Night After Night

by Phil Rickman

  Old spirit, dead spirit,

  Old spirit, dead spirit,

  Arise, the deathless dead

  He’s standing now on the barrow, on Belas Knap, at the end above the false entrance, the enormous vagina, with the bulk of the mound behind him. He’s waiting for the guardian. There’s always a guardian, someone sacrificed in prehistory, willingly perhaps, in order to protect this place.

  Old spirit, dead spirit,

  Old spirit, dead spirit,

  Arise, the deathless dead

  Down in the valley, near the edge of the town, the faces on Winchcombe church gaze up. Some of them surely are memories of twisty, wind-formed faces seen at Belas Knap in the days when people were more aware of the spirits of place. The guardian’s different faces later joined on the tower by stone caricatures of local despots and ne’er-do-wells, appointed sentries on the Church of St Peter, the town’s gatekeeper. All this making perfect, lucid sense to Cindy on his shamanic journey.

  He waits on the barrow’s bristly coat of cold grass. Nothing comes. Maybe there’s not much left of the guardian now, beyond a miasma of menace and misery. He moves away from the false entrance and stands on the lintel stone of one of the side chambers, looking down.

  Ah…

  In its entrance, old bones are laid out like toys from a toybox. Human bones – arms and legs, ribs and a pelvis. A child is squatting there, a child clothed in night-mist, thin arms outstretched like thorny twigs and, in each hand, a small skull. The skulls are grinning and the child is grinning, and a woman’s voice comes to Cindy, faint and filmy as a chiffon scarf.

  … dancing like an old-fashioned puppet, and it had a full body, a male body, and I saw that it was naked and…

  ‘You saw the picture yourself?’ Roger Herridge says.

  ‘And I examined the phone, best I could,’ the soldier says. ‘No doubt it could have been fabricated, but not here.’

  ‘We tend to react with surprise, even outrage,’ Roger says, ‘to the idea of a ghost manifesting through the most modern technology. In fact computers, tablets and mobile phones, digital signals, wi-fi… lend themselves far more readily to such manifestations than do…’

  … I knew exactly what it wanted to do to me.

  The breath, his own breath, is loud in Cindy’s ears, shushing out Roger’s voice as Belas Knap shrivels away beneath him, candlelight replacing moonwash, Kelvyn Kite finding his own way home.

  ‘… energy, you see,’ Roger says. ‘It’s all about energy. You want to ask any questions, Ashley?’

  ‘I have no questions at all,’ Ashley says. ‘Ghostly pictures are, I’m afraid, ten a penny. I wish we had it to look at, but unfortunately it seems to be unavailable. I’m not saying our friend here made it up, but he certainly can’t prove he didn’t.’

  ‘Cindy?’ Roger Herridge asks. ‘You must have some thoughts on this.’

  ‘Yes, I… I have a question. The women in the picture. Did they seem content to be here?’

  ‘I think I said that one of them, the…’ the soldier glances almost furtively over his shoulder at the portrait, ‘… the ghost, if you like, was not content.’

  The portrait indeed is sombre. Only the rubies around the French hood are aglow. Little lights, Trinity said that January afternoon. There was a pattern of tiny red lights, like a constellation.

  Warning lights, Cindy thinks.

  The soldier says, ‘It seemed to me, pained, mortally offended… I don’t know. She was very pale, like parts of her face had been eroded. Eaten.’

  ‘Did she – either of them – seem perturbed? Afraid even?’

  ‘Well, I—’ The soldier looks fleetingly disconcerted. ‘Aye… there were a sense of… let me put it this way, the woman, my boss, you’d expect her to have been very happy that night, but there was a sense of anxiety… trepidation. Agitation. Unrest.’

  ‘And was there a male?’ Cindy asks. ‘A man or a boy?’

  ‘Several men. It was a party.’

  On his guard now, he is. And the very fact that he is…

  ‘Thank you,’ Cindy says.

  ‘It’s been very interesting,’ Roger Herridge says. ‘Thank you for telling us this. We’re all— Oh. Helen. Sorry. Do you have any questions, any thoughts?’

