BONELINES
Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead
|
In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.
In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light. It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. (You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.) |
|
Bonelines
Instalment 2 (Chapters 2-6)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith
2
No one kills an angel. Mandi Lyon changed that. Though it was never her intention to upset the balance of so many worlds on the morning she arrived back in the county of her birth. Raised by adoptive parents, from whom she had drifted away after college when work took her far and wide, eventually to the profitable reaches of the US media world, she was returning now to the camp site on which she had first grown up.
In the States she had had to grow up all over again. So, this would be her third advance on adulthood.
Anne and Bryan Widger had been killed instantly on a single carriageway stretch of the A308. It was a head-on collision with a Porsche driver anxious to get out of the West Country. The end had come suddenly, brutally, and without fanfare or premonition. Curled up against the window of the Paddington train, Mandi was trying to focus on the passing folds of Wiltshire hills, but the heads of her adoptive parents resolutely smashed through the glass of the windscreen again and again, the pieces of broken shield tearing the soft flesh from the bones of their faces and popping eyes from their sockets, until their leering death’s heads zoomed around above the neat fields and clanged against the side of the train. Mandi closed her eyes and they came for her in the burgundy darkness.
It was no great surprise then, when she saw the bleeding angel.
The last thing she had seen, before closing her eyes against the cruelty, was a white horse carved into the chalk of the hills and racing piles of white limestone heaped onto a freight train sat in its siding. In the inner cinema of her fitful state, the wagons were full of teeth. A rolling ossuary, crossing the country, displaying its relics. Mandi could feel her own pearly whites working themselves loose; like she should add them to the inter-city reliquary. She was getting older, her skin was drying out, dark patches had appeared beneath her eyes; it had come the time to give something back to the country... she snapped into sharp wakefulness. Maudlin dreaming was more painful than loss.
This time, when she looked out of the muggy carriage, the flashbacks to the phone call and the instantaneous image of the crash had receded, replaced by an ache of foreboding as Mandi pictured her parents’ camp rushing towards her across the fields, the formerly mobile homes torn from their fibrous umbilical cords, the shower block lumbering on its shallow foundations. Among the architectural spectres was a medieval looking figure in an icy costume, geometrical hair and blood streaming down her chin. It smiled; then she saw its mouth full of shattered, violated teeth, vandalised ruins of a Jewish graveyard. Somehow, though the blood streamed from between the remains of broken catafalques of dentistry and fell in dark gobbets from the angel’s chin, the cold and perfect surfaces of her shift were left untouched, stainless. Her wings slowly spread up, glittering, into the clouds.
Mandi threw her head back into the seat. A wave of nausea rose through her throat and into the back of her nose. She was torn between snorting out the pressure and swallowing it as best she could, struggling to keep another violent movement from again stirring in her brains with the wire brush of her hangover. She began to gag on rising acid. Behind her eyes, the blood was white and hot, her throat lined with sand. She tried to distract herself by thinking through the one and a half bottles of Prosecco, and the something else there was before and the something else there had been after, and what might have happened around these stimulants to leave a bruise on her wrist and a tear in one of her barely justifiable shoes.
She strained to remember a conversation, more of an oration, she had delivered to the poor sucker; forget him, what was the idea? It had been brilliant, usable... it was at the after show party, or it may have been a PV, some sort of conceptual... anyway, there was a buffet of sorts with a band and... something to do with reliance and then something darker, spicier... she had been going on about snowflake companies, trying to pass off their responsibilities to individuals, that wasn’t freedom, packaging manufacturers who are less than keen to pay a share of recycling costs, her idea was green but brutal, holding a knife to company information campaigns about individual responsibilities... she was going to turn that around on them. In the US, company law designates business institutions... yes, that was it, it was coming back, the genius hinge in her idea! In the US, companies are legally regarded as individuals, but unlike human individuals they are incapable of dying, until externally wound up... so, like sea urchins... for some reason she knew this, about sea urchins, of all things, that they are immortal if left to their own devices... sea urchins had nothing to with it! Demons, that was it! Companies are demons, individuals that are immortal, but have no human soul. She would advocate ecologically-sound demon-slaughter, exorcism of the accountants, staking the heart of state capitalism, the disciplining of the executives... a wild hunt... she smiled in her daydream. Outside the golden carriage, flames somehow bright with darkness licked by at speed. In the centre of the furnace was a figure slashing at all around her with a laptop... her hair was alight, smoke billowed from under her skirts and... her teeth, her teeth... uuuuu... mmmmm...
She abruptly opened her eyes; an hour or more had passed and the countryside beyond the window was kinder and dimmer. The queasily rolling green of the giant fields had given way to a more stable patchwork. The train whooshed past a village, a canal with a pub perched on its bank, some narrow boats, and lines of old cottages flanked by something like recent suburbs, an anonymous factory on the village boundary, brick and corrugated iron farm buildings, some ruined walls in a field. All this skewered and held together by the plain symmetrical gothic of the church, built in mottled stone and sitting squat like an aged toad, content among the stone fungi of the cemetery. The wide West Door was generously open to all comers, and among its shadows, stood the angel with the smashed mouth.
Mandi looked away; struggling to find her i-pod, then remembered she had picked up the wrong one in her rush. Irritated that she would have to get back in touch with the disposable crutch from last night to recover her own music. The Last Thing she wanted to be thinking about right now. She tried Shuffle and gave in to a dire hauntological melange of Kemper Norton, English Heretic, The Advisory Circle and some other dreary Anglo-centric droning 60s nostalgia merchants pretending to be bitter and difficult. Fortuitously, it seemed about right for the soundtrack to planning a funeral for people you were only ever semi-connected with. Over the years she had paid flying visits to the camp. Mostly though, the three of them had met at gastropubs halfway between their homes; her adoptive parents refusing to let her pay the bills. She had never let them come to London; keeping them, guiltily, at arm’s length from her work at the Childquake charity where she had recently been promoted to CEO. Maybe she was reinventing the memory now, but she had some idea that when the phone rang she had been thinking of inviting Anne and Bryan... to what?
The chance had gone. Mandi argued with herself about getting some alcohol from the trolley. Decided against, then gave in. The first sip reminded her why there was an argument. The thin red wine lifted up the doubleness of her memories of Anne and Bryan; her angry dissatisfaction at their pseudo-parenting, their on-off, intimate and distracted nurturing. The nights of loneliness when they let her have ‘her own space’. She knew that these were balances that no one gets right, balances she had never wished to have the chance to get wrong, and yet all that had never made her love them any less. Or love them very much. But she had never told them one way or the other; too busy raging at their carefulness, at their refusal to be clumsily intrusive, and, now, their disappearance just when she might have been willing and able to be clumsy herself. No, she was deluded. Clever people, they had brought up a child too clever for her own good; others, less loving than them, had read her flawed intelligence and she had been played again and again. She had learned how to turn her vulnerability into a facade, a baited hook, drawing in the powerful and playing them for all they were (considerably) worth. Well that was going to stop, she thought, a moment before the Merlot drained her resolve and the headache snake ate again into the top of her neck.
She enjoyed a sliver of relief just from the thought that London was receding behind her; she could entertain for a while the fantasy that she was leaving the place forever on her way to total disappearance. That she could throw off the double ankle manacles she wore; always the deadline, and always the faint marinating fear that someone would finally have worked her out, caught on to her imposter trick, dug up the dead bodies and found they were made up of bragging, uncovered the e-mail trail that contained nothing of interest to anyone, flicked through ancient social media posts and cross-checked with CCTV and found almost less than zero.
The train entered a tunnel. Mandi felt the air push in through her ears, and a broken windscreen swallow her mind. In the jump cut from bright natural light to the dull bluey lamps of the First Great Western, the other passengers, positioned in the tableau of seating, were transformed into bit-part players in a haunting. With a sigh the sliding door at the end of the carriage drew back. The iconic wedge of train drove through the darkness. Behind a returning service trolley, decked with Quavers, Yorkie bars and shortbread fingers, the steward barked offers of hot drinks and alcohol. Responding to a request, she bent over a diaphanous elderly woman at a table, and when she smiled her teeth were smashed and blood ran down her chin into the waxed cardboard cup she was holding. Flash. Out of the tunnel and light drove all this nonsense away. Mandi gazed out of the window, where London was just a bad memory; a footprint the express escaped every day into soft hills and odd figurations in the fields: the great planes of solar panels, concrete pinball machines, orange dinosaurs, and weather-blanked adverts propped against wheelless trucks. Passing through slow comforts; the solid handle that held the cutting edge to the meat. Ahead of this stolid country, lay utopia and change, she hoped. Mandi tipped her cup and three small bottles of red wine into the flapping plastic bag of the passing cleaner; the bottles clinking on something at the bottom of the translucence. Hope hit her like a hammer and she wanted to turn back.
3
Mandi changed at Exeter St Davids, and caught the local stopper. First, though, she bought herself a flat white and drank it beneath adverts for obscure touring theatre shows; ageing TV stars cranking up their smiles against crumpled velveteen backgrounds, like prizes in the dusty window of an arcade of one armed bandits.
By the time she dragged her lumpy, hastily packed suitcase onto the platform at Devil’s Sett it was dark. The amusements had closed for the year; their modest structures barely visible against the obscure sky. Skeletal and dog-eared pirates swung above the crazy golf and a fuzzy line of industrial-style units stretched off towards the sea. Mandi crept through the gap under the railway tracks, past the silenced forms of the novelty shop and the sooty shell of the burned-out amusement centre. She could raise neither contempt nor delight at the sign for “FLAMING HOT BURGERS” pinned to the temporary metal fencing around the smoke-besmirched ruin.
As the sun had sunk somewhere into Somerset, Mandi had rehearsed a few conversations. She had imagined soaking up commiserations, politely but firmly rejecting offers of help, welcoming in a controlled way a few memories of her suddenly absent fake-parents and even tried out a eulogy or two in her head. So, when she spotted a figure in the shadows of the camp’s arch-like gateposts, she had a set of alternative responses already to hand.
‘Mandi Lyon?’
Anne and Bryan’s holiday camp, stood out from the others. Instead of a ‘BRIGHT SANDS’ or a ‘SUNNY HAVEN’, the cranky letters on the billboard outside their camp spelled out ‘LOST HORIZON’ as if the inhabitants might have become disorientated and ended up there by chance. The place had long ago given up the pretence that it was a simple holiday camp, though Mandi was uncertain about the legal significance of that; many of the residents were permanent and though they still rented their properties, these were now their only homes. Some had been there since before Mandy was born. There were lights burning in the windows of the lines of immovable mobile homes; their approximate sameness dull in the thick moonless autumn evening. Inside, there would be great anxiety and insecurity, and Mandi knew that she had come to assume responsibility for calming those vivid fears. A wisp of steam rose from a trailer and then floated away. The camp seemed to be settling in on itself, like an animal sinking into the shelter of long grass, making itself small, as if a predator had come close.
Stepping into the sodium glow of the street lamps, the shaggy white-haired man held out his hand. Mandi took it and it was cold. She looked into his face and the eyes were warm and watery. She swallowed; suddenly fearful that they would leap from their sockets.
“My name’s Crabbe. I have recently been working here as caretaker, for your parents. Please accept my condolences.”
‘Condolences’; Mandi had not prepared for ‘condolences’. Why would an unexpected word matter? ‘Condolences’ were no different from ‘commiserations? Or ‘sympathy’? Ready to feel misery, she was surprised by the word’s dolefulness; it was ridiculous. She had no such words. She could not reply. She opened her mouth and it might as well have been a cave for all it could speak for itself. She felt the cold air on her teeth.
The caretaker was unnaturally still and comfortable. As if he was expertly putting Mandi at her ease. Yet the silence grew and grew. Expanding out across the dull blue-brown grid of the camp. Mandi followed the tiny darting movements of the caretaker’s eyes. She had no idea what to say or how to respond. Her mind was a blank and getting blanker. Everything around was tightly focused, in high definition. The knobbly white-painted stones to mark the verge, the dimples on the kiosk shaped like a giant golf ball that sold candyfloss in the summer months, the leaves of palm trees snapped in recent high winds, the expanse of road, wide for the coach parties, dull orange and its surface shiny with the dampness brought on by evening. Nothing would ever come here again, no child would ever bang a spade with a bucket, no mother ever clutch swimming costumes rolled in a towel unless Mandi could speak and make it so.
“Perhaps you would like to put your things away, before...”
“Yes! Thank you.”
“Shall I?”
“No, I’m fine...”
Tears rolled out of her eyes like balls around a pinball machine; they felt silvery and heavy on her cheeks.
“Take your time”, said the caretaker, and swung about. His weatherproof trousers crackled and the anorak tied around his waist swished like a skirt. Even under the sodium lights, it was clear that he was dressed entirely in black, but for the smears of mud around his knees. His hand, although cold, had been soft, soft for someone who worked with their hands.
“You don’t need to see anyone this evening.”
“No, I want to get it done with.”
“Done with?”
“Get it over with.”
The caretaker stopped and looked at a pothole in the camp driveway, he kicked some gravel into its puddle.
“I think I should tell you, straight off, Ms Lyon...”
