclosed by oak panelling, with room on each tread for no more than two tiny, Elizabethan people abreast.

  Neither Dave nor Stolly belonged in this part of the house. Their rooms were elsewhere. He could not understand why either of them would want to use this route, but whichever of them it was would see immediately that Danzo had no business in the north gallery, no business but Seumas.

  Although he did not want to retreat, he could not now escape notice merely by dodging into Seumas’s room, for Seumas, whatever his reaction, was bound to say something that would be audible from the gallery, even from the stairwell.

  But if Danzo retreated, that would mean a return to his solitary bed, perhaps for the rest of the night. Since the Order would be moving on tomorrow, he did not know when another opportunity would ever present itself. This rambling junkpile of a house, bogged down in its own history and doomed by Bex to flames: this was the perfect venue for the culminating seduction of Seumas. Tomorrow night, nothing but hot, ash-filled air would occupy the place of his room, his fetid mattress, the stained and wrinkled sheets they would be leaving behind. The furniture, the walls themselves, would be gone. There would be no witnesses.

  The light in the stairwell had grown. He retraced his last few steps and came to the next door along, knowing he could hide in the empty bedchamber there until the danger had passed.

  He extinguished his torch and stepped inside.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  His frown steadily grew. He pressed his ear even harder against the door. What was that he had heard outside? Had it been the click of some mechanism like a latch, preceding the revolution of columned brass hinges and the wide, inward passage of an expanse of oak panels and stiles and rails, drawing in its wake a furtive sweep of air; had an unknown hand just opened the adjoining door? Was it being eased shut? And was someone even now approaching the bed where Seumas lay: where he lay not asleep, nor yet dreaming of Danzo, but anticipating the punctual arrival of Stolly or even Dave?

  What, after all, did Danzo know about Seumas? Suppose Stolly had been rodding him all along! You could never tell anything about anybody! Or Dave, from Shanley here, who had been in the Order for less than three weeks, what did Danzo know about him? Dave, who had represented himself as the hardest man alive, who had so relished buggering the wives and daughters of his erstwhile neighbours and betters, could this same Dave share, or could he have already enacted, Danzo’s most treasured fantasies of the lily-white Seumas? Was he also a queer, a homo, a pansy faggot? Did he, like Danzo, merit the ridicule and condemnation of Bex and all his tribe? And had he, like Danzo, and possibly Seumas too, already tasted the albuminous sweets offered in private by its leader, its arch hypocrite, manipulator, and pimp?

  In its access of humiliation and jealous rage, Danzo’s heart gratefully seized upon the central and obvious source of relief. He would kill Bex. He would find him lying in bed next to the just-fucked Helen and stick the muzzle of the .38 up one of those perfect nostrils, distorting his nose, causing his terrified eyeballs to cross and focus on the uncompromising length and hardness of its barrel. And then, taking his time, Danzo would tell him … no, he would just pull the trigger and blow his fucking brains out! Like grey diarrhoea, like gruel, like the repulsive silver shit of some slimy reptile, they would get sprayed with condign suddenness all over the pillows, across Helen’s skin, everywhere, and the contents of that poisonous head would never do harm again! And finally, before she had stopped screaming, Danzo would shoot her too and grab the leadership of the Order for himself! He knew as much about it as Bex: more!

  Danzo’s right hand found the grip of his revolver. He drew the weapon out and, stepping silently into the corridor, prepared to switch on his torch.

  The way to the state bedroom lay to the left. But first he turned to the right, intending to listen at Seumas’s door and, by putting an eye to the keyhole, perhaps learn the identity of his lover. His left thumb activated the torch-switch. Because the batteries were getting low, the bulb gleamed but feebly, filling the reflector with yellow light. In its subdued beam he saw, in the middle of the gallery, guarding Seumas’s door, the same camouflage-clad figure he had last seen standing sideways in that phantasmal, apple-green kitchen. The angel. St Michael. He was here.

  Danzo fumbled drunkenly with his safety catch. The angel raised his assault rifle. He was carrying a bullpup with a telescopic sight, an Enfield, like Steve’s or Coco’s. He aimed at the torchbeam: at Danzo.

  Nothing happened. The rifle had jammed.

  Danzo fired. The bullet hit St Michael in the left flank. He folded as if he had been punched, but did not drop his weapon. Danzo prepared to shoot him again, aiming for the head.

  Seumas’s door burst open and someone came out, someone in an olive-green jacket, rain-wet, fresh from a killing.

