“Don’t make it sound so ridiculous!” he protested.
“I don’t have to. Oh, Andrew, please. Please. Devil worship and black magic? Satanic pacts–”
“It’s not like that.”
“Whatever. If you’re trying to start a rumour that Rakely only got where he did thanks to magical rites, then you’re the one who’s going to look pretty bloody daft. Come on, this is all bullshit.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“Okay, quite apart from the various geographical issues involved, don’t you think it’s unlikely one man could have coordinated the careers of... what was it again? Wolsey, Cromwell, and James 1st and... and... Machiavelli? This Lucci chap would have had to be a very old man.”
“He wasn’t always called Lucci,” he said.
“What?”
“I mean, he went on and on. He was different people,” said Forster, but his voice was dropping and he sounded less convinced. “He used different names. Wore faces. I think the rites allowed him to live several lives–”
“You’re making yourself look ludicrous, Andrew, you really are. A senior cabinet minister can’t be seen to be thinking like this. Maybe you need a break. A rest. Perhaps we can move things around a little after the recess.”
He glared at me, as if I’d thrown him over, but I think he knew how foolish he looked.
“You should ask about Jenny Carr,” he said, then stopped.
I asked him what he meant, but he refused to be drawn, so I said a few encouraging words, expressed a keen desire to see him keep a lid on it, and told him to come to me the moment he felt he couldn’t.
He said he would. I left it at that. The next time I saw the PM, I casually mentioned we might have to think about getting someone new at Health. He told me he’d already been thinking the same thing.
And I assumed that was that.
Over the summer, Julia Strachan from Welfare got in touch and said that she’d taken a few odd questions from a journalist at some event, and did I know anything. She said it felt like someone might be briefing against Rakely. I told her I’d look into it, but before I got a chance Ben Worden from the Times came to me. I liked Ben. He could be an absolute stinker, but he had a very nice habit of checking sources. He didn’t like to run something if it was going to cause a mess for no reason. He said he’d been given a story, and he wanted to sound me out before he went anywhere with it. He said it was about a girl called Jenny Carr. I asked him where he’d got the story from, and he politely declined to tell me, but I knew full well it was bloody Andrew Forster. I thanked Ben for having the courtesy to come to me, and told him I’d look at it and get back to him, but I warned him it was probably an awful lot of smoke damage and zero flammable content. I said I could guess who his un-named source was, and if I was right we were talking about a man who was becoming a liability because of his desperation to grind axes.
Ben nodded. He’d imagined it was something like that. He left it with me.
I gave it all a look. Within about two hours, I have to say, it had given me a little wobble. I was astonished that something like this could have remained essentially invisible for nearly three years. I went to see Rakely about it. I wanted to get it straight.
“I want you to tell me about Jenny Carr,” I said to him. He he had this funny thing he did with his upper lip when he was slightly uncomfortable, sort of folding it in under his bottom lip for a second. I knew the moment I saw him do that I’d got hold of something. But he kept his cool.
Jenny Carr had been his PA the first time he ran for Parliament. A nice, efficient girl. She’d lived in St John’s Wood. She’d pretty much been with him from his selection all the way to the by-election.
She’d died about a month before he’d made his maiden speech. She’d been killed at her flat. The police had suspected a burglary gone wrong. Someone had broken in, not expecting to find her there, and then stabbed her eight times with a knife or possibly a sharpened screwdriver. Her body had been discovered in the living room of her home by a friend. No one had ever been arrested in connection with the murder.
It was awful, and clearly he didn’t want to talk about it. But there were odd things about it. According to the police report, which Ben Worden had given me a copy of, there had been no evidence of a break-in or a struggle. The front door of the flat was unlocked, as if she’d let someone in, someone she knew, someone she hadn’t had any reason to be wary of. Nothing had been taken. The alternative theory, that it wasn’t a burglary but in fact a sexually motivated crime, was undermined by a lack of forensic evidence. There was no sign of sexual contact at all, not even any removal or adjustment of clothing or a pose that might suggest some sexual motivation or behaviour. The coroner’s report went so far as to say she was virgo intacta, in a prim fashion that seemed to suggest it was far more unlikely for an attractive twenty-four-year-old woman to be a virgin than it was for her to be murdered.
Strangest of all, as I said to Rakely, was the fact that we didn’t know anything at all about it.
He was very frank in his reply. He told me that the whole thing had been kept quiet for the sake of the girl’s parents, who were, understandably, devastated, and had simply refused to allow the memory of their beloved daughter to become a sordid item in the news cycle. Though he’d keenly supported the police investigation, he’d gone along with the parents’ wishes. He freely admitted to me that there had been a significant element of self-interest. No matter what, his association with a murdered young woman would have probably crippled his political career right from the get-go. The alternative, which he described as being even more distasteful, would have been to deal with it openly, and risk being seen as trying to make political capital out of her death. The sympathy vote, he said. He didn’t want that. He hadn’t wanted that to be her legacy.
He’d just wanted it all to stay off the front page, and for her family to be left in peace. He’d had nothing whatsoever to do with her death, but they had gone out, briefly, when they’d first met, and he knew the press would take hold of anything and turn it into something lurid.