“Mandi.”
“...Mandi... I’m not sure that it will be possible to get it done with tonight.”
“O, I understand that. But I thought that I should at least reassure the residents.”
“That you are taking on the community?”
“That I will do whatever is best, within my....”
What was the word? What was any word? What word might do? Or was a replacement for words? The cave of silence opened up again like black wings. The world on pause. Mandi felt her muscles seizing mid-stride. The crunch of gravel seemed to retreat deep inside the cave; if the caretaker was trying to help her out, his words were far too muffled for Mandi to mind. It probably only lasted a moment, a few seconds at most, but it was already clear to Mandi that there were large gaps opening up in her sense of things; there were important subject matters missing from the big picture.
“This is it. But, of course, you remember...”
Her fake parents had done their best to turn the little bungalow into an alien temple. Dreamcatchers hung in lines. The house name was in Arabic. Above an enamelled representation of the ‘Mallard’ steam train, twin giant antlers poked, long and branched and sharp, from what looked like an unfeasibly small skull; reaching into the night, as if feeling for the lost souls of Anne and Bryan. Mandi could only see the first flash again and again and their heads striking the reinforced screens and the skin peeled from their skulls. There was no button to press for a doorbell, but a chime and a hammer. Several walking sticks, all mostly shaped by nature, stood in the feet of two old boots, painted white. Beyond the frosted glass, Mandi could just about make out a red hanging and its golden sigil. Over the years of meeting on neutral ground, in tasteful refurbishments of old pubs, chewing seared scallops and sipping dry white wines, Mandi had forgotten just how weird her parents were. Out of their natural habitat, they must have become expert in adopting the trappings of normal; Mandi had forgotten all the mystical tat, as though she had never had any part in it.
‘Do you have a key?’
‘No....’
‘I have their spare.’
The caretaker inserted the key in the lock and then stood back to allow Mandi to turn it. She released the lock, pushed the thick door ajar and removed the key.
‘You keep it.’
She pocketed the key and felt inside for a light switch. It was only as she touched the angle of the switch itself, and ran her finger along its edge, did it occur to her that she had come home. The light clicked on and everything snapped back into place; as if in the darkness it had been in chaos, but now, illuminated, it had presented itself to her in a familiar mask.
She gasped.
For a moment she felt the caretaker’s hand lightly supporting her, between her shoulder blades, and then it was gone.
“I’ll leave you.”
“No. Yes... but... come back...”
“I don’t normally work in the... but, obviously... in half an hour?”
“An hour.”
“Fine”, and he was gone, blackness into blackness.
Mandi ran through the tiny hall, along the dog-leg of corridor and threw herself into what had been her room. Flicking the light switch as she fell through the frame of the door, she had expected to feel her horror rising at a room preserved exactly as she had left it twelve years before. Instead, she froze, half-folded at the knees. There was no trace of her here at all. Anne and Bryan had wiped her away. For a moment she thought she might have chosen the wrong door, forgetful after such a long absence, but there was no mistaking the oddly sloping ceiling and the walls painted in chipped black, tiny stars of orange and pink emerging from the next layers down. Other than the walls, everything else was storage. Boxes and boxes of banal cardboard. Ribbed cardboard, hard cardboard, flat-pack and bubble-wrapped. The boxes, cases and other receptacles reached right up to the ceiling in places. There was no bed, no set of drawers, no wardrobe, no den, no silk hanging, no posters, no shrines to this and that god. No VHS collection. No tank-like recorder. No telly. The whole anomalous, anachronistic world in which she had spent so much, too much, of her childhood was no more, nuked, vapourised, and repurposed as storage space. Falling to her knees, Mandi sprang straight back up, pushing off a tower of cases, she rushed down the dog leg and around the house. A few glances and she quickly knew that if anything of hers was still there, it was modest and well hidden.
She lay down on the Persian carpet in the living room and felt herself falling in between its weft and warp – why had they erased her like that? – down into a deep basin of white, white, empty light.
4
A few miles further down the coast, at the fingertip of the northern arm of The Bay, four white figures moved in sinister harmony. The cliffs had long ago been levelled by quarrying and a grey platform now stretched out a hundred yards into the sea. The ghost-like figures moved across the limestone shelf. For things so bright they moved so darkly.
The four figures rushed to the edge of the water, fell to their knees in unison, then onto their bellies; swinging high-powered rifles off their shoulders and onto their retractable supports. Four eyes trained through four scopes upon a single shadow on the water. Only to those educated eyes was anything present there; to any casual onlooker – an early morning dog walker, a wild camper emerging from a hidden tent – there was only a dark sea under a grey sky.
Phutt, phutt, phutt... phutt. Each of the white snipers got off a single round and for a moment half a mile offshore the ocean was cut white like chalk on a blackboard. Then it darkened again. All four firers wrestled lightweight binoculars up to their eyes; but if there was blood it was as black as the sea and invisible to them. Whatever shadow they might have thought they saw before, there was none there now. As swiftly as they arrived, they departed, sweeping up their weapons and running bent-kneed back across the silvery platform to the leafy-roofed paths that ran around the sides of the sheer quarry face. Just before disappearing into the green, they checked one last time for any unfortunate witness who might have caught more than the flutter of gulls or a last gasp of sea mist. Nothing. They conveyed satisfaction to each other in glances, then, before turning into the tunnels, rolled down their white masks over four sets of lips coloured in different shades of red, and under four powdered chins.
Their nigh-silent shapes were swallowed by the black greens of the moonless wooded cliff. Nothing moved on the limestone platform. Then, with a crackle of Puffa jacket, a man with a face like a wide dish, rose from his knees from beyond a pile of discarded quarry workings. Shielding the screen with his hand, he checked what his video camera had caught, made a note in a small red Silvine notebook, then clasped his chest and shook violently.
5
The ocean gulped as the red shape hit it, falling. Warm and shallow waters rose up around the sail-like shape; giant pillars of spume that wrapped the dark thing in whiteness. For a few seconds a shining lily of bubbles stood out above the waves, while beneath them the gradually sinking flotilla of tiny corpses, the remnants of miniscule ocean creatures that had worked as much of their passage as they mortally could, blew up in clouds of muddiness. A shoal of Arctolepis fled, their arrowhead bodies slicing through the blue, soft heads swivelling to and fro; a giant Dunkleosteus, nine metres in length, soaked up the vibrations, its jointed neck armour pushed back upon itself and the invisible underwater wave striking between its stony teeth. On the ocean floor a rainbow forest of stalked crinoids turned their flowery umbrella-heads to the commotion on the surface.
The dark red shape spread itself for a moment, like a massive carpet, a Liopleurodon-sized parasol of tissue, the writhing spokes of which emitted vicious spines, jabbing blindly at the foam. With a sudden hiccup, it seemed to spread even further, increasing its girth, then the whole thing flipped over. With a thump the waters folded in on themselves, handlebar eyes and a white beak rose up from its insides and with a beat the parasol spasmed and sent the creature heading for the darker waters, for the unusual caves, for the resting places of the strange things that even the deep swimming Cladoselaches rarely saw.
High up – or was it deep within? – an exhausted God, slumped across His creation, broken and seduced, wondering what it was that He had allowed, capable of reaching even His cold and ageless Perfection, bringing His worst fears – fears that He did not even know He had until that moment – to such a stained fruition in a passion of mucus, suckers, froth, sinew, blood and desire. Before long the light blue Devonian seas had returned to their soft continuity, a gentle blanket running up to the edges of the limestone mountains already emerging from its ossuary-floor; a benign corridor to Gondwana. Glittering as the scales of lobe-fins reflected the bright sun from below, that empty God tried to look upon the face of the waters, tried to tell Himself and any creature that would listen that it was good; but He knew that there was now a red darkness down there, where light and darkness were still unseparated, locked to each other in a furious lust, and that He did not know what it was, though He knew it was there, down there, known only to the Trilobites and sinking detritus of gelatinous zooplanktons, the Salps and Medusae Jellies upon which She snacked; waiting and preparing Herself, for another assault upon His Perfection.
6
Mandi opened her eyes. The early morning gloom revealed dim shapes of musty furniture. Unable to bring herself to sleep in her foster parent's bed, Mandi had arranged a few cushions from the sofa on the living room floor and covered herself with a thin duvet. The scent of old incense had grown increasingly nauseous. No sooner had she lain down, than she was up again, fetching herself a glass of water, into which she slipped a couple of co-codamol, before sinking back onto the cushions, watching them dissolve.
The co-codamal soon took its effect, bringing some relief to Mandi's pounding head, but sleep had taken longer to come. Mandi had got to her feet, flicked on the kettle by the sink, and then stiffly bent over the lounge fire, muscles still cramped by the confines of the seats on the trains. Turning the numbered dial until it clicked; lighted gas hissed across the radiants. She liked the way that everything was in easy reach, one of the simple pleasures of mobile homes.
To the right of the fireplace was her parents’ bookshelf. Flicking on a lamp, Mandi scanned the titles, looking for something to read. Each volume was dedicated to a different aspect of paganism, witchcraft or the occult. She sighed in frustration at their narrow concerns. All the books had been arranged by theme or author. Three titles on Santeria next to a handful on Chaos magic. Then a generous section on modern witchcraft and, inevitably, a few Crowleys, Valientes and a couple of beautifully bound Scarlet Imprints. Mandi hated them all.
Mandi had flicked on her mobile. No 4G, so no chance of socialising. Just a text from the disposable guy asking if he could have his ipod back. Mandi smiled at three desperate xxx's that ended the message. Men's hopes, she thought, so frequently outweigh their sense of reality. She texted back, asking him for a postal addresses, promising to send it back in return for hers and suggesting he leave it at the front desk at her office. She pondered the use of a smiley, but that might be misconstrued, and she plumped for nothing. Casual cruelty calmed her nerves and she laid back down into the cushions, drifted far from incense into darkness, and the next thing she knew, was waking, dreamless, grey lumps of heavy furniture towering above her.
The caretaker opened the door slowly and modestly. Eased himself through a gap no wider than necessary and closed the door deftly behind him, turning a key rapidly in the Yale lock of his home.
“No one locks their doors in Lost Horizon,” she said.
“You saw the penny arcade. There’s someone around.”
Yet none of the doors they called at that morning were locked. The residents were more anxious about Mandi’s arrival than warding off fire-raisers.
Most of the camp was locked up for the winter. Bryan and Anne’s home was stationed close to the gates, a sentinel to it all. Once past their home, were rows of identical trailer-chalets; empty now, they made for an odd walk: part film location, part salesroom. Why did working class people from industrial counties choose to stay in such mass-manufactured hutches? And why did middle-class folk, as homogenous as could be, feel they had a licence to sneer at these comfy little homes from home? Anonymous containers filled for a week or two with summer meanings, squeezing families into foreign shapes. Bryan had been working his way through this part of the site; the boundary where the crash had interrupted his work was quite distinct; rather than the neat hollows with the mattresses tipped on their end, the cabins were a riot of sheets and minor holiday detritus. At this border, Bryan had made neat piles of cheap buckets with busted handles, cracked mirrors and damaged St George’s flags. Mandi swept up an armful of Christmas bunting that had blown in from somewhere else on the resort and threw it on top of the mess of red crosses.
There was something disturbingly systematic about the caretaker’s introductions. Rather than go trailer to trailer, he wove around and through the rows, before doubling back to a home they had passed much earlier; as if there were a proper order at odds with the cartographical logic of the camp. Mandi supposed she must have known some of these people quite well in her teens, but they were no more familiar to her than distant relatives on the edges of a wedding photo, people that no one spoke of anymore. As they entered each of the cabins, she got the same feeling each time, of an eccentricity that was trying to impress itself upon her, but always in the same way. There were different styles, however, and the caretaker had arranged their visit in an ordering of these.
First came the followers of the Light with their airy properties, windows that let in the day, mirrors that expanded the boundaries of their homes, First Nations images, fairies and angelology. Here were people who followed to the letter the Wiccan rede “An it harm none, do what ye will”; folk who had repurposed the Christian image of the witch as Satan’s bride to their own version of gentle earth healer. Then the Darker side with their sigils, tattoos, pentacles and chalices, Gothery and completist collections of Psychic TV recordings. These darker folk, with an uneasy relationship to Crowley, preferring the unbridled “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” to the Wiccans’ innocuous version. Their witch was Lilith.
Mandi could not help the feeling, when she was not lapsing into drowsiness, that these people hardly knew her adoptive parents at all. She had imagined that this would be a tight community, bound together by shared ideas and a cosy over-knowing, the kind of complacent set up that she despised. Yet there was nothing of that; instead she felt that the camp was in the grip of a helpless paranoia. The kind of thing you would feel in a company before a round of compulsory redundancies; she had seen such faces when she worked in HR and it had been her job, as the junior, to deliver the bad news. It would be wrong to say she enjoyed the cruelty of it, but she relished any necessity for cutting herself off from sympathy in the interests of a greater thing. That greater thing was her secret lover; on the outside she slinked around the feeding frenzies of individualism, keeping the zealots to their word, but in her dreams there was always something else, some principle, behind it all, within it all, deep down. There was a pattern guiding those thrashing bodies and virtuously greedy splashes. The nights she enjoyed the most were in the arms of that pattern, wasting time with a bottle of crude Merlot and Netflix, then curling up in fresh cotton sheets and feeling that spiritual thing, that pulsing disembodied landscape just below the mattress, the demesne where she was queen. That was why she was a cut above the others, she reassured herself, because she didn’t just believe in any of this stuff; she was in love with it, and her love was blessed by...
