by Peter Laws
‘Where is he?’ Matt asked. ‘Your husband, I mean.’
Wow. Strike up the band. Call the press. A flicker of a smile rose at the edge of her mouth. ‘In a posh hotel in London right now, being wined and dined.’
Fenn whistled. ‘And what’s the occasion?’
‘He’s taking part in a big TV show about Bernie Kissell. He’s flying over to England today, and they want Simon to be his right-hand man. How about that?’
Matt had already told Fenn about his own involvement with the show, but Fenn wisely kept that back. ‘Then your husband’s an important man.’
She nodded. ‘Simon always said God was going to widen his ministry.’
‘Well, I’m pleased for him,’ Fenn said. ‘But about this video?’
Her smile stopped.
She reached under the coffee table and pulled out a chunky-looking laptop. Matt noticed streaks of something black around her wrists. Was that dirt? Ink? Maybe paint? When she caught him looking, she instantly pulled her arms back. ‘This old thing takes eons to start. I’ll make tea.’
She vanished into the kitchen, while Matt and Fenn looked across at the framed photographs hanging from the walls, mostly of Keswick, in the Lake District. A large wedding photo sat on the mantlepiece showing the brand-new Claire and Simon Perry, snapped on church steps in a cloud of laughter and confetti. Her hair looked down to her waist back then. Perry’s looked as red as a balloon.
She timed it perfectly, because when she set the brewed tea in front of them the Windows screen had finally loaded. Her wrists, he noticed, were now clean. She waited an age for each mouse click to register but eventually a row of video thumbnails appeared. She hovered a finger over the space bar. ‘Okay, so these are from our camera above the door.’
‘Wait,’ Matt said. ‘Why do you have a camera?’
‘The couriers dump our packages on the doorstep sometimes, and they’re easily stolen. It happens a lot round here. Simon and I got one of these doorbell cameras, and he loves his gadgets. It’s handy, but we didn’t expect it to pick up this …’ She tapped the space bar and sat back. It took a full thirty seconds for the black screen to finally flicker into something else.
The screen filled with a fish-eye view of the doorstep Matt had only just been standing on. Only it was dark and the night vision camera had turned everything into a strange, bluey-grey. It was a clear view of the path all the way to the wooden garden gate, set between two high hedges. The time code read Tuesday, 18th February, 3.10 a.m.
They waited and sipped. Waited and sipped. Until Fenn saw it first. ‘Ooo …’ He leant forward, squinting.
‘What?’ Matt frowned.
‘Something’s wriggling under the gate.’
Matt shuffled forward on the couch and Claire pushed the laptop towards him with a scrape. ‘Oh … I see it.’
They looked like worms. Like tiny black tentacles reaching under the gate. A baby octopus slithering through town, knocking on doors and seeing who was home.
‘What is that?’ Fenn said.
Claire said, ‘Watch.’
As soon as she said it, the gate opened incredibly slowly and beyond it was, confusingly, just the black road. Until the road writhed and moved and started spilling through the gate. Slowly, very slowly, a figure was crawling up the pavement.
‘Is that Tom Riley?’ Matt asked.
‘Yes. Or at least, it’s his body, being moved.’
Matt stared at the reaching, grasping, crawling shadow, making its way towards the house. It kept so incredibly low that it looked more insect than human. And for a little while, Matt felt very cold indeed. The thoughts of his own garden and his own house and his own bathroom, coming to mind.
‘Yep, that’s him …’ Fenn said, ‘look at the trousers.’
Matt squinted and saw it getting clearer as it came nearer the light. The black and white chequered squares of a chef’s trousers.
‘Remember this is three in the morning,’ Claire said. ‘That’s hours after his shift ended. So if you think this is just mental illness, Mr Hunter. Keep watching …’
The crawling spider was so near the doorstep now that it vanished out of sight. Looking for cracks in the wood. When nothing happened for a while Matt was about to ask another question. Then, suddenly, the screen filled with the eyes of Tom Riley, for the briefest of seconds, before the gaping hole of his mouth covered the lens. From then on, all they saw was a dark, blue, pixelated hole that would occasionally flash with a row of glistening teeth, or the swish of a wet tongue lolling. In seconds, the mist of Tom’s hot breath turned the image into a smeared, foggy haze.
