by Monica Belle
‘Oh I believe you experience what you say, absolutely.’
‘Yes, but nothing more. You think it’s just in my head, don’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly. I just feel you should examine alternative explanations for your experiences.’
‘Whatever. You made me doubt myself anyway, because what happened with Sir Barnaby related so much more closely to your Goat of Mendes story than to his personality.’
‘Right.’
‘I looked, and I could find no evidence whatsoever to suggest that he was a Satanist, or anything of the sort. So I set up an experiment. Stephen helped me, by taking me to a cemetery I’d never visited before.’
‘I would have taken you.’
For the first time he sounded a little hurt.
‘Sorry, Michael, I would have asked you, normally, but I couldn’t. I . . . I feel too intimate with you, and I had to be safe, but alone. You’d have put ideas into my head too. Stephen was right, because I knew he’d do as he was told but it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Other than the kinky stuff, he’s very straight down the line, candlelight dinners and soft music. Anyway, he set everything up for me, black candles, a pentacle. I was blindfolded, and he left me to commune. It worked.’
‘It worked! For certain?’
‘Absolutely certain. I didn’t mean to tell you, I’d hoped I could prove it to you, just now.’
‘I’m sorry, Dusk. You have no idea how much I yearn to be able to experience something like that, but I can’t, not me. I’ve tried everything, believe me, seances, ouija board, I’ve even attended a Black Mass, of a sort. I’ve never felt anything, but if my doubt has made you explore further, that can only be a good thing. So what happened?’
‘The man was an ancestor of his, Richard Byrne, a fanatical puritan. To him I was a witch, which is presumably the way he would see me. I felt his hatred, so strong it almost overwhelmed me. He pulled me in too, the same way I was pulled into the Satanic ritual, only to a village where I was to be drowned, for heresy I imagine.’
‘And you had no idea it was his tomb?’
‘None at all. I didn’t even know where I was. Sure, I’d tried to second guess Stephen, I couldn’t help it, but I know his sense of humour, and I thought it would be some politician whose principles he disagreed with. Do you believe me?’
‘I don’t doubt you for a moment, and I certainly can’t explain it, although I admit I’d like to. So you have some empathy with . . . with ghosts, some resonance people leave when they die perhaps?’
‘Something like that. It’s certainly not physical, or I’d have been soaking wet and half-drowned. It was pretty scary.’
‘I can imagine, like a nightmare only more real.’
‘Exactly, like a dream, but only once I’d been pulled in. Normally I’m very detached, otherwise it doesn’t work, but I’m aware of myself, and of the person who’s in my head.’
‘Like thinking to yourself, perhaps when you’re trying to decide whether or not to go somewhere, buy something perhaps?’
‘No, dearer than that, more as if somebody’s talking to me but I can’t see them. No, that’s not right, because it’s the emotion I feel.’
‘There are no words?’
‘Never.’
‘So it’s as if it’s the essence of the person that’s in your head?’
‘Yes, usually. Always in fact, except for that once. My first experience with Sir Barnaby still makes no sense, and when I tried to reproduce it I couldn’t, not just now, but as a communion, mounted on the knight.’
‘You didn’t feel anything?’
‘No, I felt plenty. I just didn’t feel anything relating to Satanism.’
‘OK, let’s look at this from a scientific point of view. In what way did your first experience differ from the second?’
‘Two ways. The second time I kept my head clear and I had doubts about the reality of my experience.’
‘But you felt something?’
‘Yes, what I’d have expected to feel from Sir Barnaby as I understand his character: pompous disapproval and a desire to control. So it was inconclusive.’
‘And you’ve . . . communed you call it, with your head clear before?’
‘Yes, lots of times. On Eliza Dobson’s tomb, for instance.’
‘I remember we spoke about it. So was there any other difference, however slight? What do you put in black candles for instance?’
‘Nothing heavy, just a blend of incenses.’
‘Nothing hallucinogenic?’