“What? Sorry...”
She was suddenly aware that the fairy princess and her dreadlocked knight were staring across at her from their threadbare sofa expecting some kind of response.
“I’m sorry... lost in... with the deaths and all that... could you run me through that again?”
And under the gaze of the caretaker, Mandi dutifully attended to the plans and fears of the piskie pair.
“Hijacking, that’s what we’re saying! If you don’t do something the funeral will be hijacked!”
The knight swept some biscuit crumbs from his beard and the princess brushed them onto the carpet and rearranged her shawl.
“We wouldn’t want the... Goths, we call them... you know who I mean?”
The caretaker sharpened his stare. Mandi nodded and shot a warning glance at the caretaker.
“Then you know what they’re like.” She didn’t, but she could make a good guess. “They want to make out that your Mum and Dad were one of them...”
“Two of them”, the knight corrected, and grinned, pleased with himself, folded his arms and knocked his coffee mug from the arm of the sofa. Brown liquid fell thinly over a box of fantasy figures.
“O!”
The princess sprang lightly to her feet and was then swiftly on her knees mopping up with a J Cloth, soaking up the greasy coffee, and dabbing the laminated surface before anything could sink in. For some reason, and she did not like to imagine that there was any real reason, Mandi was minded of the grey-brown stream that sneaked around the edges of the camp, a stickiness underfoot and a fetid smell. She felt the hairs on her arm rising and a clammy bead or two hanging on her forehead. She needed some fresh air, but that would have to wait.
“We’re concerned for their memory, Amanda. That is important to people like us.”
As though it was not to her.
“Let me do this”, said the princess, returning to the sofa having tossed the J cloth into the cluttered sink. “Amanda. Your Mum and Dad were lovely people, and they deserve to be remembered that way. There wasn’t an ounce of nastiness in either of them. Nothing was ever too much for them; a repair here and there, keeping the place clean, running smooth, letting people have their own space, they didn’t poke their nose into other people’s business like you can get in some pagan communities, know what I mean?”
Why would Mandi know? Why would she think she knew? How much had she forgotten?
“We’d like everyone to remember the best side of your Mum and Dad. They were generous, they had big souls, they had bright spirits. There was no side to them. That’s who they were. Plain good. That’s why... I’m sorry I have to say this, Amanda, but that’s why you have to stop the others from using the funeral as a... pulpit!”
She spat the word out, like spoiled milk.
“They will!” announced the knight, shaking his hair into a twirling skirt. A paper lampshade on the table behind the sofa was caught in the draught and very, very slowly keeled onto its side. The knight turned in surprise, but could not make out what had happened.
“Please help us, Amanda. We are fighting for your Mum and Dad.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The fairy princess smoothed down her long skirt and then folded her hands into a woven sigil in her lap.
“We wish you to hand over the officiating at the ceremony to a neutral figure; there are many respected wise folk in the area, not the immediate area, but Totnes maybe? Your parents deserve a neutral ceremony.”
“I see”, said Mandi, standing. The handmade chair creaking in relief. The caretaker stood, as if her own shadow were following her. “Send me some names.”
And they were swiftly out of there, Mandi striding down the lane between the cabins before it struck her that she had no idea where to go to next and turned to the caretaker.
“This way,” and he turned them around and led the way to the door of the darker forces.
The darker forces had their headquarters in a large flat caravan-like structure at the far reaches of the permanent section of the camp. Those parts which had once made it mobile were now melted into a concrete base which in turn was now covered by a carpet of green moss. Even in the grey winter light, the moss shone with a sparkling gem-like aura. Guarding the steps up to the cabin were cairns made variously of stones and animal bones. Many of the bones had succumbed to the green invasion, the white had all but disappeared beneath the wash of algae. The effect was of a damp but glowing kingdom; but inside was very different. It was more of a warehouse. Multiple copies of the same volumes sat about in fierce pillars, some bound with fibrous straps. The walls were lined with gaudy shelves of red and black volumes, multiple copies of the same editions. The two managers of this odd little entrepôt had managed to combine into their dress a certain bookishness with Dungeons and Dragons camp. Crescent-shaped reading glasses obscured thick mascara, a warrior’s skirt over woolly tights, fingerless black gloves and curved fingers flattened at the end by endless thumping on keyboards. Screens winked at their work stations.
“Come in!”
Cassandra (not her real name the caretaker explained later, in case Mandi was concerned about the “Tracy” on the rental agreement) waved a handful of jiffy bags as if she were about to skim fleets of ninja throwing stars at her guests. Tossing the paper shuriken aside, she slid an office chair across the room. Mimir (same arrangement as Cassandra, the caretaker later assured her) produced another chair from behind one of the bibliopiles and steered it, at Cassandra’s bidding. Mandi was asked to choose one or the other. She hated these slippery things.
“First, please accept our congratulations on the transition. Time is artificial. Be assured that your Mother and Father...”
“My adoptive parents to be ... precise...”
“O... that they...”
“There is no death”, offered Mimir. “Only a change of worlds.”
Mandi wondered about thanking them, but the idea of ‘precision’ had suddenly struck her as intensely absurd, particularly here in their paper keep.
“Do you mind if I had a moment? To look at your books?”
They probably thought that Mandi needed a moment to collect her thoughts and feelings, but those had been assembled, logged, salted and stored behind the absurdly thick door of her vault a while ago. No, she was laughing and she wanted to enjoy the respite it gave her. Checking the spines, she turned her back on the room; pulling down a random volume here and there to scan the blurbs; she built up a rapid snapshot of the couple’s publishing predilections. They were remarkably eclectic: staring out at Mandi were unicorns with dopey eyes, angels flashing gossamer wings, mailed fists and magicians in monkish outfits, chalices swilling with suspiciously viscous stuff, random bare-breasted dryads and all the watery sensualism a charlatan publishers might wish for without a hint of genuine transcendence. How did they get away with it?
“So, you are....what?”
“O”, said Mimir. “That’s not... us! We serve as a kind of shell company for vanity writers; angels, fairies, stuff that nobody reads, the writer’s family and immediate circle, perhaps, and when I say ‘read’ I mean ‘buy’. No one reads much past the first few pages. But it creates the...”
“Illusion?”
“The magic! Of publication. It’s a service. And it pays for the real stuff.”
Cassandra pulled aside some ferocious packages of goth fantasy, crying out. In preciously carved shelves, sat tiny chapbooks. Eased from their positions, Cassandra presented a few on her open palms.
“Look, don’t touch; you’ll draw the energy.”
There was almost nothing there. Just the suggestion of power. Cassandra prised open the covers of one. Hand printed, expensive heavily grained paper, watermark, simple sigils. That was it.
“Not to be messed with.”
Cassandra placed them back in the shelves and Mimir pushed the piles of bound fantasies back into place. The kings were in their castles, all was well for the time being.
A long silence descended over the trailer.
“I’ve come to find out if there is anything .... for my Mum and Dad’s funeral, we’re making the arrangements. I imagine you would want to come.”
Mimir and Cassandra did not react and Mandi was unsure if, in their minds, the question needed no reply, or they were still deciding.
“We want to be inclusive...”
Why was she playing this stupid game?
“I don’t know if you know this, Amanda...”
Cassandra handed the baton to Mimir.
“Let’s talk straight.”
Mimir folded his arms, but Cassandra took the baton straight back.
“Truth is this, Amanda. We knew your Mum and Dad better than anyone here, and they would not appreciate having their transition marred by the love and light and “harm none” brigade. That was not their magic. They were into something stronger. They were... mild people, but I got the impression they liked to get results. Do you get my meaning?”
“I don’t remember them ever mentioning you...”
“We weren’t close, but it was obvious... they weren’t fairy and crystal people...”
“Thank you. We have a lot to do.”
Mandi rose from her chair and the caretaker was already holding open the front door. The fresh air felt sharp and good on Mandi’s cheeks. She breathed in gulps as if someone had had their thumbs on her throat. Mimir and Cassandra stood, baffled, at their door.
“I know exactly what you want”, called Mandi and strode down the lane between the dwellings of housesitting hobbits, bookkeeping princesses, entrepreneurial fairies and desktop chieftains. “Leave it to me!” Weak strings of smoke and steam rose from the caravans and shacks. Ducks clanked through the distant mist.
When she and the caretaker arrived back at Bryan and Anne’s home, Cassandra was already waiting for them.
“I hope you don’t mind, I let myself in. It’s better if we talk without the Viking, woman to woman.”
Mandi glanced sideways at the caretaker.
“He’s fine”, said Cassandra. “He’s different. He takes care. Do you mind if I smoke?”
As Cassandra rolled a joint, filling it with some rough and ragged weed, home grown by the rancid smell of it, she laid out her fears as if she were rolling out a map. Mandi had not noticed her stick or the old-fashioned callipers that supported the lower part of her right leg. Someone had yarn-bombed it. As she spoke, Cassandra gazed about the room in wonder.
“Have you been here before?”
“No one has. This was the holy of holies. I’ve never seen any of this, but I can read it like a book. That’s not what I’ve come to talk about. Amanda, you were involved in a terrible thing. Your parents, your adoptive parents weren’t they? I can’t exaggerate what it must have been like for them, and for you, I’m sure. The papers, the media, they indulged in this... spasm of collective amnesia... like the dogshit, the moment the authorities said it was the fault of the dogshit, who was interested? Who remembers three kiddies killed by dogshit? Who wants to read about that over their cornflakes?”
“Other cereals are available.”
Cassandra didn’t understand and ploughed on.
“That was a time when the media didn’t even use the term ‘shit’! Dogshit was something really, really boring people bothered about; and even they didn’t use the word. There was no celebrity dogshit, no A list dogshit, no VIP dogshit room, no executive dogshit...”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“See, even you don’t want to hear! It was a smart move on their part! Because, what was the alternative for them? Yeh, they could have put your Mom and Dad, adoptive, inside, put them on trial, they could have had you taken away, secure facility, say you were.... what? Evil? Deranged? A case of psychological whatever. They can do those things, you know? I know for a fact, because I was told by one of their best friends, that they fought – your Mom and Dad, adoptive – they fought tooth and nail to keep you out of the clutches of the psychologists. And, fair play, the authorities didn’t really want to go there. Dogshit was their stroke of genius. Bingo – it was all a problem with the drains. How many poltergeist incidents are down to faulty wiring and bad pipes? Houses on geological faults! Get my drift? Your Mom and Dad escaped, got away with it, because the authorities knew that if they did put them on the stand...”
‘On the stand’? What was this, a John Grisham thing?
“...they had to accept the possibility that the child abuse thing would fall apart, where was the evidence? Your Mom and Dad were good people! They adopted, for Chissake! And then what were they left with? Magic.”
“Cassandra, please don’t take this the wrong way...”
The caretaker shifted, so barely noticeable that Mandi turned to him. He was frozen.
“...but I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.”
“No, no, no, no... no reason why you would. It’s a long, long time ago... sounds like a fairy story. But it wasn’t. The media may have forgotten, the sheeple may have gone back to their dreams, but the pagan community has never forgotten. That’s why your Mom and Dad, adoptive or not....”
“No, they were... no question about it... they were not my actual parents...”
“They had a very special place in our community. When your community has had its witches burned for hundreds of years... they were our living martyrs. They were almost gods, Amanda, gods. Aristocracy, at the very least...’
Mandi realised that she was talking about Anne and Bryan, not Morgan le Fay and the Pendle Witches.
“Most of us, if we are really honest with ourselves, don’t see much real magic. Don’t get me wrong, the magic is real; we can... the best of, we can make an enemy fall ill and heal a friend, we can get you the lover you want, bingo, even if only for you to find out you don’t really, we can get you a good deal on a second hand car and conjure you a minor demon if you’re willing to put up with a lifetime of hassle, but what has any of that really changed? We know the spells, we celebrate the coincidences, the miracles, the way the world seems to respond to us, the arrival of unexpected animals, the schadenfreude when an enemy trips over the kerb, the magic of falling in love and of dying. But not so many of us get to stand at the door of the Otherworld and look right down. Your Mom and Dad were right there next to you...”
“I just told you. I don’t remember anything. I know there was a fuss, and that at some time they had to stop certain people coming here, I wasn’t allowed the... freedom I wanted at one time... because of something that had happened... but all kids are like that... setting fires, stealing from the shops...”
“No, Amanda, excuse me. Not all kids are like that. Not all kids are like you. Nobody’s like you, baby. I’ve said too much.”
Leaning on her stick, her young yet bony hands running over its shaft carved with interwoven plant forms, she levered herself out of the sofa, took a last long look around the room; reading it like an Egyptologist might a recently excavated room of hieroglyphics, hoovering it up with her thick mascara eyes. She tapped the stick three times on the carpet, followed its pattern to the front door, then turned so her shawl spread like a crow’s wing.