  Helen is apart from the others, on her usual cushion, though a little further away from the hearth tonight because of the ferocity of the fire. She’s looking a little confused, plucks at the cowl neck of her smoky-blue jumper.

  ‘Dead?’ she says. ‘Is he dead?’

  Defford comes across to Grayle in the gallery, where directors are exchanging glances.

  ‘What’s she on about?’

  ‘Leo, how would I know?’

  Cindy comes into shot, sitting next to Helen Parrish on the stone. He looks concerned. He looks, momentarily, like a man in drag.

  ‘Is who dead, Helen?’

  ‘God,’ Grayle says, ‘Look at that.’

  Helen’s eyes are glistening with tears.

  ‘Too clever for his own good,’ she says. ‘But he didn’t deserve this.’ She looks up. ‘Sorry. Daydreaming again. No… I have no questions.’

  ‘Daydreaming,’ Defford says. ‘She said that earlier. I mean, she fall asleep just then, or what?’

  ‘I’m sure Helen would reject this,’ Grayle says, ‘but her eyes were… OK, I’m gonna say this, I’m thinking trance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we’re inclined to take our eyes off the ball, Leo. In fact, we get so carried away with the dramatic stuff that we don’t even see the ball. The ball’s like very small and pale. Most of the time. We should be looking out for Helen. We know what this place is like, we should be looking out for all of them.’

  ‘We know?’ Defford stares at her. ‘We don’t know anything.’

  ‘Leo,’ Grayle says, ‘do you have five minutes?’

  To get into the live gallery, you walk through an area that still looks like the original stable. Part of it’s been sectioned off, a cheap door installed, though the new room it accesses has never been used by HGTV, except, judging by the smell, as a smoking area.

  A naked bulb throws jagged light over a bale of straw and a stack of metal hurdles. Defford rests his foot on one.

  ‘You’re telling me you saw… That’s what you’re saying?’

  Defford shuts his eyes, shakes his head. He doesn’t need this. This is not even the programme getting out of control, this is the staff. He does not expect to have to be one step ahead of the goddamn employees. Grayle sees all this in his face, and also an uncertainty.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Up in the Ansells’ old bedroom. You don’t know whether to believe me, do you, Leo?’

  ‘Grayle, it—’

  ‘Same with the camerawoman, Jess. It’s OK if the residents think they’ve seen something. That’s what they’re here for, and if they’re crazy, what’s that matter? But the guys this side of the camera, we’re professionals, we’re supposed to be above all this shit. Right?’

  ‘Why are you telling me this now, if it happened days, weeks ago? Why now, Grayle?’

  ‘Because it… seems to impact on what’s happening now.’

  ‘Harry Ansell?’

  She’s about to tell him what he’s going to read in tomorrow’s Times, and then stops herself, because that will immediately cancel out everything that went before. It’s reality; this is not.

  ‘I don’t… I didn’t even think of Harry Ansell at the time. I saw something hanging from a rope in what was left of the Ansells’ four-poster bed. And the air was full of this deep sadness, despair, regret… and something which I now feel was self-hatred. It was all over me. Never felt this desolate. Not even when my sister died. It was like being choked with someone else’s misery. And yeah, maybe…’ She sinks down on the bale of straw, and her head sinks into her hands. ‘Maybe I should’ve told you earlier, but I didn’t think it would actually improve my… standing.’

  She looks up, and his fa
ce tells her she was dead right.

  ‘You’re saying this… experience… happened before you knew about Harry Ansell’s death.’

  ‘Several hours before. You must’ve known about Ansell before I did. I was in Devon.’

  ‘You’re saying it was the night that he…’

  ‘And, conceivably, at the time it was happening. I don’t know.’

  The way he’s looking at her, she knows he’s thinking, What the fuck use is this to me? You’re not a resident, you don’t matter.

  He pulls his glasses off.

  ‘Ansell hanged himself in a wood. Not in his former bedroom.’

  ‘In a wood, yeah. He died in a place he knew that nobody who knew him personally would find him, nobody who’d be personally affected by the sight of him. But in his mind… as he tightened the rope… we don’t know where he was in his mind, do we?’