  In an instant, Danzo apprehended the identity of that dark, derided face. The bald pate, the oval, gold-rimmed specs: these belonged not to a second angel but to the wog, one of several in the village, the chicken-shit Aziz, whose ugly but young wife Gil and Dave and Beezer had rogered half to death. It made no sense.

  Danzo actually saw the first incandescent muzzle-flash of the angel’s Enfield. Spiky, white-hot, tinged with blue, it expanded in the darkness of the gallery, a bloom both heavenly and strange. He even felt the astral momentum and ferocity of the initial onslaught, tearing him apart, throwing his limbs and body into a dozen attitudes of frenzy, seeming to sweep him along the fading gallery and back, back towards the crimson shadow and the eternal, unchanging presence of Bex.

  8

  As soon as Bex heard the shooting he knew what it meant. Even as he leapt out of bed and struggled into his clothes he heard the first urgent, panic-stricken cries and the sound of heavy boots on the stairs and along the gallery. Men’s names were being shouted. ‘Paul! Paul!’ And then, from further off, with a Coventry twang: ‘John’s been shot!’

  John. The name of him who went before, preparing the way; of him who ate locusts and wild honey, and who preached, ‘There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose’. John: the alias Danzo had found among the angel’s effects. He had arrived at last. And surely it had been Danzo, the next-in-power to Bex, who had cut him down.

  Bex fastened his belt and forced his feet into his boots. He knew the door was already locked. He flitted to each of the windows and drew the curtains. From its place against the armchair he took up the Calico and opened the safety catch.

  He looked at Helen’s form, still lying face-up, unmoving, a forearm across her face. She hadn’t reacted at all to the sound of gunfire. She was empty, vacant, a mere shell. Her mind had gone.

  Bex had succeeded. He had exorcised his foe. He had driven him out and left him homeless, at large in this rainy October night. His plaintive, oversized face, white-bearded, was pressed to the window-glass. He was rattling all the locks, circling the Manor, desperate to get back in. But he never would. Bex was invincible. He bestrode everything. The oracles had been fulfilled, all the prophecies, the writings public and arcane. All human thought had been made redundant. It was converging and becoming concentrated in the universe of knowing that was himself. He was the dark core of collapsing matter that embodied all science, religion, art. Every poetic impulse was being sucked into it: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. Black-armed, swinging his silver blade, defiant Bex had opened the underbelly of Paradise. Its swarming contents, fabulous and multifarious, were showering down like that original fall of rebel angels in which he, the spirit most lewd, had once been driven from his rightful place in heaven.

  He grinned exultantly. St Michael dead, his legions routed!

  By now he had taken up his stand by the wall, next to the door. He was waiting for the wheedling to begin. In the Calico’s magazine, geometrically packed, waiting, lay one hundred factory-fresh rounds. They we
re destined for the residuum running around his feet. The final battle, mind against supernal mind, would be engaged later.

  ‘Bex!’

  Which was the first of them, outside his door?

  ‘Bex! All your men are dead!’

  ‘What are you?’ Bex shouted, pretending to become angry. ‘Who dares abord the Hornèd One?’ His grin widened.

  There was a hurried consultation, too low to be made out.

  Bex cried, ‘Who speaks? What is your name?’

  ‘Fernihough.’

  ‘What sort of name is that?’

  ‘Did you hear me? All your men are dead.’

  ‘They’re not men. They never were. They’re cacodemons. Unclean spirits. Parasites. They feed on me. They suck the venom from my teats.’ He edged closer to the jamb, trying to gauge the position of the man outside. ‘They can never be weaned.’

  ‘Let Helen go.’

  Bex raised the Calico and switched it to single fire.

  ‘Let her go and we’ll spare your life.’

  ‘She’s already gone,’ he said. ‘Boy, has she gone!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He made no reply.

  Not yet wishing to wreck the door, nor wishing to let them know he had in his expert hands a brand new M-960, he fired just one round, making a clean hole corresponding to the place where he thought Fernihough was standing. Splinters flew on the other side. Bex ducked back behind the wall and turned to Helen. She was watching him.

  ‘You. Brain-dead. Get dressed. Now.’

  Like an automaton, she rose from the bed to obey.

  ‘Unlock the door,’ said Fernihough outside. Plainly, he had not been killed.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m the one calling the shots!’

  The voice remained silent.

  ‘I can fire out, but you can’t fire in. Understand?’

  ‘We understand.’

  ‘In exactly sixty seconds I’ll be coming out. With Persephone. My bride. Right?’