An Absence of Natural Light

by F. G. Cottam

  He slept peacefully enough until something awoke him in the small hours. His dream memory told him it had been a rude sound, a sudden, throaty bark of contemptuous laughter. Since it couldn’t have been, since he lived there alone, he hugged the pillow and closed his eyes. He resisted the hypocritical urge to pray. And his body and brain rediscovered rest, eventually, despite a whiff of Shalimar perfume so potently strong on the pillow next to his he knew with a gloomy certainty it could only have come from life.

  Archie Simmonds, in his late-seventies by Tom’s calculation, was still a handsome man, in a biblical epic sort of way. He had a full head of white hair worn longer than it had probably been in his business life. He was tall and broad and strong-featured. Tom knew already that he didn’t sound like he came from Stafford. But Stafford had its share of wealthy people. And Simmonds had the accent of someone who’d been educated at public school. His eyes were the bright blue of the spring sky and his greeting warm, despite what he’d said on the phone.

  ‘Sorry about Arsenal,’ Tom said.

  Simmonds, who still had hold of the hand he was shaking, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we’re going to discuss your career, let’s stick to internationals, like the time you tore Germany apart in that second half at Wembley practically single-handedly. But you’re not here to discuss your career, are you, Mr Harper?’

  ‘It’s Tom, please.’

  ‘Then it’s Archie.’

  Archie Simmonds slapped him meatily on the back. Then he went and poured them both coffee in the kitchen after showing Tom into his study. He sat on a leather sofa and waited, the silence punctuated by the rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock in one corner. It was a sedate, orderly room, the domain of a man more cultured and cleverer than Tom knew he would ever become in his lifetime.

  Archie came back in with their coffee and they sat in a companionable silence for a beat of time. And then Tom told him about the music and the perfume and the tobacco smoke and the cat sketches and the dress. He told him about the way in which he’d come to own the property and the physical resemblance between Rachel and Rebecca and what they shared, beyond that, and the initials of their names. He looked for surprise on the face of his host and he looked for incredulity, but the expression he got was unreadable. The man had been a City heavyweight in the world of commercial banking. He’d been schooled in masking his feelings and his features gave nothing away.

  ‘Where did you get your information about Rachel?’

  ‘Some of it came from the alumni archive at the LSE.’

  ‘Where they gave you my home phone number, which was rather naughty of them.’

  ‘Most of it came from Professor Fleetwood.’

  ‘Arthur Fleetwood. Bloody hell, the old bugger’s still breathing? He must be close to ninety.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Well, they do say it’s the good die young.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Arthur Fleetwood is not a reliable source on the subject of Rachel Gaunt. He hasn’t the necessary objectivity. He carried a torch for her. I’d go further than that and say he was completely infatuated.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Archie Simmonds ran a contemplative thumb around the rim of his coffee cup. He said, ‘That’s a question it’s almost impossible to answer.’

  ‘You must have known her better than most.’

  ‘I thought I knew the side of her she chose to reveal to me, but half a century on, I’m not even sure of that.’

  ‘I’ve been led to believe she was deliberately enigmatic.’

  ‘Then you’ve been led up the garden path, Tom. It was more that she was fundamentally unknowable. There was nothing about her she deliberately contrived for effect. I’m sure most of the time she was as much of a surprise to herself as she was to other people. She was a creature of impulse. Oh, she plotted things. She could scheme, alright. But none of what she was, or did, was about impressing other people.’

  There was another silence. Tom didn’t quite know where to go next. Then he did. ‘When she talked about checking out early, were you ever there?’

  Archie didn’t answer. He was seated in an armchair to the right side of his desk. He put down his now-empty coffee cup. He said, ‘I never saw a woman remotely with Rachel’s glamour or presence again until the mid-Seventies when I went to the cinema here, at the Screen on the Hill, to see an interminable film by Visconti about the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.’

  ‘The bloke who had all the fairytale castles built on the Danube,’ said Tom, who knew this because he’d visited one of them, in Bavaria, for a game against Augsburg a few seasons earlier.

  ‘Suddenly Romy Schneider appeared on the screen. She was very famous by then, but new to me. It wasn’t her features particularly. It was the aura, the dynamism and of course, the sensuality. She reminded me of Rachel. Rachel’s death, when I heard about it, seemed like a reversal of nature.’

  There was yet another silence between the two men. It wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t a calm, peaceful silence either. To Tom it was as though something impended, some revelation the man sharing the room with him had yet to decide whether or not to disclose.

  Then Archie said, ‘I’m going to tell you what I think you need to know, Tom. We’ll start with my breakdown and its real cause. I’m sure you haven’t been told the truth about that.’

  He’d been dating Rachel Gaunt since the start of the term, the first of her second year at the LSE, and it was approaching the Christmas break. Winter had arrived prematurely that year and there was snow on the streets and it had stuck, cindered and in places salted but stubbornly there and a treacherous surface on which to try to walk. Darkness of course came early. Though Rachel lived in Fulham, at Absalom Court, Archie didn’t. He rented rooms in Back Hill in Clerkenwell, nearer to the LSE, only a ten minute stroll away but a commercial district of small manufactories and workshops in those days, all but deserted at weekends.