“I’ve said too much. Forgive me. Dead dogs. Dead dogs. I saw you in our home, scared to fall asleep, don’t be afraid of sleep. It’s daily consciousness that is The Fall, the unconscious is the path to redemption.”
“I’m sorry, I was just...”
And she was gone, the door blanking out her black swoop against the grey sky.
“I need to be getting on with...”
Her words trailed off, as if she had left a fading presence. Mandi stared accusingly at the caretaker.
“When, excuse me, is anyone going to tell me what the fuck this mystery is all about? Do you want some coffee?”
The caretaker refused blankly. Mandi had no energy left to argue with him. She was shocked. Never before had she owned up to anyone that she was tired. She was never tired. She was always tired. But she had a perpetual generator of energy, churning out anger and hard work, and she fed it with her exhaustion. Where did tiredness come from?
She thanked the caretaker, conjuring a politeness that was physically painful for her. Crabbe repeated that there were "things to do", and Mandi watched him as he marched slowly off in the direction of the park office. Why did so many of them dress in black?
Back inside, Mandi put the kettle on the stove and slumped on the sofa. Instinctively she looked at her mobile, hoping that there might be some 4G, perhaps a temporary gust of signal brought in by the northerly breeze that she had felt picking up throughout the morning. But nothing. Not even a text.
A few years ago, one summer’s day, Mandi had shared lunch with Anne and Bryan at the Barge Inn at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire. A couple of hours out from London, Mandi had endured the drive out of the city and across the chalk downs. The script of these lunches had been written not long after Mandi returned from the States and started meeting her adoptive parents again. Bryan would start by asking how Mandi was "getting along", a question so big and bland that Mandi always struggled to respond; she made things up, constructed huge falsehoods so absurd that Anne and Bryan were challenged to call her a liar. They never did. Then Anne would enquire about her relationships, asking in a faux tongue-in-cheek manner, knowing she would be annoyed, if she had found "Mr Right". Mandi hated the passive aggression in the questioning, and called it out every time. She knew that Anne hated it too, she spoke it in quotation marks – thank god she spared them that awful four fingers thing – but could not help herself. Playing something she was not, something far worse than she was; but those games were starting to make more – and worse – sense now. She often wondered if she might have called a halt to the meetings, were it not for the energy they released into her next opinion piece; they gave her all the ammunition and pain she would need to lay waste to the fake displays of caring and self-absorbed noseying into the business of others that had skewed the moral compass of the baby-boomers. No, though, she was beginning to suspect that she had misread them completely; that they had been playing a much longer game. And Mandi hadn’t even been on the pitch.
Although she had always kept in touch after leaving home, Mandi felt no particular closeness to her parents. Contact was more of a familial duty than anything borne out of fondness. For certain, she held a sort of love for them, but she was not interested enough in their lives to invest much effort in getting to know them – why had she not thought how strange that was at the time? – or what they really cared about. How come she suddenly felt that twinge of guilt just before they died? Although she had bathed the wound in cocaine and dry white wine she remembered wishing that things were otherwise; but what could be more inauthentic than changing the past? The past was not a set of car keys you could mislay and find again. One it was fucked, it was fucked for all eternity, it would not be coming back. They would not be coming back. And she was wasting her time fretting about it. Get it down and on the blog and forget about it. Forgetting. She was good at that, queen bitch at that, a goddess of that. She would get a lot of sympathy likes and retweets and a less than usually cantankerous comments thread from her male followers. She would hit a sickening nerve and she will tell them so. They loved to be told off by Mandi. The Mandi she had invented, the goddess of the Abyss.
She had not been a goddess to her parents. Those occasional lunches were just fine as far as she was concerned. The drive was a welcome interruption to London driving. The food was never bad. Anne and Bryan had good taste in culinary matters, out of key with the rest of their ‘alternative’ dispositions; although they never mentioned the names of chefs or owners, they seemed to know people and people seemed to know them wherever they met.
Eventually, at these events, Anne and Bryan would both run out of questions and a pall would fall over the meal. Un ange passe. They were surprisingly uncomfortable in these long ‘angelic’ silences; almost as though they had expected that this ‘nothing’ was where all their questions would lead. Or that there was something they ought to be talking about, but never did. Mandi didn’t mind the pauses; she could concentrate on the food, sip the wine and taste the parts of it; it was only a politeness that she hated that would bring her to responding to an imagined cue to ask how they were "getting along", a question never too huge or bland for Anne and Bryan. Each of these Wiltshire lunch dates were arranged to coincide with one of a number of investigations her adoptive parents were conducting into one "earth mystery" or another. Despite her distant feelings, this project-making always irritated the hell out of Mandi. She would have liked to feel that she was interesting enough to warrant a journey in her own right, rather than figure as a minor landmark along the way. But then those who ‘searched’ would rarely see what was in front of her eyes; that was the cliché. She had swallowed it and turned into a bland-angry blog piece. Her readers loved that kind of thing; a chance to feel superior to Mandi’s New Age targets, so next piece she skewered her readers right in the entitlement gland. But that was not what she had been missing? She tried to remember where the meetings had taken place, what the pattern of the old sites? But her diary had been digital and wiped itself automatically. She had no idea anymore.
On one particular trip to Wiltshire, Bryan had talked about links between that summer’s slew of crop circles and a geographical relationship to ancient burial mounds. She remembered that, but not the details. He had talked excitedly about geometric patterns, paraphrasing some new books he had speed-read. Mandi picked at her parmigiana and gulped, displacedly, at a third glass of wine; waiting for her chance to get in the factoid about random patterns like these being just as observable in the case of former branches of Woolworths. They took her scepticism in good heart, as she took their credulity. They thought the two things equivalent, she did not, and, infuriatingly and brilliantly, they regarded this contradiction with the same equanimity. She had taken another sip, ordered another glass, surrendered any idea of getting back to London that evening, and found it difficult not to agree with their agreeability.
When they met for the final time, Anne had been attempting to contact aliens, again. She had been visiting Warminster ever since the famous UFO flaps of the 1960s; in the early days digging Bryan out of bed on a whim for early morning dashes to the East. Now she had designed a new ritual to revive the meetings on the hilltops, the spontaneous gatherings of similar longing souls that never quite did enough to draw the serious attention of intergalactic messengers who, Anne still believed, had important information for humankind.
"In these end times" said Anne "we really need to try to understand what these aliens are trying to communicate to us. The Earth is in such upheaval, dear."
"Have you thought about what the future holds for the Earth, Mandi?" Asked Bryan.
Mandi wondered what it would be like to talk to her parents about how she should decorate her flat, or about music or fashion; anything not involving the future of the universe or messages from the beyond or any of the other piddling "big ideas" they found so engrossing. Her parents were obsessed with big ideas, the way some people are obsessed with football teams. They got a giant kick out of it, win or lose, revelation or debunking, they were always loyal; but Mandi wanted to win, to be the Right Woman, she did not enjoy the gnashing of teeth. She wanted cymbals and glitter and reliable drugs.
Once, when yet another ange had passe, Mandi had explained that, no, she had not thought much about the future of the Earth, but she recycled and all that shit even though she knew much it had been proved to be a con; that the only way things would change would be when big state did something about big things and let individuals consume whatever they wanted, learn to be resilient, stick up for themselves, instead of living like weeping snowflakes bewailing the state of the planet.
"Talking of our future" said Anne "there's a couple of things we need to let you know about."
Bryan took the baton.
"Your Mum and me wanted to let you know that we've written our wills and you, of course in the event of our deaths, are the sole beneficiary."
What to say? "Thank-you" did not really cut it. She knew that she should suggest that "they were too young to think about such things", not least because they were not young. But actually, she was wondering why they had waited until now.
"Well, I hope that's not needed for a while."
"Oh, so do we, dear, but we needed to prepare for these things, right now" replied Anne, kindly.
“I don’t really need...”
“It’s not for your need, dear”, her fake mum responded sharply. Bryan silenced her with a sideways glance, and then over-smiled at Mandi. Mandi felt, suddenly, a little emotional. The "sort of love" she had for the two ageing hippies formed a lump in her throat; to see them struggling and just as uncomfortable as her. To see them getting it all wrong; for all their thinking about the future and their talk of harmony. She felt guilty and enjoyed it. And surprised at herself. She was puzzled, though, that they were not talking about passing separately. Surely that was the most likely; one of them would be beamed up into the passing alien craft before the other – she was pretty sure that they were immune to any kind of Heaven’s Gate tendency – in which case Anne would inherit from Bryan or vice-versa; why were they so keen to involve her right now? They presumably meant that after they both had gone she would get what was left. While she was pondering this, Anne and Bryan described repeatedly exactly where the paperwork that one day "would be important" could be found. Mandi helped herself to another large gulp of wine from her fourth glass. Right now, those memories were coming back in unhelpful detail.
The kettle started to whistle. Mandi started, suddenly back with herself, on the sofa. Anne and Bryan dead. Where did they say she would find the paperwork? Shit.
Anne and Bryan's bedroom felt utterly taboo. Placing her coffee on the small bedside table, already a desecration, Mandi sat cautiously on the duvet. She felt the tension between the aliveness of the intimacies she imagined her parents sharing there (while carefully avoiding any visualisations) and their now complete deadness. She knew she would have to go and see them soon. Sort out the release of the bodies. She imagined their bodies being drawn from mortuary cabinets, suspicious that that only happened in movies.
Mandi caught her reflection in the body length mirror on the wall. She saw a five-year-old girl who would bounce into her foster parents’ room far too early in the morning to snuggle up between them. Whatever happened to her? She could smell them, she could smell that girl... sense her warmth. The feeling took her by surprise and she allowed herself to revel in it. She stretched out her arm to hug her mum. She expected a warm hand to cover hers. She expected movement. She did not expect a cold, lifeless skull caked in dried blood to roll towards her.
Mandi leapt back and off the bed. She had thought she left those nasty flashes on the train. She threw back her hair and sighed. She had an idea that the paperwork was in the built-in wardrobe. There was a small grey single filing drawer in there, she remembered; its brutal utility contrasted markedly with the decorative excesses of their other possessions. She had once hidden in that wardrobe, crouched beneath the rack of clothes, giddily excited when Anne or Bryan had entered the room looking for her. Once they had both come into the room, unaware of her presence; in hushed tones discussing “Steve” and "gone too far last night" and "it wasn't natural". She did not remember a Steve.
The drawer was precisely where she had remembered it. The paperwork was surprisingly orderly for a couple she knew only by their inefficiency and indifference to most things that did not involve the camp, particularly their own affairs. They never got their teeth fixed, they never got their TV license paid on time. She first found the will; it was as per the discussion in The Barge Inn or Middlecote Arms or wherever it was. They had left contact details for a financial advisor and a bottom line figure for various savings accounts. She found it odd that Anne and Bryan would have a financial advisor.
"Love of money is the root of all evil," Anne would often lecture Mandi, “not money itself, you go for it, girl, but save your love for something else”; it was hard not to re-think their platitudes differently in the light of what she now knew, or, rather, what she knew now that she did not know yet. Rumsfeld wisdom. She laughed; how blissfully unaware her parents had been, pagans quoting the Bible at her. What was their long game? Mandi had never corrected them; amused at how many of their beliefs were steeped in Christianity’s Greatest Hits; was that where they were guiding her? At the time it served only to fuel her cold cynicism.
So, this was it. The papers they had described. No personal note. And a suspension file, slightly crumpled, crammed at the back of the drawer. She eased the file out from its niche; inside was a single manila foolscap envelope. She ran her fingers around the inside of the cardboard file but there was nothing else; no silver charm, Dartmoor pisky or childhood memento intended especially for her? The manila envelope was unmarked. Inside were a number of typed sheets of yellowing paper, dry and fragile like flies’ wings. The heading on the first sheet read:
"MS. Torquay Museum. May 1926"
Why keep such an obscure document with their bank statements? She read on.
That traces of an antediluvian civilisation with its attendant fauna and flora can be so readily found in the obscure lanes, fields and woodlands of this part of Devonshire has long been known to the coarse laborers that dwell in this lugubrious place. That this foetid and extinct civilization should, through blasphemous dreams, still cast its influence has been the ruin of my family and the reason we are soon to leave these shores for ever.
An opening paragraph that was mildly intriguing. Mandi was about to read on, when there was a sharp triple knock at the door of the trailer. Mandi remembered that, prior to their visits to the camp residents, she had persuaded Crabbe to take her on a walk around the boundary of Lost Horizon. "A bit of fresh air to clear my head." But mostly just to prove that she could manipulate the miserable old git; and check out the physical state of what was now her property. She dropped the various bank statements and legal forms back into the drawer, folded the manuscript into its envelope and tossed it in after the others. Before she closed the drawer and skipped to the door, keen not to let the Caretaker slip away, she noticed something she had missed on first inspection. She retrieved the manila envelope; in the bottom right hand corner of the back of the envelope, in pencilled capitals, were the words: LOVECRAFT ORIGINAL.