  ‘Nor will we ever. I’m getting a headache, Grayle.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Grayle stands up again, the cellphone throbbing in her pocket. This was going to be the opening to explaining what she now understands about Ansell’s state of mind the night he died, his struggle against something in the house. The stuff that will sound even less convincing tomorrow after the paper comes out and the new Ansell sex story gets picked up by radio and TV.

  ‘Leo?’

  Jo’s voice from the door of the live gallery.

  ‘In here,’ Defford shouts.

  Sounding glad to be interrupted before he has to say something he might regret just to get rid of this unstable woman. Grayle’s phone stops vibrating, as Jo comes in. She’s wearing a heavyweight fleece over her fatigues, and she’s out of breath.

  ‘Leo, we have a problem.’

  Defford leans back against the plywood wall.

  ‘Just the one, Jo?’

  ‘There’s a barn on fire.’

  Defford stares at her over his glasses, down his nose, like he doesn’t get it. Jo maps it out with her hands.

  ‘There’s a barn full of old straw, apparently. I mean full. And… it’s on fire. And old straw burns like…’

  ‘And that started… how?’

  ‘Nobody seems to know. We just had a call from security. But even if you just put your head out the door—’

  ‘How far from the house?’

  ‘Well, that’s it. Not so far away we don’t need to worry about it.’

  ‘We have fire extinguishers, don’t we?’

  ‘I’m no expert, but I talked to one of the security men. He says, and I quote, using a fire extinguisher on a barn blaze is about as much use as pissing in a furnace. He was about to call the fire brigade, I said no, wait… it needed to come from you.’

  ‘Fire engines? Sirens?’ Defford lurches from the wall. ‘Look, if it’s only a barn, no animals or anything in there, and it’s insured… it’ll burn itself out eventually, won’t it?’

  ‘If it doesn’t spread. Leo, we may have to evacuate the house?’

  Defford is still for a moment. His eyes say they’ll evacuate Knap Hall over his dead body.

  ‘Go back in, Jo. I’ll join you when I’ve sorted this. And get me a crew out there.’

  He wants pictures of the fire? Well, of course he does. He leaves without looking at Grayle, who follows Jo back into the live gallery, where it’s like nothing’s happened, the residents in their candlelit time capsule, patched all over the walls, oblivious. She picks up her coat and her woolly hat and goes out into the fog, where the air’s thickening and her phone’s vibrating again.

  It’s Neil Gill.

  ‘Is he back?’

  ‘Ozzy? No, not that I know of.’

  ‘You should call the police.’

  ‘My boss—’

  ‘Bugger your boss, you should call the police.’

  Above the dull lights of the TV village, Grayle can see a billowing glow that turns the fog orange.

  ‘Neil, I think you better tell me why.’

  ‘I’ve been advised not to tell you anything, for legal reasons.’

  ‘So you’re saying I should call the cops and tell them a grown man apparently decided he wasn’t gonna be availing himself of our accommodation any more and could they please organize a nationwide search?’

  ‘You’re a TV company.’

  She pulls her woolly hat down over one ear and the phone and walks away from the stable and the noise of the diesel generator, towards the orange glow.

  ‘Listen… I’m the researcher, on a short-term contract. One up the food chain from the caterers. I’m also probably the only person here who will make any kind of sense out of whatever you can tell me, and I’m not about to pass it on to anybody else. Even if I could guarantee they’d listen.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Neil Gill says. ‘I’m his mate.’

  ‘Neil—’

  ‘We write together. We share our ideas. I tell him things, he tells me things. Things you know won’t go any further because you’re partners.’

  ‘Angharad,’ Grayle says. ‘He tell you anything about a woman called Angharad?’

  She keeps walking, as he talks, into something worse than fog.

  67

  Pig roast

  WHILE THE SOLDIER is taking his leave, waiting for his escort out of the house, Cindy motions Helen Parrish into his corner, where the lighting isn’t brilliant. Sits her in his chair, kneels beside it. He’s prepared, if it comes to it, to disable her personal mic and take full responsibility, if it means she’ll talk about this. Bigger than television, it is, but Helen isn’t concerned.

  She looks defeated.

