by Simon Clark
The route Rosemary had taken was pot luck. But she needed to keep driving. She had a premonition that time was running out. She had to find the family.
Now she glanced down repeatedly at the engine’s temperature gauge. The needle had been climbing steadily as she drove mile after mile through the hot afternoon sun.
When she glanced down again the needle had crept into the red zone. ‘Keep going, please keep going …’
Joey Barrass was comfort-eating. He’d started on his second micro-waved chicken balti when Michael strolled into the kitchen.
Joey, spooning the spicy sauce into his mouth, didn’t look up.
Michael yawned, then smiled. ‘Time for a beer break. Any left in the fridge?’
‘Help yourself. You could get me one as well.’
Michael opened the door of the refrigerator and reached for a bottle.
‘Not that one. It’s gnat’s piss. There’s some cans of Tennant’s on the top shelf.’
Michael passed him one of the cans. Joey tore open the ringpull and sucked at the can as if he’d just walked across a burning desert to get his hands on the thing.
Michael helped himself to one of the bottles of beer and sat at the kitchen table opposite Joey.
‘Christ, that hits the spot.’ Joey held the iced can to his face. ‘Jesus, it’s hot.’
‘There’s a swimming pool on the terrace.’
‘I’ll stick to this.’ He rolled the can against his forehead. ‘I don’t care what anyone says, I’m having a night on the piss tonight.’
‘After what you’ve been through, who can blame you?’
‘Christ.’ Joey looked at him, the muddy brown eyes clearing as he realized something. ‘We nearly died today, didn’t we?’
‘Don’t dwell on it. We’re safe now.’
‘For how long?’
‘I think we’ve put enough miles between us and Beastie Boy to give us a good twenty-four hours.’
‘How far have you got with that old Roman book?’
‘It’s fairly slow going but I think I’ll have learned what I need to know by around eleven.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘Christine’s putting Amy to bed. Richard’s outside.’
‘You think this book will tell you what you need to know?’
‘I think so.’
‘Thank God for that.’ Joey spooned in more balti.
‘What are you going to do when this is over?’
Joey pushed back his fringe. ‘I haven’t been able to think that far ahead. But I suppose it’ll be back to the old routine.’
Michael chatted casually, asking Joey what he did for a living. Joey told him about the property company he owned jointly with Christine and his plans for Sunnyfields.
Michael smiled. ‘It sounds as if you’re going to have money coming out of your ears in a year or two.’
‘I would be if it wasn’t for Dicky Boy out there. You know, every plan I’ve put forward for developing Sunnyfields he’s blocked. “Too ambitious,” he’ll say. Or “You’ll never get planning permission for it.”’
‘But it’s a valuable plot of land. Why’s Richard against you developing it?’
‘The bastard’s got no imagination. He keeps whining away that the land’s contaminated.’
‘Is it?’
‘There’s an old refuse tip on the site. But it can be reclaimed. Look, my idea is … pass us that pencil.’ Joey tore open the card sleeves that contained the microwave meals and, taking the pencil, began sketching out a plan of the site, talking faster and faster as his old enthusiasm returned.
Michael listened attentively, nodding. ‘So Sunnyfields is, what? Two hundred acres?’
‘Two hundred and thirty.’
Michael pointed at the edge of the plan. ‘Didn’t we go under a bridge when we were heading into town yesterday morning?’
‘That’s a railway.’
‘What lies between that and Sunnyfields?’
‘About twenty acres of cornfields.’
‘You own them?’
‘No.’
‘Buy them, then.’
‘Uh?’ Joey looked puzzled.
‘Get the farmer to sell you the fields.’
‘That’d give us another twenty acres but —’
‘No. The important thing is to be able to link into the railway. With the new anti-pollution legislation there’ll be an increase in rail freight at the expense of road freight. You could run a spur line from the main railway and anyone building a factory on Sunnyfields could bring in raw materials by rail and ship out finished goods the same way.’
‘Bloody expensive, though. We haven’t that kind of capital.’
