by F. G. Cottam
He’d been no more than twelve or thirteen years old at home in the family’s two-storey tenement on the northside of Dublin. It had been at the most desolate period of his mother’s divorce from the father he was never to see again. She was getting through it only on heavy dosages of Valium. She drowsed a lot at times she shouldn’t have. She left food simmering on the stove. She left the fire untended in their open grate or a bath still running for one of her boys upstairs. On this particular night, she’d fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa.
Paul didn’t mind. The big TV mast on Winter Hill at the northern edge of the Pennines meant that they got the English channels. With his mother asleep, he could tune into filth like Take Three Girls, or Country Matters. The latter, in particular, was a series so packed with female nudity it was spoken of in the playground at school with nothing short of awe. He sneaked a look at his mum. He went across and turned the television’s tuning dial. Granada and BBC2 were always the best bets for nakedness. He heard his younger brother, Patrick, creep down the stairs. Granada were showing some sort of documentary about the Troubles in the North. On BBC2, the weatherman was finishing up.
‘Just what I need to know,’ Patrick whispered from behind him. ‘I’m bound to rest easier, confident that East Anglia is looking at a fine late afternoon.’
‘Shush,’ Paul said.
They squeezed into the chair facing the TV, pushed together by the sagging springs, Paul putting an arm around his brother’s flannelette shoulder as he always did, waiting with some excitement.
It was The Old Grey Whistle Test. And what the two boys saw on it that night seemed to them more sinister than entertainment had any right to be. The band were costumed like medieval minstrels, in high pointed hats with bells and harlequin tunics and woven leggings. When they moved, they adopted the antic postures Paul recognised from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in his school history books. The song they did was ‘Tam Lin’, though he didn’t know that then. The evil-looking band performed as if under some kind of spell, their playing growing ever more possessed in its fire and frenzy as their singer chanted the verses. Her voice did not describe the Flemish world of Bosch, though. To the young Paul, it was a voice that belonged instead to the dark England of ancient and malevolent spells. It was an incantatory chant that evoked the Green Man and spiteful elves and John Barleycorn and cursed souls, shrieking, lost in the mists of moors and impenetrable English woods.
The sight and the sound of this performance truly dismayed him. He sat snuggled against his brother, disturbed and petrified, the television screen a grey window on a world of warped magic.
It was only eight or nine years later, at Trinity, that he heard the song again and was able to make sense of what he’d seen. They were called Fairport Convention, he learned. The boys were mostly from North Oxford and their singer had been a girl from Wimbledon called Sandy Denny. Among their players had been the guitarist Richard Thompson and the fiddle player Dave Swarbrick. And their appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test had unlocked in an impressionable boy a series of dreams so vivid and disturbing he had never really been able to forget them.
What Patrick had made of it, two years the younger, he had never thought to ask. It had not been something he had wanted, afterwards, discussion reminding him of. He did remember that after turning the television off and putting a cushion under their mum’s head and a coat over her, they had stolen upstairs and crammed into a single bunk in their bedroom together.
That had been the start of it, he thought now, lying in his nest in his rented flat in the night in Waterloo. Rain whickered and spat on his bedroom window. That had been the start of it. Not the Fischer house nor any of the other subsequent things, but that. It had been ‘Tam Lin’, all those years ago, that had sparked the fear in him that eventually found its proper cause and terrible justification.
‘How flattering that you remembered,’ Seaton lay on his back in bed and said aloud, descending into sleep, perhaps emboldened by the beer consumed listening to the loquacious Malcolm Covey. But despite the bravado, he wasn’t really thinking this. He was really thinking how awful, how defeating, that they should have known in the first place. As they knew everything, every detail, each debilitating flaw. Above him, in the puddles of the flat rainy roof of his block, he heard a skittering sound. It could have been the claws of some capering demon. But, more likely, it was a crow or a feral cat night-scavenging. It was much more likely that, Seaton thought.
And sleep claimed him.