‘No. I did try skunk, but I can’t really afford it. It spoils the scent too.’
‘So that shouldn’t make any difference, unless it’s auto-suggestion.’
‘Auto-suggestion?’
‘Making people associate two things by habit rather than because they are actually associated. Like when you hear a particular type of music you know there’s an ice-cream van about, but you don’t need that to make ice-cream, or the ice-cream to play that music.’
‘You could say that, sure. I’ve got used to the incense when I commune, so now the scent makes me ready for communion. OK, but that doesn’t account for the Satanic bit.’
‘No, not really. What else? You weren’t ill at all? It wasn’t an exceptionally hot day? Anything odd in the environment the first time? Anything different in you?’
I tried to think, and he was right. There was a difference.
‘Yes. The first time I’d been trying to commune with Isaac Foyle, as an act of atonement, but I was overcome by a need to be dirty, and cruel to myself. It was only afterwards I realised I was against Sir Barnaby’s tomb. The second time I rode the knight on top of the tomb.’
‘So your experience might not have related to Sir Barnaby at all, but to somebody else?’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but who? There’s no stone there, just bare tiles, if you’re thinking there might be a grave beneath the floor. There’s the crypt, of course, but it doesn’t extend that far out, only under the nave and chancel.’
‘Let’s go down anyway.’
‘Sure, just let me dress.’
I didn’t expect much, but still hurried to dress. Michael’s grin was truly demonic as he watched me apply cream to my sore bottom, and I made a point of pressing a big altar candle to the seat of his trousers when I was finished, just to remind him that he was not inviolate. Once in my cleaning overalls and old boots, I got together as many candles as I could, lit two and we trooped down to the crypt.
As ever, after the Gothic glory of the main body of the church it looked depressing and sleazy. I hadn’t been down since showing Michael when we’d first met, and in the meantime another section of the false ceiling had come loose, making it more dilapidated than ever. Michael lifted a candle to peer into the space, illuminating the original bricks with flickering orange light, the fourfold curve of a ceiling arch and a boss carved as a star.
‘Take all the crap out and this would be wonderful, but it’s very open. Was it never used, or did they clear stuff out?’
‘It was never used as such, I don’t know why.’
He moved on across the floor, stopping at the wall in a pool of yellow light. I busied myself with the rest of the candles, melting the base of each and sticking them to the floor, in a pentagonal pattern from sheer force of habit. Michael spoke as I fixed the last in place, pointing as he did so.
‘If the tower rises there, Foyle’s chapel must be there, and Sir Barnaby’s tomb roughly here.’
‘About a metre into the wall, yes.’
‘OK. So if somebody had been buried in a niche it would be somewhere along here.’
He began to pull at the hardboard facings, which came away easily enough, but revealed only blank, unadorned brick underneath. I watched, hoping he might find something but fairly sure he wouldn’t. I knew from early plans that the crypt had never been used, yet his idea did make sense.
There was nothing. By the time Michael had stripped three panels
away a long face of brick wall was exposed, all of it absolutely solid. He began to inspect it, peering closely at the mortar and prodding it with a key, but to no avail. Finally he stood back.
‘Damn! It made perfect sense. No, it does make perfect sense. Imagine your Satanist was a relative of someone perfectly respectable, maybe even Sir Barnaby. He’d have been an embarrassment to his family, and they’d have known that if they gave him a proper tomb it would become a magnet for every follower of the black arts from here to New Orleans. So they’d have stuck him down here, in holy ground, but safely out of the way. Unfortunately, unless he was actually interred during the construction of the church, that doesn’t seem to be the case.’
‘No.’
I stood back hastily as Michael reached up for the sagging edge of the false ceiling. It hid only the curve of the arch, which would have been a bizarre place to make a niche, but he pulled anyway. The whole section came away with a snap, to send him sprawling and leave three of the original arches exposed, each with its central boss, a green man, his mouth flowing vine, a coiled snake and a goat’s head. No, not a goat’s head, the goat’s head.