  They took him on the Saturday morning. He popped out early for a paper and a pint of milk and never made it to the newsagent’s shop on the corner. Instead a pillowcase was bundled over his head and two strong men manhandled him into the back of a van where a third trussed him up with rope before whipping off the pillowcase and replacing it with a tightly knotted blindfold.

  There was one clue to what had happened to him. He thought he’d passed their van on leaving his flat, en route to the shop, and he thought in retrospect it had followed him for a hundred yards or so before his abduction. He’d noticed its livery, done elegantly in cream paint against the brown of the van’s panelling. Martens & Degrue, it had said. The company name was known to him. By the time they had reached their destination, he had remembered it was the company for which Rachel claimed to spend the summer vacation working in some clerical capacity.

  Neither the blindfold nor the ropes were removed during an ordeal that lasted until they dumped him on a freezing cold Clerkenwell Green at 5 a.m. on Monday, after forty-eight hours of interrogation without sleep or food and with only the odd sip of water to lubricate his throat sufficiently to answer their questions.

  Those questions were about his beliefs. Those beliefs he described honestly, not daring to do otherwise, guessing from the ambient noises and the flat echo of his own voice and the persistent draught and chill that he was in a large garage or agricultural building constructed probably from corrugated steel.

  His real beliefs, they said, hitting him on the thighs and upper arms with what he thought later, nursing the livid purple and yellow bruises, had probably been a truncheon made of some dense rubber compound. Liar, they said, trying to force him to reveal his hidden, genuine, sacrilegious beliefs, the ones he was sharing with Rachel Gaunt in his efforts to influence and indoctrinate her.

  Archie Simmonds knew that there was no possibility of raised alarm and rescue. Things were very different back then. People could disappear for days and it never occurred to their friends to wonder at their absence. At
a time when almost no one had a phone in their home, it was nothing unusual for someone to drop out of sight. You could spend a week in bed nursing flu and though your absence from lectures and seminars might be registered, no one would think to come looking for you. No one would think there was anything wrong.

  He thought that they might kill him. The questions were persistent and the answers obviously inadequate and though the violence was controlled, they were not getting what they had taken the time and trouble to kidnap him to learn.

  They had seen that he was her boyfriend and they had discovered he was an Ethics student. They had put two and two together and then convinced themselves that it must make four. But he hadn’t turned her against them. Why would he have done that, when he knew less than nothing about them?

  About Rachel’s esoteric interests he knew slightly more. She had been intrigued by the occult philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, as a curious adolescent. She had then studied the written works of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. But she’d quickly tired of Crowley, the indignity of his last impoverished years in Brighton bedsits seeming to have disillusioned her. She thought occult rituals should have a pay-off beyond notoriety. It was power she wanted and it was miracles she sought personally to work.

  ‘Have you heard of Chaos Magic, Tom?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about magic beyond Derren Brown and Dynamo. I remember Paul Daniels from being a kid, but that’s not what you’re on about.’

  ‘No, I’m talking not about illusions but about real magic. Chaos Magic is predicated on the belief that you increase your power as a practitioner by breaking all the taboos. There was a persistent rumour at Absalom Court that Rachel had tracked down her birth father and, while concealing her true identity, deliberately seduced him. Quite a fanciful rumour and I don’t know if it was true but I never heard her deny it.’

  The irony, as Archie sat being interrogated and tortured, was that his romance with Rachel was coming to an end. After her flirtation with Crowley, she had taken an interest in theosophy and that had persisted and deepened. The stuff she had started to dabble in since he’d met her was too dark for him, well beyond the bounds of conventional morality. It was in the process of destroying their relationship. He had always known she was amoral and while at first that had excited him, now it made him fearful of what she might do. But he thought that if he confided in his kidnappers by letting them know what she was doing they might react by slitting his throat and putting his body in the nearest pig trough.

  ‘Eventually they let me go,’ he told Tom. ‘A fully trained and field-hardened intelligence operative couldn’t have kept the denials up for as long as I did and after two days and nights of it they must have known I had to be telling the truth.’

  ‘Except that you didn’t tell them the whole truth.’

  ‘I had an idea of what she was up to. I didn’t really want to know, by that stage. Anyway I broke down after the abduction and spent some time in a sanitarium and by the time I resumed my studies the following academic year she’d been dead for almost six months.’

  ‘Who were Martens and Degrue?’

  ‘It’s not really relevant.’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘They’re just a subsidiary. They’re wholly owned by the Jericho Society, which is an extremely secretive organization which I also believe to be quite dangerous. I did some research into them a few years ago to satisfy my own nagging curiosity, probed as far as I dared. They seem to be a demonic cult, founded in the French Revolutionary Terror and far more influential than they ought to be.’

  ‘They raised Rachel Gaunt in an orphanage they ran.’

  Archie Simmonds nodded. ‘And they lost her and they weren’t very happy about it.’

  ‘What did they lose her to, in the end?’

  ‘They lost her to theosophy, Tom, to a more seductive belief system than the one they provided her with.’