‘Trust me, buy those twenty acres; they’ll quadruple the value of Sunnyfields.’
Joey took the bait. Michael leaned back, nodding as he listened, lightly running his fingertips up and down the cold neck of the bottle. Joey talked quickly, sketching out development plans so energetically that the point of the pencil snapped.
When it looked as if he was running out of steam Michael pulled a few sheets of kitchen roll from the roller and began jotting down figures of his own.
‘Joey, look, I’m looking to expand my business interests in the UK. I need approximately a hundred acres to build an electrical components factory. If I buy approximately half of Sunnyfields that will give you the capital to buy the twenty acres, put in the rail spur and there might be enough left to build your industrial site on your half.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘We’re talking business here, Joey. Business is always serious.’
‘This is all a bit quick, though, isn’t it?’ Joey sniffed suspiciously. ‘You’ve not carried out any surveys, or even checked if the title of the land is —’
‘Joey. I trust you. All I’m asking from you is that you trust me.’
‘In what way?’
‘Just give me some support over the next couple of days. Nothing back-breaking. Basically, all I need to know is that you are on my side.’
‘And you’d buy Sunnyfields?’
‘Yes. Part of it. Or all of it. You and your sister decide.’
Joey’s muddy brown eyes glazed as he made some mental calculations, then he said, ‘Don’t worry about Christine, I can negotiate on her behalf.’
‘You trust me, Joey?’
‘I do.’ He took a swallow of beer. ‘But how about an upfront payment, just to show how serious your intentions are? You know, Michael, just a nominal sum.’
Michael smiled broadly. ‘Does one million pounds sound nominal enough to you?’
‘Straight up?’
‘Straight up. I’ll make the telephone call now and have my bank transfer one million pounds into your account.’
‘Jesus,’ Joey whispered, his hands shaking. ‘Jesus, one million?’
Michael stood up. ‘I’ll just need details of your bank account.’
Dazed, Joey handed him his cash card.
Rosemary had stopped at a service station to buy sandwiches and give the engine time to cool. She was walking back to the van across the car park when the images came ripping through her mind with a brilliance that made her gasp.
She saw a cottage overlooking a valley. A doll with long black hair.
Then she was looking through Amy Young’s eyes. The little girl was being tucked into bed by her mother.
Rosemary heard the voice. It was a little girl’s voice but it was as loud as thunder. At first it was so loud she couldn’t make out any individual words. Rosemary looked at people walking across the car park, wondering why they couldn’t hear the voice, too, coming from the sky with an ear-splitting roar.
No one noticed. Then Rosemary realized the voice came from inside her head.
As she reached the van she began to make out the words.
ROSEMARY SNOW … ROSEMARY SNOW … BANWICK, DEVON … BANWICK, GLEBE COTTAGE IN DEVON … DEVON BY THE SLIPPERY SEA … ORANGES AND LEMONS, SAY THE BELLS OF ST CLEMENTS …<
br />
The words became a song as the little girl somewhere in Devon began to sing herself to sleep.
Rosemary scrambled into the driving seat and turned the ignition key. As the VW’s engine rattled into life the temperature gauge immediately climbed into the red.
Tough shit, she thought, savagely stamping the pedal to the floor. You’re going to take me to Devon if it’s the last thing you do.
Chapter 49
Night Talk
With Amy asleep upstairs, Christine, Joey and Richard sat in the lounge of the cottage in silence. The television showed a spy thriller. None of them would be able to remember its title or even a gist of the plot. They watched the images move across the screen, but a mixture of delayed shock and tiredness blunted their minds. Joey nursed a bottle of whisky, automatically topping up his glass every few minutes.
Richard could smell the microwave meals that Joey had binged on. His stomach rolled but he couldn’t decide whether he was hungry or nauseous.
As a brass clock on the mantelpiece chimed eleven Michael walked in. He was purposeful, businesslike: the thousand-year-old book was clasped under one arm, a wad of sheets covered in his handwriting was in the other.
Instantly the three sat up, alert and hoping for good news.