Four
He sat sipping coffee outside a café on Kennington Road at nine thirty the following morning, glad it was a Saturday. He didn’t pursue his research work at weekends. He had tried to simplify his life, to reduce it to a series of habits and routines undeserving of challenge or even rigorous thought. But life was going to be vastly more complicated now, after Covey’s intervention. It was going to be more dangerous, too. To his surprise, Seaton found he almost welcomed that. The prospect of action was almost a relief to him, after the months and years of concealment and dread. Wakeful in the small hours, fearful after the tape-machine cabaret, he’d decided he was unlikely to survive what he intended to try to do. But his bitter conclusion had been that his life was not worth living anyway. Not as it was. And, unchallenged, he knew its condition would never greatly improve.
The café was an Italian place called Perdoni’s. It was double-fronted and had an optimistic array of metal chairs and zinc tables placed on the pavement outside. And it was at one of these tables that Seaton sat, the pavement flags under his feet still wet with rain from the previous night. Inside, the trade was mostly black-cab drivers, sharing the red leather bench seats with a smattering of tourists just off the Eurostar. On the other side of the road sat the brutalist brick and glass edifice of Kennington police station. To the left of the station, from where Seaton sat, was Lambeth North Underground station. To his right, he could see the black railings and leaf-thinned trees of the War Museum grounds. The War Museum was the attraction for the Germans and Dutch and Belgians in Perdoni’s, chain-smoking over their empty espresso cups, to the general irritation of the cabbies in the café. Most of the cabbies smoked, of course. When all was said and done, they were cabbies. But they were more furtive about their habit than the tourists were when they dragged on their crimped and hidden gaspers.
Overhead, the morning sky was a vivid blue, intersected by fading vapour trails. It was a bright enough blue, the sky. But it had a depth and stillness suggestive of the steady retreat of sunlight and warmth through autumn. Halloween was not long past. In the newsagent’s window a few doors down from the café, they were still trying to sell leftover werewolf gloves and pointy hats in a cut-price window display. The British had really taken to Halloween over recent years, the kids trick-or-treating in their witch and skeleton costumes and ghoul masks in faithful imitation of their American counterparts. It threatened to become a bigger celebration than Guy Fawkes Night. Maybe it already was. Seaton could see the irony in All Hallows Eve becoming no more in the public mind than an excuse for children to beg sweets at the doors of strangers. But he couldn’t enjoy it. He had seen real ghouls. Magic was something that could be harnessed and exploited and there were people in the world with hunger for power and influence enough to risk dabbling in its dark, cruel possibilities.
It was easier not to think about it. It was much more enjoyable to think, instead, of the psychological warfare being waged inside Perdoni’s between the cabbies and the foreigners. He sneaked a look through the glass. The cabbies huddled, bellicose behind their swinging brass badges, in front of stroke-inducing fry-ups and mugs of sweet tea. The foreigners were pale and impassive in spectacles with narrow black frames and dark clothes he knew would have costly labels. They tinkered with expensive camcorders in preparation for their museum visit. These were taken from and put back into little leather knapsacks embossed with discreet logos. Occasionally, their owners checked the time on their expensive wristwatches.
And all the while they smoked.
There was one particularly good-looking couple at the periphery of this chic cluster. Both the man and the woman were tall and very slender. You would have said that each was even beautiful in a pale, bloodless sort of way. She wore black lipstick and it capped half the cream-coloured stubs in the teeming ashtray on the table in front of them. Something about this pair intrigued Seaton. He would have felt self-conscious, rude even, scrutinising them. But they seemed to be staring through the window back at him, brazenly enough. Then the weight of a passing lorry shivered the glass of the café window, making the tableau behind it blurry and indistinct for a moment, and Seaton turned his attention elsewhere.