Fenn spoke through his teeth. ‘How long does this go on for?’
‘It’s forty-two minutes from start to finish.’
Matt and Fenn’s eyebrows shot up.
‘He just crawls away at the end, but you can barely see him leaving cos the camera’s smeared with his spit. All that gloop broke the damn thing. The ringer doesn’t work any more. We’re getting a new one.’ She leant forward, elbows on her knees. ‘There’s something crude about it, don’t you think? The way he’s doing it?’
‘You mean crude as in sexual?’ Fenn said.
‘Yes …’ She stared down at the flicking hole on the screen.
Matt nodded. ‘I admit it’s disturbing, but you don’t need to be a demon to lick a doorbe—’
‘Do you know the name Baal-Berith?’ Her eyes narrowed.
‘He’s a demon,’ Fenn said.
‘Bravo. And did you know he’s the lord of blasphemy and murder?’
‘We’re aware of his work,’ Matt said. ‘Why?’
‘Because when we got up the next morning, that name was scrawled across our front door, and we both had to look it up. It was written in …’ She looked to the window, shaking her head.
‘In what?’
‘In shit.’
Matt felt his face contract. ‘Urgh.’
‘Yeah … so you see, Tom really was beyond the scope of doctors and psychologists. Tom needed an exorcism, and Simon was the only one who cared enough to help.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘Justine wasn’t exactly …’ she trailed off.
Matt frowned. ‘What?’
‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.’ Claire saw them both staring at her, pressing her. ‘Fine. Justine wasn’t a Christian. She had no time for church. She was too wrapped up in that salon of hers and I thought that was a sad thing to focus on. I mean her job … a beautician.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with beauticians,’ Matt said.
‘I know, but they make masks for people, don’t they? They encourage women to be obsessed with themselves. I’m not sure if that’s healthy. It makes us insecure. I suppose what I mean is … Justine spent so much time looking in the mirror, she probably never looked up … to God. That sounds terribly judgemental.’
Matt nodded. ‘Yeah, it does.’
‘I’m sorry. But my point is that she wouldn’t have prayed for Tom. She was never at church. So he must have been a desperately lonely man, until Simon came along.’
‘Why didn’t you call the police and show them this video at the time?’ Fenn said.
She thought about it, her eyes lowering. ‘Maybe we should have. Maybe not. But the Pastor Kissell videos say that bringing in non-Christians can just make things confusing and worse for the person possessed.’ She bit her lip again. ‘All I know is that no matter what you say, Professor, and no matter how guilty you try to make me feel, I’ve never seen someone with depression do that.’ She pointed a stabbing finger at the laptop screen. For a moment, Tom’s flicking mouth seemed so frantic, there could have been two tongues in there.
Fenn asked her to skip to the end of the video but by then Tom’s crawl away was lost in a mass of smeared spit on the screen, so she closed the laptop, sat back into her chair. She stared at them both for a while.
‘Claire?’ Fenn said. Then again, ‘Claire?’
She blinked. ‘Y
es.’
‘The report says you and your husband met at the pub on the night of the murder.’
‘Yes. He’d been in London all day. He came straight to the pub from the train.’
‘And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Where were you that day?’
‘At home,’ she frowned at Fenn, like it was a ridiculous question. ‘I was here.’
‘All day?’
‘Of course. Then I went to the Merricot and met Simon at six. Simon went to see Tom after and that’s … that’s when the exorcism happened. We were together all night after that.’ She turned something over in her mouth. ‘And Mr Hunter, can I just say that I think you’re being rather unkind to my husband. He really did try the medical approach. It just didn’t work. He performed that exorcism on Tom from a pure, loving heart. Doesn’t motivation count?’
‘It does …’ he said. ‘But people can still do destructive, terrible things, even with the noblest of aims.’
‘Is that true for you, too?’ She watched him.