‘Have you finished?’ asked Richard, feeling a sudden low buzz of optimism.
‘Just this minute. The relevant section about the Beast was shorter than I thought.’
‘And?’ Christine prompted.
Michael sat down, putting the book on the coffee table and spreading out the sheets of paper. He said, ‘The Divine Epitome’ is quite short and to the point, I’ll give it that. The book was written by a monk in the tenth century. Because he was a devout Christian he decided to identify the entity I called the Beast as the Holy Spirit.’ He began to read. ‘“If it is your desire that the Holy Spirit should dwell permanently in your heart, so that it imbues you with power over men in their tents and palaces and over beasts of the forest, fields and the air, then parcel a silver cross in pieces of burial shroud, then bind that to your forehead.” It goes on to give specific instructions about how to make the silver crucifix, right down to its dimensions, weight and the purity of the silver.’
Christine leaned forward. ‘Will it work?’
‘Will it, hell.’ Michael dropped the sheets on to the table. ‘It’s sheer mumbo-jumbo based on half-remembered folk tales and soldiers’ tall stories.’
‘Great,’ Joey said thickly. ‘Bloody great.’
‘So all that happened today was a waste of time?’ Christine said. ‘All those people dying?’
‘All I can say is I regret it as much as you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘But nothing I can say or do now will bring those people back.’
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’ Joey slopped more whisky into the glass.
‘The Divine Epitome isn’t completely useless,’ Michael said. ‘What does seem to be accurate is a reference to the Codex Alexander. You remember, that’s an account of Alexander the Great’s invasion of India and how he took the power out of the Purple Crescent, which is an area of the Eastern end of the Mediterranean?’
Christine nodded. ‘Your research team have that now?’
‘Yes. The Divine Epitome tells us that,’ he began to read again, ‘“Alexander’s spell that binds the Holy Spirit to the heart is contained in the chapter that recounts his siege of the Indian City of Kush.’”
‘Well, mercy me,’ chuckled Joey. ‘That sounds a big help.’
Michael’s smile was forgiving. ‘Believe me, it is, Joey. I’ve just been speaking to the head of my team by phone. The Codex Alexander is contained in one hundred and thirty-six separate documents. My research team would have needed to read them all to find what we need. Now they can home in on the relevant parchment and begin work right away on the translation.’
‘But how do you control the power?’ Christine asked, her eyes sharply alert now.
Michael smiled. ‘It’s quite easy, really. Once you have the knack.’
‘Or it was easy when you lived in Istanbul?’
‘That’s right. Once I moved outside the Purple Crescent I lost control of it and —’
‘And it ran amok.’
‘Precisely. But the Codex Alexander will tell us how to regain control of it.’
‘Sounds like my bloody dog,’ Joey grunted. ‘It behaved itself, did what you told it. Bloody good dog. Then one day it wouldn’t do a bloody thing you told it to do. We couldn’t work out what’d happened. All we knew was that one day we had an obedient dog, then the next day you couldn’t do a bloody thing with it. D’ya know what’d happened to it?’
Michael shook his head.
Joey topped up his glass. ‘It had gone bloody deaf, that’s what.’ He laughed thickly. ‘There we were telling it to sit down or get my bloody slippers and the poor bloody mutt couldn’t hear a bloody thing.’
Michael nodded. ‘It makes a good analogy to what’s happening here. When I arrived here in Britain it was as if the Beast could no longer hear me.’
‘But how did you control it before?’ Christine asked. ‘I mean was it like a spell, or what?’
‘I call it Active Imagination.’
‘Active Imagination?’
‘Well.’ Michael put his fingertips together thoughtfully. ‘I can’t see the Beast or hear it. So when I was first developing this partnership with it when I was living in Istanbul, I practised the knack of imagining.’
‘And you had to imagine you controlled it.’
‘Yes. I knew I had to keep it close to me, so close it felt as if it actually shared my head with me.’
‘So how did you keep it close?’