After Perdoni’s, he packed a few things into an overnight bag and then walked the short distance to the lock-up under the arches in Hercules Road. There was a key to the padlock on the door in Covey’s padded envelope. The car key the envelope contained had already told him that he would be driving a Saab. The car was fairly new, black, its exterior spotless and its carpets and upholstery freshly vacuumed. The tank was full and Seaton had studied the route using a road atlas in the morning at his table outside the café.
He had not driven for a while but had barely drunk anything the evening before with Covey and driving was a skill he considered rudimentary enough. Nevertheless, he had one bad moment on the journey. It occurred on the A3, the bulk of Guildford cathedral looming monolithic to his left, when the Saab’s radio switched itself on. He looked down at the green lights of the display, so shocked that the wheel seemed to convulse in his hand, veering the car violently to the left. A furious horn blatted from behind and he saw the lorry he’d almost hit shuddering under the force of its air brakes in his rear-view mirror. He corrected his steering with sweaty hands and could feel his heart, light in his chest, as he waited for Sandy Denny’s cold and ragged delivery of the posthumous ‘Tam Lin’ through the speakers behind the door panels. But when he made sense of the sound, it was a white soul song he didn’t know, the station innocent, the presenter talking inanely about the weather or his wife or something over the melody as it faded in and out of coherence with the strength of the signal. Some piece of software built into the Saab’s dashboard had elected to turn the radio on, that was all. The last person to use the car must have preprogrammed it. He pushed the radio’s ‘mute’ button and the music and talking stopped as his pulse began to slow reluctantly to its normal rate.
The university was new, half-timbered buildings with thick panes of tinted glass, set amid gravel paths and thickets and avenues of mature trees on one side of a slope that grew less gentle the higher and more exposed to the weather it became. A chapel and an administration building topped the rise. The chapel surprised Seaton. He thought that perhaps it meant American or Catholic funding. The blue sky of the London morning had become a mournful November grey en route to Surrey in the afternoon. Now, when Seaton looked up, the cloud was blank and low and bruised heavily with its burden of impending rain. Gravel, in larger fragments than he thought usual for paths, crunched or was squirted stubbornly out from under his feet. He could feel the sharpness of individual stones through the soles of his shoes. Halogen lamps had been wired high at intervals in some of the trees and he was glad of the light. He had been obliged to park at the very bottom of the hill. The humanities building was closer to the top. His breathing became more laboured as the incline steepened. The path seemed to narrow and the trees grew denser, limiting the daylight through their crisp brown and orange autumn foliage. So he was glad of the halogen lamps. And particularly grateful for their flat, white glare when he thought he heard the approach of something large and stealthy through the ferns and branches, over the dead leaves and damp grass behind the wall of trees rising along his left, parallel to the narrowing path along which he walked. He stopped and the sound ceased. He could hear his own breathing and the whisper of water dropping on to leaves as the rain began to fall. Up ahead, above him, lights flickered on and off in the humanities building that was his destination.
He looked around, half-waiting for the sound to stir again. The rain strengthened. He heard drops begin to drip from stiffening leaves and dribble down runnels of bark. It occurred to him that he was soaked, again, for the third time in less than twenty-four hours. And it occurred to him that the wood on the hill was a great deal older than the university buildings so sympathetically designed to blend in with their austere and gloomy surroundings. He waited in the rain to hear again the predatory prowl of whatever was concealed in the trees to his left. He waited for five minutes, glancing a couple of times at his wristwatch. It was growing darker. But no sound came. After five minutes, he moved on up the hill to his meeting with Andrew Clarke, the ethics professor. He did not want to be late. Though he was confident Professor Clarke would have no further, pressing engagements after this. It was a Saturday, after all. And Saturday was a quiet day in academia.
There was moss spreading on the wood of the building. It furred the sills of the windows and encroached across the stone surround of the main entrance, soft and deeply green. And there was mildew inside. Seaton smelled its scent of subtle decay as soon as the glass door closed behind him and he paused in the blink and stutter of failing fluorescents overhead, wondering which way he ought to go to find the ethics man. There was no one in the long corridor in front of him. There were doors to right and left, numbered he saw, as he progressed along the passage. But none of them bore a name. The mildew smell grew stronger. He saw two doors marked WC with male and female symbols under the initials and went into the Gents because he needed to pee.