  Tom had remembered something. He had remembered the man in the raincoat watching him as he stood at Rachel’s graveside the previous afternoon in the Stoke Newington necropolis.

  Outside, the weather had changed. The sky had darkened sending murky shadows and etching crevices of gloom in Archie’s study. He looked older in this light and Tom knew that some of these memories were, for the moment, tormenting him. A gust of wind hurled rain in an angry patter against the window panes.

  ‘What was the attraction for her, in you?’

  ‘You’re probably thinking she was looking for someone good to corrupt, but it was much more mundane than that. I wasn’t bad-looking, back then. I rowed and boxed and led the backs in the first fifteen at rugger. She had a powerful appetite for sex and I was someone who could keep up. It was never more really than a rather torrid fling.’

  It was a fling that had haunted him for half a century. Tom said, ‘Can we get to what is relevant?’

  ‘You’re not going to like this part.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to.’

  ‘Have you heard of the Dweller on the Threshold?’

  ‘It’s a song by Van Morrison.’

  ‘If only it was only that.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s a being they talk about in theosophy. It’s a sort of malign spirit that lurks with the ambition of replacing a living person. It lives fully only at the expense of that person, someone it can single out and come to resemble to make the replacement seamless.’

  Tom felt colder than it could have been in the room. It had become gloomy in there and wet outside but it was still late May. He shivered. He said to Archie Simmonds, ‘How would you become one of these Dwellers on the Threshold, or return as one, if you’d been human in the first place?’

  Quietly, Archie said, ‘It was Rachel’s belief that she could achieve it through sacrifice.’

  Tom closed his eyes. He was seeing the boys and girls in the cine film, the clever and good-looking youngsters who’d not lived to see the Sixties swing. It was one of the parts of the puzzle he’d told Rebecca in the cab on the way to the cemetery yesterday he hadn’t wanted to discover.

  He said goodbye to Archie at the door, who surprised him with a full embrace at their parting, strong and sincere.

  ‘Steady, Archie,’ he said, returning it. ‘One of your neighbours might see you.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn who sees me,’ Archie said. ‘You were a magnificent player, skilled, brave and sporting.’

  ‘Only in the internationals, mind,’ Tom said, ‘only in an England shirt.’

  ‘Only in the internationals, of course,’ Archie said. There was a tremor in his voice. ‘Take care, Tom. And take all the care you can of Rebecca Green.’

  He caught a cab back into town and Bond Street. He wasn’t particularly eager to get home. He was looking forward to seeing Rebecca, later, but felt things were coming to their conclusion now and there was something he needed to pick up from the shop where he’d recently bought his Bremont watch.

  The watch had cost him just over three and a half grand. The item he was after now was priced considerably higher than that, but he could afford it and thought the cost justified. En route, his cabbie told him at some length and in considerable detail about his son’s team, which played on Hackney Marshes, where he insisted that the only thing preventing the players from achieving a Premiership level of performance was the bumpy state of the pitches.

  He met Rebecca for dinner at the pizzeria in Gabriel’s Wharf. It was a place with recent, happy associations for both of them. She listened to what he had to say as she ate, without looking at him. When he had finished, she put down her knife and fork and took a sip of her wine and raised her eyes. She said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.’

  ‘I was physically aroused by the scent of her, touching her dress.’

  ‘She gave you a boner.’

  ‘Yes, if you have to put it like that.’

  ‘In some ways she’d be perfect for you. I knew you’d want to sleep with her.’

>   ‘I don’t think I’d get much sleep.’

  ‘That’s precisely my point. She’s clever and fearless and she doesn’t give a fuck. And you’ve led a monastic sort of life in many respects.’ Rebecca smiled. ‘You’ve got some catching up to do.’

  ‘We shouldn’t talk about her in the present tense. It’s perverse.’

  ‘It would be dangerous to do otherwise, Tom. It would be self-deceiving. She’s coming back. We both know it. And if she hasn’t done so already, she’ll seduce you into helping her. You’ll only be a fling, but what a fling. She’s the crash course in the kind of life you’ve only ever masturbated about. I wonder if her Chaos Magic can do anything about your knee.’

  ‘It’s hurtful listening to you speak like this.’

  ‘I haven’t said anything you haven’t thought. You’re going to have to make a choice, Tom. If she comes through that door it’s at your invitation and at my expense. I know she’s real. She laughed at me while you were sleeping. You didn’t know that, did you? She’s confident of the outcome here. She must have studied you. I get the feeling she thinks she knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe she does.’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Then invite me back tonight. Implore me. Want me. Mean it. You’ll do it, Tom, or I’ll walk out of that restaurant door right now and I swear you’ll never lay eyes on me again.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s dangerous?’

  ‘’Course it’s fucking dangerous. But it doesn’t matter where I am, does it? You invite her through that door and it makes me an affront to nature, just an anomaly really, an insult that the world can’t tolerate. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, whoever I’m with doesn’t matter. She comes, I’m gone. Or are you too naive to grasp that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not too naive to grasp that.’ He paused. Then he said, ‘You know what it is that separates great players from those that are content just with being good?’

  ‘I hardly think this is the time to be discussing football.’