The Devil Upstairs

by Anthony O'Neill

  She gritted her teeth, stomped upstairs and rapped on the door.

  No answer.

  She knocked again.

  Still nothing.

  It seemed incredible, but the music was so overwhelming that the people inside couldn’t hear her. She pounded down the vortex of the spiral stairway, all sixty-six steps, and buzzed on Moyle’s intercom. She held the button for perhaps thirty seconds. And eventually heard Moyle’s slurred voice: ‘Who is it?’

  She inhaled. ‘It’s Cat Thomas from downstairs. I really must ask you to turn down the music. It’s nearly midnight and—’

  ‘What?’ said Moyle. ‘I can’t hear you!’

  ‘You can’t hear me because the music is so damn loud! Can you turn it down, please?’

  A disdainful pause, then Moyle hung up.

  Cat re-entered the building, fuming. She went right to the top of the stairs and banged on his door again. She banged and banged. She wasn’t going to take this any more.

  Finally, the door opened. Kee-wah!

  Moyle stood there in black vest and jeans, droopy eyed, holding a beer bottle in one hand and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other. He stared at Cat with his serial killer eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cat, using her most authoritative voice, ‘but you’re gonna have to dial that music down. Please. I have an exam tomorrow and I really need my rest. Everyone in the building needs their rest. So please turn it down – turn it off – or I’ll have to make a formal complaint. And I really don’t want to do that.’

  Moyle looked stunned – speechless – that she would dare speak to him like that. Then one of his friends in the room behind, the straggly-bearded driver of the Hyundai, noticed her.

  ‘Hey, hey, it’s Shania Twain! You’re still the one, baby! Still the one!’

  And Moyle smirked and sneered. ‘Whatsa matter, darling? Music not American enough for you?’

  ‘Just turn it down,’ she growled, then wheeled around and returned to her flat downstairs.

  A minute later, to her surprise, the volume went down. Right down. A few more minutes, then it went off entirely. And Cat registered a small moment of triumph. She’d done it. By standing up for herself, fearlessly, she’d achieved something.

  But at the same time she sensed it couldn’t be that easy. Moyle wouldn’t just give in like that. She listened to the footsteps, the clinking bottles, the laughing, the shifting furniture, waiting for something. The stinger. And then it came – the sound of people singing.

  ‘I’m Gonna Getcha Good . . .’

  ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much . . .’

  ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman . . .’

  They were singing Shania Twain songs. At the top of their lungs. To mock her. And just to make more noise.

  ‘Uh uh oh oh!’

  Over and over and over.

  ‘Uh uh oh oh!’

  Shania Twain is Canadian, you dimwits, she thought bitterly.

  The dimwits went on and on until they rang out of Twain hits and got back to ‘Black Betty’ and started jumping up and down again.

  BAM-DA-LAM. BAM-DA-LAM. BAM-DA-LAM.

  BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.

  Cat waited until it twelve-thirty and then called 101. She got through quickly – because it was mid-week, she guessed – and lodged her complaint. Thirty minutes later, staring out the window, she saw a police car draw up in the street outside. Two uniformed cops, barely out of their teens, got out and glanced up at the top floor. They shook their heads. She heard them come around to the building’s stair door and buzz through to Number Six. She heard the people upstairs shifting, frantically flushing the toilet. Voices. The stair door springing open. The cops ascending slowly: clap . . . clap . . . clap – the measured gait of the law. She heard them arriving at Moyle’s place and knocking commandingly. The door opening. Stern words issued. Grudging acknowledgments. The sound of the cops, with radio transmitters squawking, heading back down the steps. Reluctant movements above. Grumbling. Bottles being thrown together. The toilet flushing again. Muffled farewells. People clopping down the stairs. Laughing as they spilled out of the building. Car doors slamming. Engines rumbling. The party was over.

  Cat brushed her teeth and got into bed. She shoved the gel plugs into her ears, wrapped the pillow around her head and waited for the inevitable statement from above. A protest. A howl of rage. A signal from Moyle that he would never gracefully surrender.

  In the event, it took much longer than expected – Cat’s mind was a swirl of hallucinatory images – before she heard the deeply ominous announcement.