Go to Bonelines Instalment 3
Go to the Bonelines homepage
No one kills an angel. Mandi Lyon changed that. Though it was never her intention to upset the balance of so many worlds on the morning she arrived back in the county of her birth. Raised by adoptive parents, from whom she had drifted away after college when work took her far and wide, eventually to the profitable reaches of the US media world, she was returning now to the camp site on which she had first grown up.
In the States she had had to grow up all over again. So, this would be her third advance on adulthood.
Anne and Bryan Widger had been killed instantly on a single carriageway stretch of the A308. It was a head-on collision with a Porsche driver anxious to get out of the West Country. The end had come suddenly, brutally, and without fanfare or premonition. Curled up against the window of the Paddington train, Mandi was trying to focus on the passing folds of Wiltshire hills, but the heads of her adoptive parents resolutely smashed through the glass of the windscreen again and again, the pieces of broken shield tearing the soft flesh from the bones of their faces and popping eyes from their sockets, until their leering death’s heads zoomed around above the neat fields and clanged against the side of the train. Mandi closed her eyes and they came for her in the burgundy darkness.
It was no great surprise then, when she saw the bleeding angel.
The last thing she had seen, before closing her eyes against the cruelty, was a white horse carved into the chalk of the hills and racing piles of white limestone heaped onto a freight train sat in its siding. In the inner cinema of her fitful state, the wagons were full of teeth. A rolling ossuary, crossing the country, displaying its relics. Mandi could feel her own pearly whites working themselves loose; like she should add them to the inter-city reliquary. She was getting older, her skin was drying out, dark patches had appeared beneath her eyes; it had come the time to give something back to the country... she snapped into sharp wakefulness. Maudlin dreaming was more painful than loss.
This time, when she looked out of the muggy carriage, the flashbacks to the phone call and the instantaneous image of the crash had receded, replaced by an ache of foreboding as Mandi pictured her parents’ camp rushing towards her across the fields, the formerly mobile homes torn from their fibrous umbilical cords, the shower block lumbering on its shallow foundations. Among the architectural spectres was a medieval looking figure in an icy costume, geometrical hair and blood streaming down her chin. It smiled; then she saw its mouth full of shattered, violated teeth, vandalised ruins of a Jewish graveyard. Somehow, though the blood streamed from between the remains of broken catafalques of dentistry and fell in dark gobbets from the angel’s chin, the cold and perfect surfaces of her shift were left untouched, stainless. Her wings slowly spread up, glittering, into the clouds.
Mandi threw her head back into the seat. A wave of nausea rose through her throat and into the back of her nose. She was torn between snorting out the pressure and swallowing it as best she could, struggling to keep another violent movement from again stirring in her brains with the wire brush of her hangover. She began to gag on rising acid. Behind her eyes, the blood was white and hot, her throat lined with sand. She tried to distract herself by thinking through the one and a half bottles of Prosecco, and the something else there was before and the something else there had been after, and what might have happened around these stimulants to leave a bruise on her wrist and a tear in one of her barely justifiable shoes.
She strained to remember a conversation, more of an oration, she had delivered to the poor sucker; forget him, what was the idea? It had been brilliant, usable... it was at the after show party, or it may have been a PV, some sort of conceptual... anyway, there was a buffet of sorts with a band and... something to do with reliance and then something darker, spicier... she had been going on about snowflake companies, trying to pass off their responsibilities to individuals, that wasn’t freedom, packaging manufacturers who are less than keen to pay a share of recycling costs, her idea was green but brutal, holding a knife to company information campaigns about individual responsibilities... she was going to turn that around on them. In the US, company law designates business institutions... yes, that was it, it was coming back, the genius hinge in her idea! In the US, companies are legally regarded as individuals, but unlike human individuals they are incapable of dying, until externally wound up... so, like sea urchins... for some reason she knew this, about sea urchins, of all things, that they are immortal if left to their own devices... sea urchins had nothing to with it! Demons, that was it! Companies are demons, individuals that are immortal, but have no human soul. She would advocate ecologically-sound demon-slaughter, exorcism of the accountants, staking the heart of state capitalism, the disciplining of the executives... a wild hunt... she smiled in her daydream. Outside the golden carriage, flames somehow bright with darkness licked by at speed. In the centre of the furnace was a figure slashing at all around her with a laptop... her hair was alight, smoke billowed from under her skirts and... her teeth, her teeth... uuuuu... mmmmm...
She abruptly opened her eyes; an hour or more had passed and the countryside beyond the window was kinder and dimmer. The queasily rolling green of the giant fields had given way to a more stable patchwork. The train whooshed past a village, a canal with a pub perched on its bank, some narrow boats, and lines of old cottages flanked by something like recent suburbs, an anonymous factory on the village boundary, brick and corrugated iron farm buildings, some ruined walls in a field. All this skewered and held together by the plain symmetrical gothic of the church, built in mottled stone and sitting squat like an aged toad, content among the stone fungi of the cemetery. The wide West Door was generously open to all comers, and among its shadows, stood the angel with the smashed mouth.
Mandi looked away; struggling to find her i-pod, then remembered she had picked up the wrong one in her rush. Irritated that she would have to get back in touch with the disposable crutch from last night to recover her own music. The Last Thing she wanted to be thinking about right now. She tried Shuffle and gave in to a dire hauntological melange of Kemper Norton, English Heretic, The Advisory Circle and some other dreary Anglo-centric droning 60s nostalgia merchants pretending to be bitter and difficult. Fortuitously, it seemed about right for the soundtrack to planning a funeral for people you were only ever semi-connected with. Over the years she had paid flying visits to the camp. Mostly though, the three of them had met at gastropubs halfway between their homes; her adoptive parents refusing to let her pay the bills. She had never let them come to London; keeping them, guiltily, at arm’s length from her work at the Childquake charity where she had recently been promoted to CEO. Maybe she was reinventing the memory now, but she had some idea that when the phone rang she had been thinking of inviting Anne and Bryan... to what?
The chance had gone. Mandi argued with herself about getting some alcohol from the trolley. Decided against, then gave in. The first sip reminded her why there was an argument. The thin red wine lifted up the doubleness of her memories of Anne and Bryan; her angry dissatisfaction at their pseudo-parenting, their on-off, intimate and distracted nurturing. The nights of loneliness when they let her have ‘her own space’. She knew that these were balances that no one gets right, balances she had never wished to have the chance to get wrong, and yet all that had never made her love them any less. Or love them very much. But she had never told them one way or the other; too busy raging at their carefulness, at their refusal to be clumsily intrusive, and, now, their disappearance just when she might have been willing and able to be clumsy herself. No, she was deluded. Clever people, they had brought up a child too clever for her own good; others, less loving than them, had read her flawed intelligence and she had been played again and again. She had learned how to turn her vulnerability into a facade, a baited hook, drawing in the powerful and playing them for all they were (considerably) worth. Well that was going to stop, she thought, a moment before the Merlot drained her resolve and the headache snake ate again into the top of her neck.
She enjoyed a sliver of relief just from the thought that London was receding behind her; she could entertain for a while the fantasy that she was leaving the place forever on her way to total disappearance. That she could throw off the double ankle manacles she wore; always the deadline, and always the faint marinating fear that someone would finally have worked her out, caught on to her imposter trick, dug up the dead bodies and found they were made up of bragging, uncovered the e-mail trail that contained nothing of interest to anyone, flicked through ancient social media posts and cross-checked with CCTV and found almost less than zero.
The train entered a tunnel. Mandi felt the air push in through her ears, and a broken windscreen swallow her mind. In the jump cut from bright natural light to the dull bluey lamps of the First Great Western, the other passengers, positioned in the tableau of seating, were transformed into bit-part players in a haunting. With a sigh the sliding door at the end of the carriage drew back. The iconic wedge of train drove through the darkness. Behind a returning service trolley, decked with Quavers, Yorkie bars and shortbread fingers, the steward barked offers of hot drinks and alcohol. Responding to a request, she bent over a diaphanous elderly woman at a table, and when she smiled her teeth were smashed and blood ran down her chin into the waxed cardboard cup she was holding. Flash. Out of the tunnel and light drove all this nonsense away. Mandi gazed out of the window, where London was just a bad memory; a footprint the express escaped every day into soft hills and odd figurations in the fields: the great planes of solar panels, concrete pinball machines, orange dinosaurs, and weather-blanked adverts propped against wheelless trucks. Passing through slow comforts; the solid handle that held the cutting edge to the meat. Ahead of this stolid country, lay utopia and change, she hoped. Mandi tipped her cup and three small bottles of red wine into the flapping plastic bag of the passing cleaner; the bottles clinking on something at the bottom of the translucence. Hope hit her like a hammer and she wanted to turn back.
3
Mandi changed at Exeter St Davids, and caught the local stopper. First, though, she bought herself a flat white and drank it beneath adverts for obscure touring theatre shows; ageing TV stars cranking up their smiles against crumpled velveteen backgrounds, like prizes in the dusty window of an arcade of one armed bandits.
By the time she dragged her lumpy, hastily packed suitcase onto the platform at Devil’s Sett it was dark. The amusements had closed for the year; their modest structures barely visible against the obscure sky. Skeletal and dog-eared pirates swung above the crazy golf and a fuzzy line of industrial-style units stretched off towards the sea. Mandi crept through the gap under the railway tracks, past the silenced forms of the novelty shop and the sooty shell of the burned-out amusement centre. She could raise neither contempt nor delight at the sign for “FLAMING HOT BURGERS” pinned to the temporary metal fencing around the smoke-besmirched ruin.
As the sun had sunk somewhere into Somerset, Mandi had rehearsed a few conversations. She had imagined soaking up commiserations, politely but firmly rejecting offers of help, welcoming in a controlled way a few memories of her suddenly absent fake-parents and even tried out a eulogy or two in her head. So, when she spotted a figure in the shadows of the camp’s arch-like gateposts, she had a set of alternative responses already to hand.
‘Mandi Lyon?’
Anne and Bryan’s holiday camp, stood out from the others. Instead of a ‘BRIGHT SANDS’ or a ‘SUNNY HAVEN’, the cranky letters on the billboard outside their camp spelled out ‘LOST HORIZON’ as if the inhabitants might have become disorientated and ended up there by chance. The place had long ago given up the pretence that it was a simple holiday camp, though Mandi was uncertain about the legal significance of that; many of the residents were permanent and though they still rented their properties, these were now their only homes. Some had been there since before Mandy was born. There were lights burning in the windows of the lines of immovable mobile homes; their approximate sameness dull in the thick moonless autumn evening. Inside, there would be great anxiety and insecurity, and Mandi knew that she had come to assume responsibility for calming those vivid fears. A wisp of steam rose from a trailer and then floated away. The camp seemed to be settling in on itself, like an animal sinking into the shelter of long grass, making itself small, as if a predator had come close.
Stepping into the sodium glow of the street lamps, the shaggy white-haired man held out his hand. Mandi took it and it was cold. She looked into his face and the eyes were warm and watery. She swallowed; suddenly fearful that they would leap from their sockets.
“My name’s Crabbe. I have recently been working here as caretaker, for your parents. Please accept my condolences.”
‘Condolences’; Mandi had not prepared for ‘condolences’. Why would an unexpected word matter? ‘Condolences’ were no different from ‘commiserations? Or ‘sympathy’? Ready to feel misery, she was surprised by the word’s dolefulness; it was ridiculous. She had no such words. She could not reply. She opened her mouth and it might as well have been a cave for all it could speak for itself. She felt the cold air on her teeth.
The caretaker was unnaturally still and comfortable. As if he was expertly putting Mandi at her ease. Yet the silence grew and grew. Expanding out across the dull blue-brown grid of the camp. Mandi followed the tiny darting movements of the caretaker’s eyes. She had no idea what to say or how to respond. Her mind was a blank and getting blanker. Everything around was tightly focused, in high definition. The knobbly white-painted stones to mark the verge, the dimples on the kiosk shaped like a giant golf ball that sold candyfloss in the summer months, the leaves of palm trees snapped in recent high winds, the expanse of road, wide for the coach parties, dull orange and its surface shiny with the dampness brought on by evening. Nothing would ever come here again, no child would ever bang a spade with a bucket, no mother ever clutch swimming costumes rolled in a towel unless Mandi could speak and make it so.
“Perhaps you would like to put your things away, before...”
“Yes! Thank you.”
“Shall I?”
“No, I’m fine...”
Tears rolled out of her eyes like balls around a pinball machine; they felt silvery and heavy on her cheeks.
“Take your time”, said the caretaker, and swung about. His weatherproof trousers crackled and the anorak tied around his waist swished like a skirt. Even under the sodium lights, it was clear that he was dressed entirely in black, but for the smears of mud around his knees. His hand, although cold, had been soft, soft for someone who worked with their hands.
“You don’t need to see anyone this evening.”
“No, I want to get it done with.”
“Done with?”
“Get it over with.”
The caretaker stopped and looked at a pothole in the camp driveway, he kicked some gravel into its puddle.
“I think I should tell you, straight off, Ms Lyon...”
“Mandi.”