‘Well, I imagined it took the form of a dog that was well behaved as long as I kept giving it orders. So I developed the instructions in a phrase that I kept running through my head: Walk with me, sit with me, stay with me. Walk with me, sit with me, stay with me.’
‘And you had to keep repeating that.’
‘Yes. Not aloud, of course.’
‘How many times a day?’
‘Well, that’s the hard part. All day and every day.’
‘You had to keep that up all the time?’ Christine said, astonished. ‘It’s a wonder it didn’t send you mad.’
‘At first I came close to it.’ He smiled. ‘But you get used to it.’
‘But what happened when you slept?’ asked Richard.
‘I learned it would lie dormant for at least an hour. So,’ he shrugged, ‘I learned to make do with one hour’s sleep a night, with an hour’s siesta in the afternoon.’
‘By rights sleep deprivation alone should have killed you.’
‘It’s more common than you imagine. If you read about the Byzantine Emperors you’ll see that those in symbiotic relationship with the Beast needed just one hour’s sleep a night. Then they’d pace the city walls until dawn.’
Joey snorted. ‘Doesn’t sound bloody worth it to me.’
Michael stood up, his eyes alight. ‘But you can’t understand what the Beast does for you. The energy, the enthusiasm it gives you. Once you have it inside you, you feel your whole body comes alive; your senses – hearing, touch, sight, taste, smell – become more acute. You feel full of fire and you know in here,’ he thumped his chest, ‘you know in here that nothing is impossible any more.’
‘So you think having to repeat that rhyme umpteen thousand times a day is a small price to pay for what you receive in return?’ Richard said.
‘I do. It is tough at first. However, you get used to it.’ Michael looked happier now than any other time they had seen him, walking up and down the room, his hands moving in slow graceful gestures as he spoke enthusiastically.
‘Try an experiment,’ he told them. ‘Pick a nursery rhyme. Then repeat it over and over in your head. Do that for a couple of hours non-stop as you go about your everyday business. And you will see you do acclimatize eventually.’
‘I … I�
��ll pass on that one, if … if you don’t mind,’ Joey slurred.
‘Once this energy is running through you,’ Michael said, ‘you feel wonderful, enthusiastic, strong. And the miraculous part of it all is that you can transfer that feeling to others. Whether it’s a couple of people in a room like this. Or to a hundred people in a hall or a hundred thousand soldiers on a battlefield.’ His voice was low but fast. To Richard it sounded almost like a cat’s purr. And there was something hypnotic about it.
‘Imagine,’ Michael was saying, ‘that you are Emperor of Byzantium. Your Empire is under siege from a dozen different armies – the Russians, the Bulgarians, the Muslims. Because they know that you are Lord of Constantinople, the greatest city in the world that contains treasuries piled to the roof beams with gold bullion and diamonds by the sackful. Now, picture this: your army has just returned from fighting the Saracens. They are exhausted, their bodies are dripping with sweat and blood. They’ve come home to rest. But your Empire is being attacked again by another army. Your men can’t fight any more. But you have the Beast on your side. It fills you full of energy; it gives you the power to inspire your people. So you climb on your horse and you ride along the lines of exhausted men and you talk to them; you inspire them. They look like deflated balloons but as you speak you see that energy pumping into them. As if they are being inflated, they lift themselves up; they feel strong, and happy, and eager to fight again. They will die for you. And they will die shouting your name in ecstasy.’
‘There are records of this happening?’
‘Dozens.’ Michael’s eyes blazed with excitement. ‘In the eleventh century the Russians launched a seaborne invasion of Constantinople with a force of a hundred thousand men. Constantinople’s fighting ships were elsewhere so the Emperor ordered that every old barge and merchant vessel that could float be armed with Greek Fire, their secret weapon which was an early form of flame thrower. Unwittingly, the Russian fleet sailed into range of the Greek Fire throwers and within a couple of hours most of the enemy fleet was on fire. With the ships on fire the Russian sailors and troops had to swim to the beaches where they were slaughtered by the Byzantine army. Eyewitness accounts say that the sea was reddened with the blood of the Russians as if a great river of blood ran from the land into the water.’