“Well, now someone’s got it,” I said. I told him who, and I told him how. I said I’d have a word with Ben Worden. I told him I couldn’t stop Worden running with it, but that I’d try to appeal to his better judgement and get him to see it was a non-story that could only, irresponsibly, do damage to the government and the country. You have to remember, the party was in fine form just then, pretty much due to Rakely’s amazing run, and we were going into an election year.
Before I left, on a whim really, I asked Rakely if he knew anything about a book called The White Cockerel.
“I don’t know, Charles,” he said. “What’s that?”
I said never mind. But I noticed he did the thing with his lip again.
I spoke to Ben Worden, and he told me he’d probably drop it anyway. After that, we really just yanked and cranked towards the election. The PM’s health issues came out, which was a total shock. There’d been no record of Alzheimer’s in his family. We accelerated the process of elevating Rakely. We wanted to go into the election with a leader who would win it convincingly.
And we did, in the end, as it turned out.
The plane crash was just awful. Of course it was. It was a terrible blow that I didn’t think the party would survive, but I have to say I think we scored a little bit of that ghastly sympathy vote in the end. The PM even offered to stay on, but we had his exit strategy in place, and besides, the public already knew he was ill.
That crash though. I mean, really. Just a routine flight back from the Strasbourg Summit. Rakely, Doug Barney and Eileen Clemmens, plus their aides and several members of the press. Including, and I always remark on this, Ben Worden. The Civil Aviation Authority never did work out what happened to those engines.
After the election, the landslide, I went to see the PM. The new PM, I should say. He was in very fine form. I’ll freely admit it. He’d turned things around in the most spec
tacular way. It was admirable. Hats off to him. He’d really stepped up in our hour of need.
Anyway, we were having a quiet chat over a good malt, and he said this thing to me. I remember it very clearly.
He said, “Charles, sometimes you can only get so far. You have to clear the slate. Just clear everything aside. Sometimes things go past a point where they’re useful, and you have to brush them away and start again.”
It was a very singular thing to say. I felt he was referring to something that only I might know about.
In a way, he was right. He must have known.
I looked him straight in the eye, and I said, “By the by, Andrew, I wrote to the librarian at Merton about six weeks ago. I asked her if the college had ever had a book called The White Cockerel in its collection.”
“Did you indeed?” He laughed, as though I’d brought up some embarrassing gaffe from the past to rag him with.
“It took about a fortnight, but she rang me back in the end,” I said. “She told me the index suggested that there had been a manuscript of that name in the college library. Seventeenth Century Italian, very fragile. The notes said it was an Italian translation of an earlier Aramaic text, which itself was believed to be a translation of an even earlier work. The manuscript had been in the library at Merton until 1992, at which point it had vanished. She said, sadly, that books were taken from time to time, especially by undergraduates who fancied making a little money on the antiquarian market.”
“Oh,” he said. “Never mind, Charles. Looks like we don’t actually need it now.”
Which was an amusing remark, of course.
“Rakely was up at Merton,” I said. “1991 to 1993.”
The PM nodded.
“What do you think of that, Andrew?” I asked.
He shrugged, and did a funny little thing with his upper lip.
Then we went in to join the others for dinner.
FIRST AND LAST AND ALWAYS
THANA NIVEAU
There’s a danger in wanting something too much, and when you couple that with sorcery, the consequences can be grave indeed. Thana shows us what happens when a casual witch takes the plunge into a more complex arcane world than that found in popular books on love magic. Desire has its own kind of magic and in playing with it, Tamsin finds herself on a dangerous path.
TAMSIN PLACED HER hands on either side of her phone and gazed intently at the picture of Nicky she’d taken the day before. Her heart soared as she said his name aloud.
The flickering candlelight gave him the illusion of movement and Tamsin could almost believe she was watching him through a portal, seeing him as he was right at this moment. After a few seconds the picture faded and the screen went dark. She peered into the smooth black surface, focusing on the afterimage – Nicky in negative, overlaid by the reflection of her eyes and the ghostly glow of the flame.
“Nicky.”
When the image behind her eyes finally faded, she tried to see beyond the scrying glass of the phone’s screen, into whatever dimension the emptiness might reveal. Past, present, future – she didn’t care as long as she saw him.
When nothing happened she tapped the screen to wake it up, to reveal the photo again and repeat the entire process.
It was just a quick candid shot but she’d captured the vibrancy of the setting sun. Nicky had been on his way to rehearse with his band, Valhalla, and he was smiling at someone out of frame. His head was turned slightly to one side. She’d shot straight into the sun, creating a dramatic lens flare that partially obscured one hazel eye. A lock of black hair fell over his other eye, just reaching his cheekbone.
Tamsin tried to visualise herself in the picture with him, her long blond tresses transformed by the evening light into burnished gold. That was how she liked to imagine she looked to him, anyway. Her hair was her best feature. It fell in lustrous waves halfway down her back and it made her average face a little prettier, gave her the wild, windblown look of a gothic heroine. Nicky had complimented her on it one day when she’d had it down and she’d worn it that way ever since.