“...Mandi... I’m not sure that it will be possible to get it done with tonight.”
“O, I understand that. But I thought that I should at least reassure the residents.”
“That you are taking on the community?”
“That I will do whatever is best, within my....”
What was the word? What was any word? What word might do? Or was a replacement for words? The cave of silence opened up again like black wings. The world on pause. Mandi felt her muscles seizing mid-stride. The crunch of gravel seemed to retreat deep inside the cave; if the caretaker was trying to help her out, his words were far too muffled for Mandi to mind. It probably only lasted a moment, a few seconds at most, but it was already clear to Mandi that there were large gaps opening up in her sense of things; there were important subject matters missing from the big picture.
“This is it. But, of course, you remember...”
Her fake parents had done their best to turn the little bungalow into an alien temple. Dreamcatchers hung in lines. The house name was in Arabic. Above an enamelled representation of the ‘Mallard’ steam train, twin giant antlers poked, long and branched and sharp, from what looked like an unfeasibly small skull; reaching into the night, as if feeling for the lost souls of Anne and Bryan. Mandi could only see the first flash again and again and their heads striking the reinforced screens and the skin peeled from their skulls. There was no button to press for a doorbell, but a chime and a hammer. Several walking sticks, all mostly shaped by nature, stood in the feet of two old boots, painted white. Beyond the frosted glass, Mandi could just about make out a red hanging and its golden sigil. Over the years of meeting on neutral ground, in tasteful refurbishments of old pubs, chewing seared scallops and sipping dry white wines, Mandi had forgotten just how weird her parents were. Out of their natural habitat, they must have become expert in adopting the trappings of normal; Mandi had forgotten all the mystical tat, as though she had never had any part in it.
‘Do you have a key?’
‘No....’
‘I have their spare.’
The caretaker inserted the key in the lock and then stood back to allow Mandi to turn it. She released the lock, pushed the thick door ajar and removed the key.
‘You keep it.’
She pocketed the key and felt inside for a light switch. It was only as she touched the angle of the switch itself, and ran her finger along its edge, did it occur to her that she had come home. The light clicked on and everything snapped back into place; as if in the darkness it had been in chaos, but now, illuminated, it had presented itself to her in a familiar mask.
She gasped.
For a moment she felt the caretaker’s hand lightly supporting her, between her shoulder blades, and then it was gone.
“I’ll leave you.”
“No. Yes... but... come back...”
“I don’t normally work in the... but, obviously... in half an hour?”
“An hour.”
“Fine”, and he was gone, blackness into blackness.
Mandi ran through the tiny hall, along the dog-leg of corridor and threw herself into what had been her room. Flicking the light switch as she fell through the frame of the door, she had expected to feel her horror rising at a room preserved exactly as she had left it twelve years before. Instead, she froze, half-folded at the knees. There was no trace of her here at all. Anne and Bryan had wiped her away. For a moment she thought she might have chosen the wrong door, forgetful after such a long absence, but there was no mistaking the oddly sloping ceiling and the walls painted in chipped black, tiny stars of orange and pink emerging from the next layers down. Other than the walls, everything else was storage. Boxes and boxes of banal cardboard. Ribbed cardboard, hard cardboard, flat-pack and bubble-wrapped. The boxes, cases and other receptacles reached right up to the ceiling in places. There was no bed, no set of drawers, no wardrobe, no den, no silk hanging, no posters, no shrines to this and that god. No VHS collection. No tank-like recorder. No telly. The whole anomalous, anachronistic world in which she had spent so much, too much, of her childhood was no more, nuked, vapourised, and repurposed as storage space. Falling to her knees, Mandi sprang straight back up, pushing off a tower of cases, she rushed down the dog leg and around the house. A few glances and she quickly knew that if anything of hers was still there, it was modest and well hidden.
She lay down on the Persian carpet in the living room and felt herself falling in between its weft and warp – why had they erased her like that? – down into a deep basin of white, white, empty light.
4
A few miles further down the coast, at the fingertip of the northern arm of The Bay, four white figures moved in sinister harmony. The cliffs had long ago been levelled by quarrying and a grey platform now stretched out a hundred yards into the sea. The ghost-like figures moved across the limestone shelf. For things so bright they moved so darkly.
The four figures rushed to the edge of the water, fell to their knees in unison, then onto their bellies; swinging high-powered rifles off their shoulders and onto their retractable supports. Four eyes trained through four scopes upon a single shadow on the water. Only to those educated eyes was anything present there; to any casual onlooker – an early morning dog walker, a wild camper emerging from a hidden tent – there was only a dark sea under a grey sky.
Phutt, phutt, phutt... phutt. Each of the white snipers got off a single round and for a moment half a mile offshore the ocean was cut white like chalk on a blackboard. Then it darkened again. All four firers wrestled lightweight binoculars up to their eyes; but if there was blood it was as black as the sea and invisible to them. Whatever shadow they might have thought they saw before, there was none there now. As swiftly as they arrived, they departed, sweeping up their weapons and running bent-kneed back across the silvery platform to the leafy-roofed paths that ran around the sides of the sheer quarry face. Just before disappearing into the green, they checked one last time for any unfortunate witness who might have caught more than the flutter of gulls or a last gasp of sea mist. Nothing. They conveyed satisfaction to each other in glances, then, before turning into the tunnels, rolled down their white masks over four sets of lips coloured in different shades of red, and under four powdered chins.
Their nigh-silent shapes were swallowed by the black greens of the moonless wooded cliff. Nothing moved on the limestone platform. Then, with a crackle of Puffa jacket, a man with a face like a wide dish, rose from his knees from beyond a pile of discarded quarry workings. Shielding the screen with his hand, he checked what his video camera had caught, made a note in a small red Silvine notebook, then clasped his chest and shook violently.
5
The ocean gulped as the red shape hit it, falling. Warm and shallow waters rose up around the sail-like shape; giant pillars of spume that wrapped the dark thing in whiteness. For a few seconds a shining lily of bubbles stood out above the waves, while beneath them the gradually sinking flotilla of tiny corpses, the remnants of miniscule ocean creatures that had worked as much of their passage as they mortally could, blew up in clouds of muddiness. A shoal of Arctolepis fled, their arrowhead bodies slicing through the blue, soft heads swivelling to and fro; a giant Dunkleosteus, nine metres in length, soaked up the vibrations, its jointed neck armour pushed back upon itself and the invisible underwater wave striking between its stony teeth. On the ocean floor a rainbow forest of stalked crinoids turned their flowery umbrella-heads to the commotion on the surface.
The dark red shape spread itself for a moment, like a massive carpet, a Liopleurodon-sized parasol of tissue, the writhing spokes of which emitted vicious spines, jabbing blindly at the foam. With a sudden hiccup, it seemed to spread even further, increasing its girth, then the whole thing flipped over. With a thump the waters folded in on themselves, handlebar eyes and a white beak rose up from its insides and with a beat the parasol spasmed and sent the creature heading for the darker waters, for the unusual caves, for the resting places of the strange things that even the deep swimming Cladoselaches rarely saw.
High up – or was it deep within? – an exhausted God, slumped across His creation, broken and seduced, wondering what it was that He had allowed, capable of reaching even His cold and ageless Perfection, bringing His worst fears – fears that He did not even know He had until that moment – to such a stained fruition in a passion of mucus, suckers, froth, sinew, blood and desire. Before long the light blue Devonian seas had returned to their soft continuity, a gentle blanket running up to the edges of the limestone mountains already emerging from its ossuary-floor; a benign corridor to Gondwana. Glittering as the scales of lobe-fins reflected the bright sun from below, that empty God tried to look upon the face of the waters, tried to tell Himself and any creature that would listen that it was good; but He knew that there was now a red darkness down there, where light and darkness were still unseparated, locked to each other in a furious lust, and that He did not know what it was, though He knew it was there, down there, known only to the Trilobites and sinking detritus of gelatinous zooplanktons, the Salps and Medusae Jellies upon which She snacked; waiting and preparing Herself, for another assault upon His Perfection.
6
Mandi opened her eyes. The early morning gloom revealed dim shapes of musty furniture. Unable to bring herself to sleep in her foster parent's bed, Mandi had arranged a few cushions from the sofa on the living room floor and covered herself with a thin duvet. The scent of old incense had grown increasingly nauseous. No sooner had she lain down, than she was up again, fetching herself a glass of water, into which she slipped a couple of co-codamol, before sinking back onto the cushions, watching them dissolve.
The co-codamal soon took its effect, bringing some relief to Mandi's pounding head, but sleep had taken longer to come. Mandi had got to her feet, flicked on the kettle by the sink, and then stiffly bent over the lounge fire, muscles still cramped by the confines of the seats on the trains. Turning the numbered dial until it clicked; lighted gas hissed across the radiants. She liked the way that everything was in easy reach, one of the simple pleasures of mobile homes.
To the right of the fireplace was her parents’ bookshelf. Flicking on a lamp, Mandi scanned the titles, looking for something to read. Each volume was dedicated to a different aspect of paganism, witchcraft or the occult. She sighed in frustration at their narrow concerns. All the books had been arranged by theme or author. Three titles on Santeria next to a handful on Chaos magic. Then a generous section on modern witchcraft and, inevitably, a few Crowleys, Valientes and a couple of beautifully bound Scarlet Imprints. Mandi hated them all.
Mandi had flicked on her mobile. No 4G, so no chance of socialising. Just a text from the disposable guy asking if he could have his ipod back. Mandi smiled at three desperate xxx's that ended the message. Men's hopes, she thought, so frequently outweigh their sense of reality. She texted back, asking him for a postal addresses, promising to send it back in return for hers and suggesting he leave it at the front desk at her office. She pondered the use of a smiley, but that might be misconstrued, and she plumped for nothing. Casual cruelty calmed her nerves and she laid back down into the cushions, drifted far from incense into darkness, and the next thing she knew, was waking, dreamless, grey lumps of heavy furniture towering above her.
The caretaker opened the door slowly and modestly. Eased himself through a gap no wider than necessary and closed the door deftly behind him, turning a key rapidly in the Yale lock of his home.
“No one locks their doors in Lost Horizon,” she said.
“You saw the penny arcade. There’s someone around.”
Yet none of the doors they called at that morning were locked. The residents were more anxious about Mandi’s arrival than warding off fire-raisers.
Most of the camp was locked up for the winter. Bryan and Anne’s home was stationed close to the gates, a sentinel to it all. Once past their home, were rows of identical trailer-chalets; empty now, they made for an odd walk: part film location, part salesroom. Why did working class people from industrial counties choose to stay in such mass-manufactured hutches? And why did middle-class folk, as homogenous as could be, feel they had a licence to sneer at these comfy little homes from home? Anonymous containers filled for a week or two with summer meanings, squeezing families into foreign shapes. Bryan had been working his way through this part of the site; the boundary where the crash had interrupted his work was quite distinct; rather than the neat hollows with the mattresses tipped on their end, the cabins were a riot of sheets and minor holiday detritus. At this border, Bryan had made neat piles of cheap buckets with busted handles, cracked mirrors and damaged St George’s flags. Mandi swept up an armful of Christmas bunting that had blown in from somewhere else on the resort and threw it on top of the mess of red crosses.
There was something disturbingly systematic about the caretaker’s introductions. Rather than go trailer to trailer, he wove around and through the rows, before doubling back to a home they had passed much earlier; as if there were a proper order at odds with the cartographical logic of the camp. Mandi supposed she must have known some of these people quite well in her teens, but they were no more familiar to her than distant relatives on the edges of a wedding photo, people that no one spoke of anymore. As they entered each of the cabins, she got the same feeling each time, of an eccentricity that was trying to impress itself upon her, but always in the same way. There were different styles, however, and the caretaker had arranged their visit in an ordering of these.
First came the followers of the Light with their airy properties, windows that let in the day, mirrors that expanded the boundaries of their homes, First Nations images, fairies and angelology. Here were people who followed to the letter the Wiccan rede “An it harm none, do what ye will”; folk who had repurposed the Christian image of the witch as Satan’s bride to their own version of gentle earth healer. Then the Darker side with their sigils, tattoos, pentacles and chalices, Gothery and completist collections of Psychic TV recordings. These darker folk, with an uneasy relationship to Crowley, preferring the unbridled “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” to the Wiccans’ innocuous version. Their witch was Lilith.
Mandi could not help the feeling, when she was not lapsing into drowsiness, that these people hardly knew her adoptive parents at all. She had imagined that this would be a tight community, bound together by shared ideas and a cosy over-knowing, the kind of complacent set up that she despised. Yet there was nothing of that; instead she felt that the camp was in the grip of a helpless paranoia. The kind of thing you would feel in a company before a round of compulsory redundancies; she had seen such faces when she worked in HR and it had been her job, as the junior, to deliver the bad news. It would be wrong to say she enjoyed the cruelty of it, but she relished any necessity for cutting herself off from sympathy in the interests of a greater thing. That greater thing was her secret lover; on the outside she slinked around the feeding frenzies of individualism, keeping the zealots to their word, but in her dreams there was always something else, some principle, behind it all, within it all, deep down. There was a pattern guiding those thrashing bodies and virtuously greedy splashes. The nights she enjoyed the most were in the arms of that pattern, wasting time with a bottle of crude Merlot and Netflix, then curling up in fresh cotton sheets and feeling that spiritual thing, that pulsing disembodied landscape just below the mattress, the demesne where she was queen. That was why she was a cut above the others, she reassured herself, because she didn’t just believe in any of this stuff; she was in love with it, and her love was blessed by...