‘It’s true for everybody.’
Matt jumped when Fenn clapped his hands together. ‘Well listen, thanks for the tea and the video, but we best be off.’
‘Wait.’ She stood with them. ‘How’s Tom doing?’
‘Why do you care?’ Fenn said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘After what he did to Justine, and to an officer of mine. Why would you care how Tom Riley is?’
‘Because we all lose our way, sometimes.’ She looked at Matt. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Tom Riley is fine. Now goodbye, Mrs Perry.’ Fenn shook her hand, very briefly, and they headed back into the hall.
It was just as she was undoing the latch that Matt spotted a side door, open a crack. But it was the handle that really caught his eye. He saw those familiar black smears again that he’d seen on her wrist.
‘Uh-oh,’ Matt pointed at the handle. ‘You missed a bit.’
She stared at it and tugged her cardigan close.
Fenn was clearly intrigued by that look of hers because he was already pushing through the door.
She shot a hand forward. ‘I’d rather you—’
The door swung open into a small, dark room, with a set of blinds firmly closed. In the centre were two small wooden stools. One sat in front of an easel, with a large canvas propped. It was scraped with three charcoal lines. Like claw marks. And on the walls, there were about seven more hanging. He saw the smeared shapes of what seemed like strange, shimmering faces.
‘You’re an artist?’ Matt said.
‘No …’ she said. ‘I … attempt.’
Matt caught all the shadowed eyes looking back.
‘They look like skulls,’ Fenn said, quietly.
‘They’re faces. People I know. People I love.’
‘People you love?’ Fenn’s brow crinkled. ‘Did that doorbell video inspire you?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘What are the wires?’ Matt pointed to the little black cords hanging from the frames. They each had a switch.
Before she even opened her mouth, Fenn flicked one of them on. Suddenly some sort of hidden clockwork mechanism started moving, and the canvas started to ripple and protrude. For a moment, the face was alive.
‘Wow,’ Matt said. ‘That’s actually pretty clever.’
She shrugged. ‘Simon helps with that part. He’s the clever one.’
Fenn stared at the pulsating skull, face twisting in disgust. ‘Do your parishioners know about these … things?’
‘No. They’re private. Now please …’ She reached for the handle and tugged them back into the hallway. She pulled the door shut and all those gaunt black eye sockets vanished. He could still hear the one motor whirring. ‘Now, can I please get back to cleaning my house?’
‘We’re sorry for intruding, but may I say …’ Matt said, as she ushered them out onto the doorstep. ‘It’s refreshing to see Christian art that isn’t all rainbows and doves. You’re very good. So anyway, thanks for …’ He turned to say goodbye, but he just saw the door rattle shut in his face.
Fenn was already halfway down the path.
Matt jogged up behind him and they reached the gate. Matt turned, standing in the same place that Tom the insect had crawled a few weeks ago. He wondered how long it took to get the smell of shit out of a door.
He shivered when he realised she was watching from the lounge window, staring out like a doll in a trance. It was just as he opened the gate that she seemed to blink herself to life, and then she raised a hand. Her wave looked strange and sallow. A ghost in the window. Then she turned away and walked back to her hoover.
‘Bet she’s great fun at parties,’ Matt said.
Fenn shook his head. ‘She gives me the creeps.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They sent a car. A sleek, black BMW that made Wren whistle when it rolled up at the house. The driver didn’t get out. He just beeped his horn twice and Matt’s phone pinged with a simultaneous message.
Ready, it said.
Matt zipped up his hefty bag, stuffed with demonology books and a notepad, and he wondered if they’d have a camera on him, just to film him walking out. Nupa did say they wanted a lot of footage. He leant towards the hallway mirror to fiddle with his fringe. He tutted to himself.
‘You look hot,’ Wren said.
‘Hot as in temperature or hot as in—’
‘Hot as in hawt. You look great. You’ll be great. And hey …’ she kissed his shoulder, ‘you did the right thing last night on TV.’
He caught her eye, and they held each other’s gaze for a moment in the reflection. Then he turned and kissed her. ‘I’d rather they didn’t film our house. I don’t want the nutters knowing where we live.’