“Hey there, Tamsin,” he’d said, hearing the click of her camera phone.
His low sleepy voice turned her knees to water. And his smile...
“You coming to our show tomorrow night?”
It was only a half hour spot at a local student hangout but to Tamsin it may as well have been a major concert.
“Of course,” she’d said, thrilling to the sound of his voice. It rang in her ears as she cast about for something else to say. Anything to keep him there for another minute. “Oh – I saw the video you guys posted on YouTube.”
He’d blushed then, shyly lowering his head as though he had anything to be shy about. She’d played the clip endlessly, imagining that every time he looked into the camera, he was looking right at her.
“Oh, it’s just a demo,” he said. “Rob said we should build up an online presence before we send anything to the record companies.”
“Just a demo? It looked completely professional to me!”
“Thanks.”
Nicky smiled again and they shared an awkward silence before he glanced at his watch. “Well, guess I’d better go.”
“Yeah,” she’d said, dying but not daring to take another picture of him. She’d already copied all the ones on his Facebook profile and even printed some of them out. Her favourite one sat in a little gold frame on the nightstand by her bed. His beautiful pale face in closeup, his eyes meeting hers every night and every morning.
“OK, see you tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah,” she breathed. “See you...”
The memory of the conversation echoed in her mind as she woke her phone up again and said his name, willing him to hear her in his mind, to acknowledge his true feelings for her. She was dressed and ready for the concert, determined that tonight would be the night. Tonight he would love her back.
But it was not to be.
VALHALLA PLAYED FIVE songs and Nicky was brilliant, as always. The pub was full of students who cheered as though they were at the Glastonbury Festival. Tamsin stood as close to the stage as she could but Nicky didn’t look her way once. He seemed completely lost in the performance, singing with his eyes closed, oblivious to everything but the music. Someday he would be a big star. Tamsin had no doubt about it. But she had to make sure he was hers before that happened. Once he was famous he would be hounded by groupies. Girls with tramp stamps and black lipstick. Tamsin was what he needed, what he really wanted. He just didn’t know it yet.
After the show he was surrounded by his friends and Tamsin’s stomach clenched with jealousy at the sight of all the other girls flocking around him. There was no way she could push her way through the crush of bodies. It was torture to be so close to him, yet unable to reach him. Torture to watch him with all those other girls, none of whom understood him the way Tamsin did.
Tears blurred her vision and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara. She couldn’t let him see her like that so she made herself turn away. As she opened the door of the pub she glanced back one last time, hoping he would sense her anguish and signal to her to stay. But wishing only made the reality worse. He hadn’t noticed her at all.
That night she sat cross-legged on her bed, staring forlornly at an uninspired Tarot spread. It was her third attempt. Each time she had managed to draw cards that told her nothing meaningful or even relevant. The Knight of Cups hadn’t appeared in any of the three spreads. Cups represented the world of feelings and the Knight was the most romantic card of all. But he was nowhere to be seen tonight. Nicky’s symbolic absence felt like a sickness, something that would grow and spread until it consumed her and spat out her indigestible heart.
She swept the cards away in disgust. Her chest felt tight, as though her insides were trying to shrink away from the pain. If she closed her eyes she saw his face. Her skin burned for the touch of his hands.
Her flatmates had teased her about him, c
alling him “goth boy” and other dismissive names. Beth had drawn a cartoon of him as Dracula and Chrissie had once left a pair of comedy fangs in the bathroom for her to find. Tamsin was sure they didn’t mean to be cruel; they just didn’t understand. After all, neither of them had a boyfriend either.
At least they didn’t mock her religion. Beth had got Tamsin a book on witchcraft for her birthday and she had tried both the love spells in it. They were of the ‘bad poetry and herbs’ variety, probably inspired more by Harry Potter than by any real magic. But she’d tried them anyway, feeling silly for doing it and then feeling even sillier when they didn’t work. What had she expected?
She’d been so sure he would notice her tonight. Her feelings were too intense to be only one-sided. In desperation, she powered up her computer and began searching online for proper love spells. She quickly found a naff website hawking ‘love spells that totally work’, along with ‘amazingly accurate’ astrological charts and other rubbish that was probably just designed by spammers to harvest your email address if you were gormless enough to provide it for a ‘personalised’ reading. But there must be other witches online, real witches who knew what they were doing.
It was on a forum called eBook Of Shadows that Tamsin finally found what she was looking for.
In order to truly love something, you have to make it part of you.
The post was by someone called Osprey and she was relating a story her gran had told her.
There was a young girl who lived with her family on a farm. Times were hard and one year there was a drought, the next year a flood. The crops were destroyed and the family was facing ruin. But the girl was in love with a boy from the neighbouring village and she was terrified that her parents would decide to move. If they did, she knew she would never see her true love again.
So she cast a spell to bind them to the land. She took a spoon and circled the farmhouse, collecting one scoop of soil for each member of the family. That night she sprinkled it into the stew her mother made and mixed it well. She said a few words over it and wished very hard for it to work. Her family complained that the food tasted strange but they ate it all the same.
The Future of Horror Page 48