“What? Sorry...”
She was suddenly aware that the fairy princess and her dreadlocked knight were staring across at her from their threadbare sofa expecting some kind of response.
“I’m sorry... lost in... with the deaths and all that... could you run me through that again?”
And under the gaze of the caretaker, Mandi dutifully attended to the plans and fears of the piskie pair.
“Hijacking, that’s what we’re saying! If you don’t do something the funeral will be hijacked!”
The knight swept some biscuit crumbs from his beard and the princess brushed them onto the carpet and rearranged her shawl.
“We wouldn’t want the... Goths, we call them... you know who I mean?”
The caretaker sharpened his stare. Mandi nodded and shot a warning glance at the caretaker.
“Then you know what they’re like.” She didn’t, but she could make a good guess. “They want to make out that your Mum and Dad were one of them...”
“Two of them”, the knight corrected, and grinned, pleased with himself, folded his arms and knocked his coffee mug from the arm of the sofa. Brown liquid fell thinly over a box of fantasy figures.
“O!”
The princess sprang lightly to her feet and was then swiftly on her knees mopping up with a J Cloth, soaking up the greasy coffee, and dabbing the laminated surface before anything could sink in. For some reason, and she did not like to imagine that there was any real reason, Mandi was minded of the grey-brown stream that sneaked around the edges of the camp, a stickiness underfoot and a fetid smell. She felt the hairs on her arm rising and a clammy bead or two hanging on her forehead. She needed some fresh air, but that would have to wait.
“We’re concerned for their memory, Amanda. That is important to people like us.”
As though it was not to her.
“Let me do this”, said the princess, returning to the sofa having tossed the J cloth into the cluttered sink. “Amanda. Your Mum and Dad were lovely people, and they deserve to be remembered that way. There wasn’t an ounce of nastiness in either of them. Nothing was ever too much for them; a repair here and there, keeping the place clean, running smooth, letting people have their own space, they didn’t poke their nose into other people’s business like you can get in some pagan communities, know what I mean?”
Why would Mandi know? Why would she think she knew? How much had she forgotten?
“We’d like everyone to remember the best side of your Mum and Dad. They were generous, they had big souls, they had bright spirits. There was no side to them. That’s who they were. Plain good. That’s why... I’m sorry I have to say this, Amanda, but that’s why you have to stop the others from using the funeral as a... pulpit!”
She spat the word out, like spoiled milk.
“They will!” announced the knight, shaking his hair into a twirling skirt. A paper lampshade on the table behind the sofa was caught in the draught and very, very slowly keeled onto its side. The knight turned in surprise, but could not make out what had happened.
“Please help us, Amanda. We are fighting for your Mum and Dad.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The fairy princess smoothed down her long skirt and then folded her hands into a woven sigil in her lap.
“We wish you to hand over the officiating at the ceremony to a neutral figure; there are many respected wise folk in the area, not the immediate area, but Totnes maybe? Your parents deserve a neutral ceremony.”
“I see”, said Mandi, standing. The handmade chair creaking in relief. The caretaker stood, as if her own shadow were following her. “Send me some names.”
And they were swiftly out of there, Mandi striding down the lane between the cabins before it struck her that she had no idea where to go to next and turned to the caretaker.
“This way,” and he turned them around and led the way to the door of the darker forces.
The darker forces had their headquarters in a large flat caravan-like structure at the far reaches of the permanent section of the camp. Those parts which had once made it mobile were now melted into a concrete base which in turn was now covered by a carpet of green moss. Even in the grey winter light, the moss shone with a sparkling gem-like aura. Guarding the steps up to the cabin were cairns made variously of stones and animal bones. Many of the bones had succumbed to the green invasion, the white had all but disappeared beneath the wash of algae. The effect was of a damp but glowing kingdom; but inside was very different. It was more of a warehouse. Multiple copies of the same volumes sat about in fierce pillars, some bound with fibrous straps. The walls were lined with gaudy shelves of red and black volumes, multiple copies of the same editions. The two managers of this odd little entrepôt had managed to combine into their dress a certain bookishness with Dungeons and Dragons camp. Crescent-shaped reading glasses obscured thick mascara, a warrior’s skirt over woolly tights, fingerless black gloves and curved fingers flattened at the end by endless thumping on keyboards. Screens winked at their work stations.
“Come in!”
Cassandra (not her real name the caretaker explained later, in case Mandi was concerned about the “Tracy” on the rental agreement) waved a handful of jiffy bags as if she were about to skim fleets of ninja throwing stars at her guests. Tossing the paper shuriken aside, she slid an office chair across the room. Mimir (same arrangement as Cassandra, the caretaker later assured her) produced another chair from behind one of the bibliopiles and steered it, at Cassandra’s bidding. Mandi was asked to choose one or the other. She hated these slippery things.
“First, please accept our congratulations on the transition. Time is artificial. Be assured that your Mother and Father...”
“My adoptive parents to be ... precise...”
“O... that they...”
“There is no death”, offered Mimir. “Only a change of worlds.”
Mandi wondered about thanking them, but the idea of ‘precision’ had suddenly struck her as intensely absurd, particularly here in their paper keep.
“Do you mind if I had a moment? To look at your books?”
They probably thought that Mandi needed a moment to collect her thoughts and feelings, but those had been assembled, logged, salted and stored behind the absurdly thick door of her vault a while ago. No, she was laughing and she wanted to enjoy the respite it gave her. Checking the spines, she turned her back on the room; pulling down a random volume here and there to scan the blurbs; she built up a rapid snapshot of the couple’s publishing predilections. They were remarkably eclectic: staring out at Mandi were unicorns with dopey eyes, angels flashing gossamer wings, mailed fists and magicians in monkish outfits, chalices swilling with suspiciously viscous stuff, random bare-breasted dryads and all the watery sensualism a charlatan publishers might wish for without a hint of genuine transcendence. How did they get away with it?
“So, you are....what?”
“O”, said Mimir. “That’s not... us! We serve as a kind of shell company for vanity writers; angels, fairies, stuff that nobody reads, the writer’s family and immediate circle, perhaps, and when I say ‘read’ I mean ‘buy’. No one reads much past the first few pages. But it creates the...”
“Illusion?”
“The magic! Of publication. It’s a service. And it pays for the real stuff.”
Cassandra pulled aside some ferocious packages of goth fantasy, crying out. In preciously carved shelves, sat tiny chapbooks. Eased from their positions, Cassandra presented a few on her open palms.
“Look, don’t touch; you’ll draw the energy.”
There was almost nothing there. Just the suggestion of power. Cassandra prised open the covers of one. Hand printed, expensive heavily grained paper, watermark, simple sigils. That was it.
“Not to be messed with.”
Cassandra placed them back in the shelves and Mimir pushed the piles of bound fantasies back into place. The kings were in their castles, all was well for the time being.
A long silence descended over the trailer.
“I’ve come to find out if there is anything .... for my Mum and Dad’s funeral, we’re making the arrangements. I imagine you would want to come.”
Mimir and Cassandra did not react and Mandi was unsure if, in their minds, the question needed no reply, or they were still deciding.
“We want to be inclusive...”
Why was she playing this stupid game?
“I don’t know if you know this, Amanda...”
Cassandra handed the baton to Mimir.
“Let’s talk straight.”
Mimir folded his arms, but Cassandra took the baton straight back.
“Truth is this, Amanda. We knew your Mum and Dad better than anyone here, and they would not appreciate having their transition marred by the love and light and “harm none” brigade. That was not their magic. They were into something stronger. They were... mild people, but I got the impression they liked to get results. Do you get my meaning?”
“I don’t remember them ever mentioning you...”
“We weren’t close, but it was obvious... they weren’t fairy and crystal people...”
“Thank you. We have a lot to do.”
Mandi rose from her chair and the caretaker was already holding open the front door. The fresh air felt sharp and good on Mandi’s cheeks. She breathed in gulps as if someone had had their thumbs on her throat. Mimir and Cassandra stood, baffled, at their door.
“I know exactly what you want”, called Mandi and strode down the lane between the dwellings of housesitting hobbits, bookkeeping princesses, entrepreneurial fairies and desktop chieftains. “Leave it to me!” Weak strings of smoke and steam rose from the caravans and shacks. Ducks clanked through the distant mist.
When she and the caretaker arrived back at Bryan and Anne’s home, Cassandra was already waiting for them.
“I hope you don’t mind, I let myself in. It’s better if we talk without the Viking, woman to woman.”
Mandi glanced sideways at the caretaker.
“He’s fine”, said Cassandra. “He’s different. He takes care. Do you mind if I smoke?”
As Cassandra rolled a joint, filling it with some rough and ragged weed, home grown by the rancid smell of it, she laid out her fears as if she were rolling out a map. Mandi had not noticed her stick or the old-fashioned callipers that supported the lower part of her right leg. Someone had yarn-bombed it. As she spoke, Cassandra gazed about the room in wonder.
“Have you been here before?”
“No one has. This was the holy of holies. I’ve never seen any of this, but I can read it like a book. That’s not what I’ve come to talk about. Amanda, you were involved in a terrible thing. Your parents, your adoptive parents weren’t they? I can’t exaggerate what it must have been like for them, and for you, I’m sure. The papers, the media, they indulged in this... spasm of collective amnesia... like the dogshit, the moment the authorities said it was the fault of the dogshit, who was interested? Who remembers three kiddies killed by dogshit? Who wants to read about that over their cornflakes?”
“Other cereals are available.”
Cassandra didn’t understand and ploughed on.
“That was a time when the media didn’t even use the term ‘shit’! Dogshit was something really, really boring people bothered about; and even they didn’t use the word. There was no celebrity dogshit, no A list dogshit, no VIP dogshit room, no executive dogshit...”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“See, even you don’t want to hear! It was a smart move on their part! Because, what was the alternative for them? Yeh, they could have put your Mom and Dad, adoptive, inside, put them on trial, they could have had you taken away, secure facility, say you were.... what? Evil? Deranged? A case of psychological whatever. They can do those things, you know? I know for a fact, because I was told by one of their best friends, that they fought – your Mom and Dad, adoptive – they fought tooth and nail to keep you out of the clutches of the psychologists. And, fair play, the authorities didn’t really want to go there. Dogshit was their stroke of genius. Bingo – it was all a problem with the drains. How many poltergeist incidents are down to faulty wiring and bad pipes? Houses on geological faults! Get my drift? Your Mom and Dad escaped, got away with it, because the authorities knew that if they did put them on the stand...”
‘On the stand’? What was this, a John Grisham thing?
“...they had to accept the possibility that the child abuse thing would fall apart, where was the evidence? Your Mom and Dad were good people! They adopted, for Chissake! And then what were they left with? Magic.”
“Cassandra, please don’t take this the wrong way...”
The caretaker shifted, so barely noticeable that Mandi turned to him. He was frozen.
“...but I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.”
“No, no, no, no... no reason why you would. It’s a long, long time ago... sounds like a fairy story. But it wasn’t. The media may have forgotten, the sheeple may have gone back to their dreams, but the pagan community has never forgotten. That’s why your Mom and Dad, adoptive or not....”
“No, they were... no question about it... they were not my actual parents...”
“They had a very special place in our community. When your community has had its witches burned for hundreds of years... they were our living martyrs. They were almost gods, Amanda, gods. Aristocracy, at the very least...’
Mandi realised that she was talking about Anne and Bryan, not Morgan le Fay and the Pendle Witches.
“Most of us, if we are really honest with ourselves, don’t see much real magic. Don’t get me wrong, the magic is real; we can... the best of, we can make an enemy fall ill and heal a friend, we can get you the lover you want, bingo, even if only for you to find out you don’t really, we can get you a good deal on a second hand car and conjure you a minor demon if you’re willing to put up with a lifetime of hassle, but what has any of that really changed? We know the spells, we celebrate the coincidences, the miracles, the way the world seems to respond to us, the arrival of unexpected animals, the schadenfreude when an enemy trips over the kerb, the magic of falling in love and of dying. But not so many of us get to stand at the door of the Otherworld and look right down. Your Mom and Dad were right there next to you...”
“I just told you. I don’t remember anything. I know there was a fuss, and that at some time they had to stop certain people coming here, I wasn’t allowed the... freedom I wanted at one time... because of something that had happened... but all kids are like that... setting fires, stealing from the shops...”
“No, Amanda, excuse me. Not all kids are like that. Not all kids are like you. Nobody’s like you, baby. I’ve said too much.”
Leaning on her stick, her young yet bony hands running over its shaft carved with interwoven plant forms, she levered herself out of the sofa, took a last long look around the room; reading it like an Egyptologist might a recently excavated room of hieroglyphics, hoovering it up with her thick mascara eyes. She tapped the stick three times on the carpet, followed its pattern to the front door, then turned so her shawl spread like a crow’s wing.