  TWAAAAAAAANGGGGG.

  * * *

  The battle was on. Over the ensuing nights Moyle stepped up both the volume and frequency of his aural attacks. If he had not previously been waging a war of attrition then he was now. Objects were not so much dropped as hurled down. Doors were not just closed but slammed. Jagged bursts of hellish music rent the night air. Varieties of DIY work – ten seconds of hammering or drilling – were performed at the most unlikely of times. He even began using his washing machine in the middle of the night, so that every fifteen minutes or so there was raucous whirring and stammering as it reached the peak of a spin cycle.

  Trapped in a spin cycle of her own – weary, nodding off at her desk, constipated, suffering piercing headaches, gaunt inside her clothes – Cat one morning marched into Agnes’s little office.

  ‘You still have those meetings?’ she demanded. ‘To make requests?’

  Agnes looked up, surprised. ‘Aye,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘Book me in,’ Cat told her with a sigh. ‘Book me in.’

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The meeting took a few weeks to organise; so long, in fact, Cat started to wonder if it was going to take place at all. But it turned out that Agnes had been busy submitting details.

  ‘All sort of things,’ she explained, driving past the pebble-dash bungalows of southern Edinburgh. ‘Everything I know about you. Your work history. Your attitudes and ethics. Your religious beliefs.’

  ‘My religious beliefs?’ Cat raised her eyebrows. ‘Sounds like you know more about me than I know about myself.’

  ‘Well, certainly more than anyone in Scotland. You’ve been very open with me.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘More than you’ve probably realised.’

  Now that she thought about it, Cat couldn’t deny that she’d been more revealing than usual with Agnes – probably a means of establishing rapport in a foreign land. She doubted she would have been so candid back in Florida.

  ‘I had to endorse you, in effect. I even had to send pictures of you.’

  ‘Pictures?’ Cat frowned. ‘Where on earth did you get those?’

  ‘I snapped a couple when you weren’t looking. The office in general, actually, but I cropped them down to just show you.’

  ‘Very . . . creepy, of you.’

  ‘Hey, I’m a trained investigator, remember. I swiped a photo off the Net, too.’

  ‘There are photos of me on the Net?’

  ‘From that case you mentioned – the organised crime thing in America.’

  ‘But I was told those photos had been taken down. I was assured all photos of me had been taken down.’

  ‘They’re still out there, if you know where to look.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly what I want to hear.’

  ‘Relax,’ said Agnes, with a suggestive glance. ‘They’re good photos. You look good. You always look good. Anyone with a pulse would kill to do you.’

  Cat, nodding noncommittally, was still unable to get a handle on Agnes’s sexuality. She spoke as lustily of women as she did of men, and often registered her desire to ‘do’ someone. But she didn’t seem to be ‘doing’ anybody – despite boasting constantly of her sexual prowess and the ‘magnetic attraction’ of her enormous ‘assets’. For tonight, for the meeting, she’d glammed up in a preposterously low-cut frock, dramatically swinging earrings, siren-red lipstick, and
lashings of mascara and rouge. Cat refrained from saying it, but she looked like a music hall prostitute. Marinated in some sort of lilac perfume, she even smelled like one. Cat herself, ignoring Agnes’s exhortation to ‘dress to impress’, had merely thrown on a respectable outfit – tailored wide-leg pants, a striped top, dark-blue denim jacket – and feathered some concealer under her eyes to hide the shadows.

  ‘Any reason,’ she asked, ‘why I need to look good, by the way?’

  ‘Well’ – Agnes laughed – ‘everyone responds better to a pretty face.’

  Cat couldn’t argue with that. ‘And why were all the other details necessary?’

  ‘Security. They needed to be sure that you’re not some sort of spy or undercover journalist. There’ve been a lot of stories in the press lately.’

  ‘What stories?’

  ‘Drugs, orgies, cavorting in the moonlight, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Stories about your group specifically?’

  ‘Not mine in particular.’

  Cat looked out at the open fields, where skeletal electrical towers were marching off into the darkness. ‘This group,’ she ventured, ‘is some sort of cult, right?’

  ‘Cults are for gobshites. We don’t like that word.’