  ‘Cindy, I’m sure tonight’s rushes are going to finish my career for good, but… I… genuinely do not remember what the bloody hell I said.’ She leans her head against his shoulder. ‘If I could give them back their contract in return for this never going out, and me being a hundred miles from wherever this is by tomorrow…’

  He points to her mic, motions removing it. She shakes her head.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘I didn’t know. Christ, odd things happen, they’re just… odd things. Odd and useless. Maybe Diana, if I’d been on my own, without a crew and a budget to worry about… I don’t know, I’m just a jobbing hack.’

  He strokes her hair, says nothing.

  ‘I’m buggered now, aren’t I?’

  He laughs.

  She probably is.

  *

  The shaped bushes of the evergreen knot garden are black against the blaze, like a graveyard in front of a burning church.

  That barn. The only barn it could be, and flames are already gobbling up the roof, alight almost end to end now, rafters burned through, blackened air sizzling with hot dust and chips of wood trailing fire like small comets.

  Grayle watches roof tiles falling into the body of the barn. Her eyes are smarting. She’s seen Eloise and Lisa Muir among groups of people watching and coughing, and Jordan on his own. Half the village must be out here. She can’t see Defford.

  ‘You in a bloody chest hospital?’ Neil Gill says in her ear.

  ‘We have a fire.’

  ‘At the house? Are you serious?’

  ‘In an outbuilding.’

  But there’s not much more than the knot garden between the barn and the oldest part of the house, where the main chamber is and all the bedrooms. They need the fire brigade, and fast. Defford must see that.

  ‘Let me get away from here,’ she croaks into the phone. ‘I just needed to see how bad it was. Jeez—’

  An interior explosion like a huge dragon-gasp has sent people backing off from the barn, hands and scarves clamped over their mouths. A cameraman drops to one knee, alongside a soundman with a fleeced-up boom mic, his hooded lens panning slowly across the ridge of fire which tonight is the horizon.

  Neil Gill says, ‘You want to call me back?’

  ‘No, hell, Neil, I want you to keep right on talking. Go back to the word “Machiavelli
an”.’

  ‘Sounds daft when you say it, but that’s the way he is. Too smart by half. When he’s messed up emotionally, it’s how he works his way through. Puts his broken heart into something. Didn’t even start work on his mother-in-law till he found out Sophie was playing away.’

  ‘His wife was…?’

  Amidst the roaring and the crackling, Grayle’s mentally replaying her tape of Ozzy’s friendly Wiccan mother-in-law.

  That lazy image – very misleading, luv. Austin has a steely determination, and he’ll never give up on an idea… I could see him studying me… devising a persona for me that would sound realistic as well as being very funny… a very clever lad.

  This was revenge? Recovery?

  ‘Neil, did Ozzy actually tell you what he had in mind for Big Other?’

  ‘Not directly. More a what if…? situation. He’d read this book about these people creating a ghost. The ghost of somebody imaginary, and he’s going, What if you created the ghost of somebody who’d been alive and was now dead and shouldn’t be? In a situation where it’d be believed without too many questions.’

  ‘Rhys Sebold’s dead girlfriend? His friend?’

  She flounders through the murk of HGTV’s amusement park, looking for a quiet place now. Passing the clock-towered stable, far enough away from the barn to keep on transmitting, as long as no cables are affected. Neil spells it out.

  ‘Sebold has an ego the size of Greater London. He thinks everybody famous wants to be his mate and every woman wants to shag him, and a lot of the time he’s not wrong. Women… he doesn’t do equal. You listen to him on the radio, he’s this big feminist. Away from the mic, what he likes, what he gets off on, is to be adored. Unconditionally.’

  Under the sudden squawking of a fire truck in the lane, she can hear Rhiannon: she got very starry-eyed when he started taking an interest in her.

  ‘Chloe… Angharad…’

  ‘Little researcher. Did all the things for him that women are not supposed to at the ultra-feminist BBC. Rhys puts her in his pocket, takes her home. Life goes on as usual, drinking with his famous mates, one-nighters with women who adore him. You must’ve noticed him this week, turning it on with that Eloise before she got the elbow. And she thinks she hates him.’