“I’ve said too much. Forgive me. Dead dogs. Dead dogs. I saw you in our home, scared to fall asleep, don’t be afraid of sleep. It’s daily consciousness that is The Fall, the unconscious is the path to redemption.”
“I’m sorry, I was just...”
And she was gone, the door blanking out her black swoop against the grey sky.
“I need to be getting on with...”
Her words trailed off, as if she had left a fading presence. Mandi stared accusingly at the caretaker.
“When, excuse me, is anyone going to tell me what the fuck this mystery is all about? Do you want some coffee?”
The caretaker refused blankly. Mandi had no energy left to argue with him. She was shocked. Never before had she owned up to anyone that she was tired. She was never tired. She was always tired. But she had a perpetual generator of energy, churning out anger and hard work, and she fed it with her exhaustion. Where did tiredness come from?
She thanked the caretaker, conjuring a politeness that was physically painful for her. Crabbe repeated that there were "things to do", and Mandi watched him as he marched slowly off in the direction of the park office. Why did so many of them dress in black?
Back inside, Mandi put the kettle on the stove and slumped on the sofa. Instinctively she looked at her mobile, hoping that there might be some 4G, perhaps a temporary gust of signal brought in by the northerly breeze that she had felt picking up throughout the morning. But nothing. Not even a text.
A few years ago, one summer’s day, Mandi had shared lunch with Anne and Bryan at the Barge Inn at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire. A couple of hours out from London, Mandi had endured the drive out of the city and across the chalk downs. The script of these lunches had been written not long after Mandi returned from the States and started meeting her adoptive parents again. Bryan would start by asking how Mandi was "getting along", a question so big and bland that Mandi always struggled to respond; she made things up, constructed huge falsehoods so absurd that Anne and Bryan were challenged to call her a liar. They never did. Then Anne would enquire about her relationships, asking in a faux tongue-in-cheek manner, knowing she would be annoyed, if she had found "Mr Right". Mandi hated the passive aggression in the questioning, and called it out every time. She knew that Anne hated it too, she spoke it in quotation marks – thank god she spared them that awful four fingers thing – but could not help herself. Playing something she was not, something far worse than she was; but those games were starting to make more – and worse – sense now. She often wondered if she might have called a halt to the meetings, were it not for the energy they released into her next opinion piece; they gave her all the ammunition and pain she would need to lay waste to the fake displays of caring and self-absorbed noseying into the business of others that had skewed the moral compass of the baby-boomers. No, though, she was beginning to suspect that she had misread them completely; that they had been playing a much longer game. And Mandi hadn’t even been on the pitch.
Although she had always kept in touch after leaving home, Mandi felt no particular closeness to her parents. Contact was more of a familial duty than anything borne out of fondness. For certain, she held a sort of love for them, but she was not interested enough in their lives to invest much effort in getting to know them – why had she not thought how strange that was at the time? – or what they really cared about. How come she suddenly felt that twinge of guilt just before they died? Although she had bathed the wound in cocaine and dry white wine she remembered wishing that things were otherwise; but what could be more inauthentic than changing the past? The past was not a set of car keys you could mislay and find again. One it was fucked, it was fucked for all eternity, it would not be coming back. They would not be coming back. And she was wasting her time fretting about it. Get it down and on the blog and forget about it. Forgetting. She was good at that, queen bitch at that, a goddess of that. She would get a lot of sympathy likes and retweets and a less than usually cantankerous comments thread from her male followers. She would hit a sickening nerve and she will tell them so. They loved to be told off by Mandi. The Mandi she had invented, the goddess of the Abyss.
She had not been a goddess to her parents. Those occasional lunches were just fine as far as she was concerned. The drive was a welcome interruption to London driving. The food was never bad. Anne and Bryan had good taste in culinary matters, out of key with the rest of their ‘alternative’ dispositions; although they never mentioned the names of chefs or owners, they seemed to know people and people seemed to know them wherever they met.
Eventually, at these events, Anne and Bryan would both run out of questions and a pall would fall over the meal. Un ange passe. They were surprisingly uncomfortable in these long ‘angelic’ silences; almost as though they had expected that this ‘nothing’ was where all their questions would lead. Or that there was something they ought to be talking about, but never did. Mandi didn’t mind the pauses; she could concentrate on the food, sip the wine and taste the parts of it; it was only a politeness that she hated that would bring her to responding to an imagined cue to ask how they were "getting along", a question never too huge or bland for Anne and Bryan. Each of these Wiltshire lunch dates were arranged to coincide with one of a number of investigations her adoptive parents were conducting into one "earth mystery" or another. Despite her distant feelings, this project-making always irritated the hell out of Mandi. She would have liked to feel that she was interesting enough to warrant a journey in her own right, rather than figure as a minor landmark along the way. But then those who ‘searched’ would rarely see what was in front of her eyes; that was the cliché. She had swallowed it and turned into a bland-angry blog piece. Her readers loved that kind of thing; a chance to feel superior to Mandi’s New Age targets, so next piece she skewered her readers right in the entitlement gland. But that was not what she had been missing? She tried to remember where the meetings had taken place, what the pattern of the old sites? But her diary had been digital and wiped itself automatically. She had no idea anymore.
On one particular trip to Wiltshire, Bryan had talked about links between that summer’s slew of crop circles and a geographical relationship to ancient burial mounds. She remembered that, but not the details. He had talked excitedly about geometric patterns, paraphrasing some new books he had speed-read. Mandi picked at her parmigiana and gulped, displacedly, at a third glass of wine; waiting for her chance to get in the factoid about random patterns like these being just as observable in the case of former branches of Woolworths. They took her scepticism in good heart, as she took their credulity. They thought the two things equivalent, she did not, and, infuriatingly and brilliantly, they regarded this contradiction with the same equanimity. She had taken another sip, ordered another glass, surrendered any idea of getting back to London that evening, and found it difficult not to agree with their agreeability.
When they met for the final time, Anne had been attempting to contact aliens, again. She had been visiting Warminster ever since the famous UFO flaps of the 1960s; in the early days digging Bryan out of bed on a whim for early morning dashes to the East. Now she had designed a new ritual to revive the meetings on the hilltops, the spontaneous gatherings of similar longing souls that never quite did enough to draw the serious attention of intergalactic messengers who, Anne still believed, had important information for humankind.
"In these end times" said Anne "we really need to try to understand what these aliens are trying to communicate to us. The Earth is in such upheaval, dear."
"Have you thought about what the future holds for the Earth, Mandi?" Asked Bryan.
Mandi wondered what it would be like to talk to her parents about how she should decorate her flat, or about music or fashion; anything not involving the future of the universe or messages from the beyond or any of the other piddling "big ideas" they found so engrossing. Her parents were obsessed with big ideas, the way some people are obsessed with football teams. They got a giant kick out of it, win or lose, revelation or debunking, they were always loyal; but Mandi wanted to win, to be the Right Woman, she did not enjoy the gnashing of teeth. She wanted cymbals and glitter and reliable drugs.
Once, when yet another ange had passe, Mandi had explained that, no, she had not thought much about the future of the Earth, but she recycled and all that shit even though she knew much it had been proved to be a con; that the only way things would change would be when big state did something about big things and let individuals consume whatever they wanted, learn to be resilient, stick up for themselves, instead of living like weeping snowflakes bewailing the state of the planet.
"Talking of our future" said Anne "there's a couple of things we need to let you know about."
Bryan took the baton.
"Your Mum and me wanted to let you know that we've written our wills and you, of course in the event of our deaths, are the sole beneficiary."
What to say? "Thank-you" did not really cut it. She knew that she should suggest that "they were too young to think about such things", not least because they were not young. But actually, she was wondering why they had waited until now.
"Well, I hope that's not needed for a while."
"Oh, so do we, dear, but we needed to prepare for these things, right now" replied Anne, kindly.
“I don’t really need...”
“It’s not for your need, dear”, her fake mum responded sharply. Bryan silenced her with a sideways glance, and then over-smiled at Mandi. Mandi felt, suddenly, a little emotional. The "sort of love" she had for the two ageing hippies formed a lump in her throat; to see them struggling and just as uncomfortable as her. To see them getting it all wrong; for all their thinking about the future and their talk of harmony. She felt guilty and enjoyed it. And surprised at herself. She was puzzled, though, that they were not talking about passing separately. Surely that was the most likely; one of them would be beamed up into the passing alien craft before the other – she was pretty sure that they were immune to any kind of Heaven’s Gate tendency – in which case Anne would inherit from Bryan or vice-versa; why were they so keen to involve her right now? They presumably meant that after they both had gone she would get what was left. While she was pondering this, Anne and Bryan described repeatedly exactly where the paperwork that one day "would be important" could be found. Mandi helped herself to another large gulp of wine from her fourth glass. Right now, those memories were coming back in unhelpful detail.
The kettle started to whistle. Mandi started, suddenly back with herself, on the sofa. Anne and Bryan dead. Where did they say she would find the paperwork? Shit.
Anne and Bryan's bedroom felt utterly taboo. Placing her coffee on the small bedside table, already a desecration, Mandi sat cautiously on the duvet. She felt the tension between the aliveness of the intimacies she imagined her parents sharing there (while carefully avoiding any visualisations) and their now complete deadness. She knew she would have to go and see them soon. Sort out the release of the bodies. She imagined their bodies being drawn from mortuary cabinets, suspicious that that only happened in movies.
Mandi caught her reflection in the body length mirror on the wall. She saw a five-year-old girl who would bounce into her foster parents’ room far too early in the morning to snuggle up between them. Whatever happened to her? She could smell them, she could smell that girl... sense her warmth. The feeling took her by surprise and she allowed herself to revel in it. She stretched out her arm to hug her mum. She expected a warm hand to cover hers. She expected movement. She did not expect a cold, lifeless skull caked in dried blood to roll towards her.
Mandi leapt back and off the bed. She had thought she left those nasty flashes on the train. She threw back her hair and sighed. She had an idea that the paperwork was in the built-in wardrobe. There was a small grey single filing drawer in there, she remembered; its brutal utility contrasted markedly with the decorative excesses of their other possessions. She had once hidden in that wardrobe, crouched beneath the rack of clothes, giddily excited when Anne or Bryan had entered the room looking for her. Once they had both come into the room, unaware of her presence; in hushed tones discussing “Steve” and "gone too far last night" and "it wasn't natural". She did not remember a Steve.
The drawer was precisely where she had remembered it. The paperwork was surprisingly orderly for a couple she knew only by their inefficiency and indifference to most things that did not involve the camp, particularly their own affairs. They never got their teeth fixed, they never got their TV license paid on time. She first found the will; it was as per the discussion in The Barge Inn or Middlecote Arms or wherever it was. They had left contact details for a financial advisor and a bottom line figure for various savings accounts. She found it odd that Anne and Bryan would have a financial advisor.
"Love of money is the root of all evil," Anne would often lecture Mandi, “not money itself, you go for it, girl, but save your love for something else”; it was hard not to re-think their platitudes differently in the light of what she now knew, or, rather, what she knew now that she did not know yet. Rumsfeld wisdom. She laughed; how blissfully unaware her parents had been, pagans quoting the Bible at her. What was their long game? Mandi had never corrected them; amused at how many of their beliefs were steeped in Christianity’s Greatest Hits; was that where they were guiding her? At the time it served only to fuel her cold cynicism.
So, this was it. The papers they had described. No personal note. And a suspension file, slightly crumpled, crammed at the back of the drawer. She eased the file out from its niche; inside was a single manila foolscap envelope. She ran her fingers around the inside of the cardboard file but there was nothing else; no silver charm, Dartmoor pisky or childhood memento intended especially for her? The manila envelope was unmarked. Inside were a number of typed sheets of yellowing paper, dry and fragile like flies’ wings. The heading on the first sheet read:
"MS. Torquay Museum. May 1926"
Why keep such an obscure document with their bank statements? She read on.
That traces of an antediluvian civilisation with its attendant fauna and flora can be so readily found in the obscure lanes, fields and woodlands of this part of Devonshire has long been known to the coarse laborers that dwell in this lugubrious place. That this foetid and extinct civilization should, through blasphemous dreams, still cast its influence has been the ruin of my family and the reason we are soon to leave these shores for ever.
An opening paragraph that was mildly intriguing. Mandi was about to read on, when there was a sharp triple knock at the door of the trailer. Mandi remembered that, prior to their visits to the camp residents, she had persuaded Crabbe to take her on a walk around the boundary of Lost Horizon. "A bit of fresh air to clear my head." But mostly just to prove that she could manipulate the miserable old git; and check out the physical state of what was now her property. She dropped the various bank statements and legal forms back into the drawer, folded the manuscript into its envelope and tossed it in after the others. Before she closed the drawer and skipped to the door, keen not to let the Caretaker slip away, she noticed something she had missed on first inspection. She retrieved the manila envelope; in the bottom right hand corner of the back of the envelope, in pencilled capitals, were the words: LOVECRAFT ORIGINAL.
Go to Bonelines Instalment 3
Go to the Bonelines homepage