  ‘Something Satanic?’

  Agnes made an ambivalent noise. ‘Not in the traditional sense.’

  ‘Traditional sense?’

  ‘Well, you can’t believe everything you read. You can’t believe anything you read, really.’

  ‘A Satanic cult,’ Cat said, tasting the words. ‘You know, I can’t imagine why I’m surprised.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not really surprised. You know what you’re getting into and don’t pretend otherwise.’

  In truth, Cat had already experienced numerous misgivings about the whole charade. But then Moyle would bang a fist against his bedroom wall at one a.m. Hammer a nail at two a.m. Fire up his washing machine at three a.m. Cat even suspected that he was stealing her mail from the communal mailbox: she’d gotten an email from Stella, the one sibling who’d been halfway sisterly to her, asking why she hadn’t acknowledged a birthday gift. Meanwhile, her enquiries to Building Standards and Public Safety – her last hope for some alterations to the ceiling – had proved as fruitless as she feared: ‘We apologise for not responding, but to this point we have received no correspondence from the landlord of the property in question. The matter has been referred to the Acting Surveyor, Mr McIver, though we are unable to confirm when he will be free to visit you.’

  So ultimately Cat figured that Agnes’s ‘meeting’ – or whatever it was – would be cathartic. She understood the power of symbolic actions. Saluting the flag, planting a tree, flipping a coin to a war veteran, voting in an election. Or tearing an ex-boyfriend’s photo into pieces, plunging pins into a voodoo doll, slamming a door in frustration. It was like hypnosis. The mere act of seeking a solution might expel the negative energy. It might paradoxically exorcise a few demons. It might even make her less sensitive to Moyle’s astonishing disrespect.

  ‘And the others – the ones in your coven or whatever – they’re devil worshippers too, I suppose?’

  Agnes shook her head. ‘You’re using old words. Old words with old associations. Everything’s different now. The world’s upside down – you know that.’

  ‘Then I won’t have to drink anyone’s blood? Or kiss anyone’s behind?’

  ‘Would you really be here if you thought that?’ Agnes said. ‘It’s more of a game.’

  ‘I don’t like games.’

  ‘Well, not really a game. But you’ll see. You’ll see.’

  Cat stared pensively out the window again. Having crossed the city bypass, they were into a region of rolling hills, ranks of hedgerows and acres of dark pastureland.

  ‘Where’s it being held, exactly?’ she asked. ‘You never did tell me.’

  ‘A castle,’ said Agnes. ‘Aileanach Castle.’

  ‘A genuine castle? With towers and turrets?’

  ‘The living quarters are at ground level and the castle is underneath – fourteenth century, I think.’

  ‘The castle itself is underground?’

  ‘No, the house is at the top two levels. The rest of the castle sort of clings to a slope overlooking the River Esk. When you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And who lives there?’

  ‘The Laird of Howgate. It’s been in his family for centuries.’

  ‘This Laird of Howgate being a Satanist?’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t advertise it – and neither should you.’ Agnes chuckled to soften what might have sounded like a threat.

  All evening, Cat noticed, Agnes had been tightly wound. Her hands were gripped tight to the steering wheel. Her voice was high-pitched. She was giggling excessively. She might even have been sweating more than usual.

  ‘He’ll be in attendance tonight? The Laird?’

  ‘He might be.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘People from all over. Slovakia. Japan. Austria. Ireland. Sri Lanka.’

  ‘The United Nations of Witches.’

  Agnes giggled again. ‘Some of them were in Montenegro for the autumn equinox celebrations in September. Then they were in Norway last week for Hallowe’en. That was one of the reasons it took a few weeks to organise.’

  ‘They’re not all coming for me, I hope?’

  ‘No, not really. Not really.’

  ‘Then who?’

  But Agnes didn’t titter this time. Didn’t answer at all.