‘Especially the possessed ones.’ She opened up the front door and he looked down their long path to the gate and the black car, purring there. ‘If they are filming, do you dare me to slap your arse as you leave? Like, proper old school.’
‘Wren don’t.’
‘Do you dare me, though?’
‘Wren don’t,’ he grabbed his bag, then he kissed her one last time. ‘I’ll see you tonight.’
‘Do you dare me, though?’
Laughing, he trotted quickly away from her. But he went a little too fast, a little too eager. His half-zipped-up bag slid off his shoulder and almost upended. He slapped it with his hand, pinning it midway down his leg. His papers didn’t flutter out, but if they were filming, he’d already ticked the ‘nerdy professor’ box with great skill. He hitched his bag back up and turned. She was standing on the step mouthing the word, Smooooth. But she added her patented wink too, and so he winked back.
He loved that comedy wink of hers. The one that to passers-by looked like little more than a bit of ribbing, but to him, was always the codeword reminder to not take life too seriously. That she’d be there at the end of it with wine and smiles and real reality.
There were no cameras. Just the driver opening the door and reaching out a hand for his bag. ‘I can take that, sir.’
‘Careful it doesn’t leap from your hand.’ Matt handed it over. ‘I think that bag’s possessed, don’t you?’
He looked at Matt, in complete confusion. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’
He heard Wren snort with laughter on the doorstep.
‘Er … let’s just go.’
Not long after moving off Matt tried to make conversation, but his driver, called Ray, was a one-word-answer type of fella, so Matt got bored of trying after a while. He just sat in the back and took in the sickly new leather smell.
Just enjoy it. And relax, he heard his own advice to Abby Linh last night. And if you don’t, it’ll be over in a flash anyway.
It took a good hour to reach Heathrow, which gave him time to read over a bunch of psychology reports he’d gathered on so-called possession cases. A consistent theme was that so many of the slam-dunk evidences of demonis
m − vulgar language, aversion to religious symbols, seizure-like writhings – could all be easily faked. Or if not faked, then acted from a purely subconscious belief that a demon was lurking inside.
And those evidences that were more difficult to explain − levitation, vomiting metal nails and pins, or having secret, almost psychic knowledge about others in the room − they were never convincingly caught on record anyway.
All these case notes just solidified his natural thinking on the topic. That possession was, to use the technical term, the very poppiest form of poppycock.
When the car pulled up to Arrivals, he saw the silver quiff of Ethan, the guy from the swimming pool this morning. He was waiting on the kerb, both hands plunged into the pocket of a denim jacket with a thick collar of sheep’s wool. He was doing his usual, impatient two-step, nervously staring at his watch. And next to him was a young woman with blonde pigtails. She was holding a hefty-looking camera.
As soon as Matt’s car pulled round the turn, she swung it up onto her shoulder. Yikes, he thought. Here we go.
He tugged his jacket into place, and some dangerous imp of mischief in his brain insisted he step out of the car like a Hollywood diva and strike a Vogue pose, just for the larks.
Do you dare me, though?
Don’t, he told himself, don’t.
‘Least you’re good-looking,’ Ray suddenly said. ‘Ready for your close-up?’ It was the longest sentence Ray had probably said in his entire life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Matt got used to the camera fairly quickly. Mainly because this was so different to his usual experience with news reporters. Nobody was thrusting a mic into his gob, asking him constant questions. Ethan just greeted him and they walked into airport arrivals together while the camera just kinda … hovered around. The pigtails woman would either film from behind, or she’d suddenly burst into a dash ahead of them, to get a shot from the front. She was a master at walking backwards without looking, though she still made him deeply nervous around pot plants.
Yet within minutes she, and the camera in her hand, faded into the scenery. It was scary how quick that happened. Then Ethan said they had half an hour before Kissell would appear, which was when the camera finally dropped. She put out her hand and became a person, rather than a living tripod. They shook as they walked, though she tended to spring along. ‘Hey, Professor, I’m Suzy.’