13
I HAD TO know, and so did Michael. We spent the rest of the day in the crypt, heedless of the fact that he was supposed to be moving into his flat, or of anything else. For hours we were pulling at the rotten facings and the false ceiling, pausing only for water or coffee and for him to buy a paraffin lamp.
By mid-afternoon every single piece of facing and the whole ceiling had been torn down, fittings and all. We’d piled it into the middle of the crypt, exposing the walls and the ceiling. The walls yielded nothing, every one solid, plain brick with no evidence of openings made into them, no inscriptions, nothing. The ceiling was a different matter, or rather, the bosses were. Before I had only seen one, a star, but that, along with green men, snakes, assorted astrological and occult symbols and, of course, the goat’s head, were each and every one of significance. There was no pattern, as such, beyond the twelve zodiac signs being arranged in sequence, and the only explanation we could come up with was that they had been meant to have specific rituals performed beneath them.
It was fascinating, but had done no more than whet our curiosity. We wanted to know who was responsible, and why. We wanted to know if the crypt had been left empty specifically to make space for the rituals to be performed. I, more than anything, wanted to know why the goat’s head could have inspired such strong emotions in me if there was no burial associated with it.
We paced the distances out, and discovered that the goat’s head was beneath the pews about two metres to the side of where I’d masturbated in front of Sir Barnaby’s tomb. Now I knew, I could feel it more strongly still, both in the crypt and above, more so above. Just standing there made my senses swim and my head fill with bizarre and dirty thoughts. Only the state of frantic energy I’d worked myself into prevented me from masturbating then and there, but I promised myself I would not delay the pleasure long.
Oddly, none of the other bosses had any effect on me at all, even those with supposedly powerful occult symbols. The nave followed the line of zodiac symbols in the crypt beneath, so that as people entered the church or a bride might have walked to her groom’s side, she crossed each symbol. I had never noticed anything beyond the normal effect of the church before, and could not, despite several trials. The goat’s head was like a hotspot of emotion, just as if it had been a tomb.
By the time it had begun to grow dark we felt we’d done everything we could. The crypt had been investigated from end to end, the floor above mapped out, the walls tested for hollow spaces. More tests were possible, such as running a metal detector over the floor, but we both felt the answer was more likely to come from research. The crypt had been built for a purpose, an occult purpose, and therefore those with responsibility for the construction of All Angels must have known. More than that, they must have been responsible.
The answer hit me as I sat among the packing cases in Michael’s new flat across the road. Suddenly it was clear, both who our Satanist was and why the goat’s head gave me such strong emotions. Like any church, no one man had been responsible for the construction of All Angels, but the guiding hand had been its first priest. Michael was in the kitchen, spooning out a Chinese take-away onto plates, and I told him as I came in.
‘Our Satanist was James O’Donnell.’
‘The priest?’
‘Yes. At least, he must have been a leading light among them. His name is on the deeds, letters discussing the commissioning of the rood screen with Foyle, all sorts. He could have directed the carvings in the crypt.
‘What about Foyle?’
‘He was no Satanist, I’m sure, but if he could carve imps and green men, why not goats’ heads and occult symbols? He’d have seen that sort of symbology as a warning of Satan’s might. They were keen on that.’
‘And you think James O’Donnell went the whole hog and switched to Satanism.’
‘Yes. Do you know about his heart?’
‘His heart?’
‘Yes, his body was taken back to Ireland, but his heart was buried here, under the floor. I’ve tried to find where it is lots of times, looking for physical things and trying to find a spot with a strong air of sanctity. I never could, and now I know why. What I should have been looking for was an air of the satanic. Which is exactly what we’ve found.’
‘You think his heart is in the goat’s head?’
‘Where else?’