  In awkward silence she steered down a serpentine side road flanked by bristling conifers. They passed what looked like a ruined granary and a deserted cottage. The forest thickened and darkened, and Cat had the disorientating sense of having visited the place in a dream. Finally Agnes flicked the indicator and they turned into a driveway, pausing before ornate wrought-iron gates flanked by sentry boxes. Two slab-faced guards in padded jackets lumbered up to the windows. One of them lanced Cat’s face with a flashlight beam. Agnes nodded at them and muttered a strange word: ‘Shenhamforash.’ Still expressionless, the guards drew back, the gates swung open, and the VW eased into the thickly wooded estate. Mounted cameras rotated to follow them.

  Cat looked around. ‘What’s going on here, exactly?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Agnes. ‘There’s been a lot of trouble lately.’

  ‘But do they really need all this security?’

  ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ Another evasive laugh.

  The driveway seemed endless. Cat thought she saw more guards moving like wraiths among the trees. She could’ve sworn that some of them were carrying assault rifles.

  Eventually the VW entered a clearing. The headlights swept across several parked vehicles – a Rolls, an Aston Martin, a Porsche 911 – and Agnes pulled up in a spot that seemed reserved for her.

  ‘Now I see why you advised me to dress up,’ said Cat.

  ‘Aye,’ said Agnes, ‘some of these folk have done pretty well for themselves.’

  They got out of the car to the sound of owls hooting in the forest. They passed a surreal oak tree with a trunk that resembled fifty serpents entwined around one another. Cat was again ruffled by déjà vu. The Laird of Howgate’s residence – the top of the castle – looked like a well-tended hunting lodge, but as they approached she discerned a huge gulf behind it. She made out a precipitous slope. She thought she heard flowing water.

  She spared a moment to appreciate the absurdity of the situation. Five months earlier she was shielding her face from the Florida sun. Now she was approaching a remote and well-guarded Scottish castle to participate in some mysterious Satanic ritual. Or game. Or something.

  ‘I’m not going to regret this, am I?’ she whispered.

  ‘If things go to plan,’ Agnes assured her, ‘you’ll more likely look back on this as the greatest moment of your life.’

  It was Saturday, 4 November.

  CHAPTER

&nbs
p; ELEVEN

  Arriving at a heavily beamed door, Agnes rapped seven times with a jackal-headed knocker and the door swung open almost instantaneously.

  ‘Och, look at the two of you! Let’s get you inside and oot of this cold!’

  The first ‘witch’, if that was what she was, was a personable old biddy in a knitted cardigan, tartan skirt and pussy-bow blouse – everyone’s vision of a perfect Scottish grandmother.

  ‘I’m Maggie Balfour,’ the woman chirped. ‘It’s so good to see you noo!’

  ‘I’m Cat Thomas.’

  ‘Of course you are, dear – Catriona Thomas, our wee visitor from America. Come right through noo, come right through.’

  After scraping her shoes on a doormat, Cat stepped into a stuffy, dimly lit chamber with oaken panels and ceiling beams. Above was a mediaeval-style chandelier fixed with electric candles. On the walls were sconce-lights, swords, hunting trophies and smoky paintings of Highland scenes. Stretched across the floorboards was a threadbare Persian carpet that looked as old as the 1001 Nights. The whole effect was baronial but insistently cosy.

  ‘You want to take off yer jacket?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘I’m OK,’ said Cat.

  ‘It can get a wee bit warm in here, I warn ye noo.’

  ‘I’m fine for now, thanks.’

  Cat’s nostrils had already curled at an unpleasant odour. She noticed a black cat in the corner, licking its privates.

  ‘This way, dears, they’re waiting for you.’

  They were ushered into a sizable salon – ancient tapestries on the walls now – where a group of eminent-looking personages, like something out of a wax museum, were partaking of drinks and canapés. Not one of them looked younger than fifty. Much tweed, velour, brooches, tiepins and plaid. Upon Cat’s entry all of them turned simultaneously, like clockwork automatons, as though her arrival had been announced with a trumpet.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Cat, hoping an all-purpose greeting would suffice.

  But Maggie, guiding her by the arm, insisted on introducing everyone individually. ‘This is Akinari Ito, our good friend from Japan . . . and Tamsin Blight from Cornwall . . . and Petra Varga from Bratislava . . . and George Pickingill from Dorset . . . and Éliphas Lévi from Provence . . . and Johannes Junius from Innsbruck . . . and Priya Benedicto from Madras . . .’