Mildew blotched and spotted the porcelain of the urinals. In the sinks, the mouths of the dripping copper taps were stained and swollen with mould. The mirrors above the sinks reflected black. Seaton saw all of this in the feeble glow of an emergency light screwed into the plaster above the door. The fluorescents were out in here. He peed calmly and then deliberately washed his hands. The paper from the dispenser, when he dried them, felt dusty between his fingers. He liked the mirrors above the row of sinks least. There was a temptation, very compelling, to look into them. He’d glanced at one of them on walking in and thought he’d glimpsed in its dark reflection a grinning flapper under a glitter-ball. It would be a terrible mistake to look into the mirrors in here. He compressed his paper towel in his palm and aimed it at a bin screwed to the wall. It missed. He was reaching for the door handle when he heard a snicker of laughter from one of the stalls, which he now saw was locked. He was suddenly aware of the smell of strong tobacco smoke. It was very rich, Turkish, perhaps Egyptian. He crouched and looked under the stall. A pair of feet faced him. They were shod in shiny leather shoes. Above the shoes, skirting each, rose the grey anachronism of canvas spats. In the dim light, Seaton could just make out the ridges of buttons rising taut at their ankles. He saw the sole of one shoe lift and slap the floor and heard more laughter from the stall’s occupant.
‘I say,’ said an empty voice.
He straightened and walked out of the lavatory as calmly as he could.
The ethics professor was in a room at the very end of the corridor. It was his office, and he sat behind his desk flanked by shelves of books with his name on their spines and photographs of occasions he’d dignified with his attendance in an academic gown. There was a lit Coleman lantern on his desk and it deepened the shadows in the room with its steady flare of flat brightness. Light gleamed off the glasses the professor wore, making it impossible to see his eyes or read his mood. He was probably in his mid-fifties, with grey hair and grey cheeks. There was a careworn, threadbare look about him entirely absent in the pictures of him on his walls. Seaton felt very sorry for him, sitting there. He had a view through his window of dark, encroaching trees. He cleared his throat, stood and turned and looked through the window now.
‘Are you aware, Mr Seaton, that there are more trees in Surrey than in any other county in England?’
‘No. That I didn’t know, professor.�
��
‘An Irish accent. Dublin?’
‘Dublin. Though I was born in Bray, which is to the south of Dublin in the north of County Wicklow.’
‘On the coast.’
‘On the coast.’
The professor nodded. He was still looking out of the window. ‘No coast in Surrey, of course. No salt in the soil. None of those withering coastal winds. Which probably explains the concentration of trees.’
Seaton said nothing.
‘The wood we’re in on this hill was here long before the university and will, I fancy, be here long after it, too. Would you agree?’
‘I’d say so, professor. I’d say it was a betting certainty.’
‘Entropy,’ the professor said.
‘What?’
‘Yesterday men came and used those high-pressure water hoses more usually employed to eradicate graffiti. They used them to scour the moss from the building we’re in. They’ve been doing it a lot, lately. But this morning the moss was back.’
Seaton sat with his elbows on his knees and his fingers linked. He looked away from the professor’s back, down at his own hands.
‘Each day the electrician comes. Each day the lavatories are scrubbed and disinfected. But it makes no difference. Entropy, Mr Seaton. The breakdown of a pattern. The descent into disorder.’
Outside, he could hear the fizz and blink of the fluorescents in the dark corridor. ‘This isn’t entropy, professor.’
Professor Clarke turned from the window and faced Seaton. He took off his glasses. His eyes were very blue in the light of the Coleman lamp and for a man who studied ethics, Seaton thought, surprisingly lacking in guile. ‘There’s something in the trees,’ he said. ‘Something in this building sometimes, too. I’m being haunted, aren’t I?’