It made sense. Over the next few days Michael and I spent hours digging into the career of Father James O’Donnell. There was nothing overt, but plenty of circumstance. His rapid rise in the church had come to an abrupt halt when he had declined promotion from his post at All Angels. He had remained there for the rest of his life, with the same two curates. One of those curates had later broken away from the church and had ended his life as an Adeptus Minor in the Golden Dawn. O’Donnell had also been reprimanded for stressing the power of Satan in his sermons, and there was a letter to him from his bishop that contained a gentle hint on the fate of the Albigensians. By the look of things O’Donnell had gone far beyond the idea of a balance between God and Satan. The name of the other curate was Albert Dawes, so close to the Satanist in the Goat of Mendes it gave me pause for thought, only for Michael to laughingly dismiss it as coincidence.
There was evidence enough for me, and more than enough when coupled with my own experience. Father James O’Donnell, a priest respected by thousands, had held Satanic rituals in the crypt of All Angels, rituals involving not just Devil worship, but sex, even sodomy. It was a magnificent irony and a masterpiece of Gothicism.
If I had felt love for All Angels and everything it stood for before, now it was tenfold. It was a church, but also a temple to Satan, an expression of all the impossibilities and contradictions of church teaching, the clash of the beautiful and the macabre, the solemn piety and the talk of hellfire. It was me.
Now I understood the strength of my empathy for the place when my feelings for its parent religion were mixed to say the least. It was no shrine to pious hypocrisy, but a place in which a full-scale Gothic nightmare had been played out. Michael was equally delighted, and immediately wanted to work the story up into a graphic novel, following the life of James O’Donnell from his original doubts to the burial of his heart in a carving of a goat’s head. I was all for it, keen to help as best I could, by modelling for him.
I hadn’t seen Stephen, despite a couple of phone calls. He was busy, either that or starting to get cold feet about our relationship. I was even wondering if the roses had not been an attempt to let me down gently rather than a genuine thank you when he called to ask if I’d like to come over in the evening. I was actually with Michael at the time, drinking coffee in his flat, which made it more than a little awkward for all his apparent acceptance. The only sensible choice seemed to be completely honest. I took the phone away from my mouth and turned to Michael.
&nbs
p; ‘It’s Stephen. He wants to give me dinner, at his flat.’
The answer was immediate.
‘Why not invite him over here?’
‘Here?’
‘Why not? He can take you out, and I’ll see you later. Besides, I bought you a little treat this morning, something you rather seemed to want.’
I threw him a puzzled look as he leant back to delve into a black carrier bag on the floor. Puzzled, I told Stephen to hold, then my jaw dropped open as Michael pulled out a thick leather strap set with steel rings, and a monstrous black rubber phallus. He held it up, grinning, then put his finger to his lips. His intention was all too obvious, and spoke straight to my wicked side. I was trying not to giggle as I once more put the phone to my mouth.
‘Stephen, hi, sorry about that. Would you rather come over here?’
He put up a bit of resistance, but not much. Two minutes later I’d arranged for him to come over at six, take me to dinner and bring me back. I was grinning maniacally as I put the phone down.
‘You are so wicked, Michael! So, you like the idea of me buggering Stephen, do you?’
‘It rather appeals, yes. Your suggestion of having a man’s virginity taken for the Goat of Mendes story turned me on to it.’
‘Only that?’
‘Well, OK, so the idea appeals full stop.’
‘Would you do the buggering?’
‘I might. Why not?’
‘No reason. I’m glad you’ve the strength to admit you’d like to.’
He was grinning, and his eyebrows rose a little as he passed me the dildo. It was, if anything, more grotesque than the one he’d drawn in the illustration. The harness was like a pair of leather pants, with one strap to circle the waist and another to go between the legs. They met at the front in a ring, which accommodated the phallus itself. It was a jet-black rubber penis, obscene in the exaggeration of anatomical detail. The head was swollen and bulbous, the neck thick and taut above the rubbery mass of the rolled-back foreskin. The shaft was gnarled and criss-crossed with veins standing out like tree roots, the scrotum fat and wrinkled. It was big too, bigger than either Michael or Stephen.