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 7 (Chapters 30-34)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith
Chapter 30
Mandi strode up the beach in a vain attempt to clear her head. She had been surprised that the caretaker had not attended the ceremony. Perhaps he felt he needed to keep an eye on the camp, given that, for once, all its residents were absent. Mandi would enjoy bumping into him now; arguing over the meaning of the latest heap of flotsam and jetsam to wash up.
The ceremony had been followed by a buffet and mini-wake in the canteen. The ceremonial instruments were put away and guitars and violins appeared; folk tunes wafted over the gathering. The vegan caterers had excelled themselves; there were even foraged flowers to eat. How they had found these at the time of year was puzzling. The tastes were rich and strong. Yet, the wake was remarkably restrained and ordinary. The same embarrassed anonymities and dislocations that Mandi had felt at other drinks and nibbles after other funerals. Except that this time she was the focus of the sympathies. The only wrinkle was when the caretaker suddenly popped up to throw out a kid in a hoodie, drawn down over his face, nothing to do with the funeral, stealing food, Crabbe had said. In the scuffle the kid had dropped a black disc badge and the caretaker had thrown it after him.
Once it was decent to do so, Mandi had worked the room, saying her goodbyes and dishing out thanks, before escaping to the beach. There was no one else around. Not even dog walkers. The light was just starting to fade. The sea was flat. Mandi checked up and down the dunes, but there was no sign of the caretaker. She resorted to throwing stones into the waves.
“Everglades, everglades, everglades...”
There was something in the water. Twenty metres or so from the shore; a dark shape just beneath the surface. Mandi watched it carefully,
occasionally obscured by the white foam of a wave, but there was certainly something there. At times it seemed to show a wide reflective surface like the body of a seal or a large mammal, but there was no head lifted up above the surface, and what looked like the limbs of starfish spread out from its centre; then it would roll in a wave and the whole thing would appear more like a large bundle of rags, soaked through and close to sinking. It was hard to tell if it was moved by the waves alone or was treading water. Mandi took another stone and threw it so it landed a few feet from the shape. For a moment it did not react, but as another wave came tumbling in, breaking more as the shape approached the shore, it turned and for a moment Mandi saw what she thought was a jaw and three eyeholes, before it twisted again and slipped out of sight, replaced by what might have been a large filthy sheet or dark sail.
Mandi was still wearing her good shoes; she had not changed since the funeral. She looked around for a piece of driftwood to try and hook the thing and drag it to shore, but there was nothing long enough. She scanned the dunes once more; she was still alone. She would wait then. And ten minutes later the shape was within reaching distance. Mandi took a short and solid piece of wood and leaned over the water to drag it in. By now she knew what it was; a body.
Probably a man’s by the clothes. Once she had it out of the water, in some crazed hope that there might still be some life in it, she turned it over. What had been a face was pale and bloated, tiny crabs and sea slugs were escaping from the gaping caves in it; not just the eyes and mouth, but new openings. The police came very quickly. They sealed off the beach and the body was spirited away in an ambulance.
A young constable assured Mandi that there was no question of foul play; from the clothes and what remained of the contents of a wallet they had already identified the deceased as a missing person with a long history of psychiatric problems. “It’s a crying shame,” he said, “you have no idea how many of these poor souls wash up along this coast... we don’t make a big fuss about it obviously because of the holidaymakers... people don’t want to think of these poor fellahs washing up where they’re sun-bathing...”
“How many do you mean by ‘no idea’?” She really did have none. “Ten a year?”
The young policeman did not react.
“Ten a month?”
“I better be getting back...”
“How did you know to come so quickly?”
He nodded towards the dunes.
“The gentleman from Lost Horizon alerted us...”
The caretaker in his usual black was standing on one of the sandy brows.
“But... when I got here there were no footprints near the body...”
“Says he saw it from the tops, Madam. Recognised the pattern, when the sea leaves a body. You should know that these poor sods are very unhappy individuals, they have their own reasons for what they do and they deserve some confidentiality... I’d be grateful if you didn’t share our conversation. Just for good practice.”
Another snowflake.
Chapter 31
It was a surprisingly well attended meeting. Not simply in terms of numbers, but the side streets were cluttered for an hour with BMWs and what the Americans called SUVs. The Bay Museum had been hosting these events for years, or at least the organisation that hosted them was nominally the same – the Bay branch of the Hexameron Essay Society (an otherwise extinct entity, originally established as a conservative discussion group in the mid-nineteenth century by a Corpus Christi student opposed to the decadent ideas of the aesthete and author of the notorious final chapter of ‘The Renaissance’, Walter Pater) – but in recent times the society had received an infusion of younger blood. Publicised as a local historical society with a detailed interest in the work of local nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers, along with the predictable bookworms and retired academics, the meetings now attracted a new generation of local entrepreneurs, technologists from the two nearest university labs and from anonymous industrial estates, and dealers in intellectual property.
Business, on Hexameron afternoons, was a forbidden subject, however. Discussion focussed solely around ideas and their local histories. The Society’s aggressive championing of the role of the county (particularly its Bay area) in the pioneering of radical ideas in information technology, psychology and industrial design had at first created ripples and then loyalty among the more regionally patriotic of the small local village and town historians. Approving articles appeared in the nostalgia sections of local newspapers, then in their mainstream features; trade magazines and free sheets quickly picked them up and the Society’s name was mentioned at Rotary Club dinners, freemasons’ lodges, trade associations and Probus Clubs, filtering down through board room chatter and shop floor recommendations. Mostly male, mostly white, the shining faces that eagerly greeted the arrival of the chairman and speaker were now a familiar sight at the Museum. At the back of the room, staff from a local hotel, Russians in smart black and white uniforms, were discreetly clearing away the last of the champagne flutes and canapé crumbs.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen – and lady! – I am very pleased to welcome you all here today. There is no society business, so I suggest that we move immediately onto the main item on the agenda, and introduce you all to...”
The speaker, who in common with the chairman wore a black disc badge, glanced down at his notes, and paused, allowing a group of four young women, dressed in startling white shirts and dark grey flute knit skirts, to ease themselves in through the back doors, navigate the Russians, and take their places in four reserved seats on the back row. So silently and lithely did they enter that barely a head turned. One that did was that, for the time being, of a young CEO of a big data shell company that had spun off sensitive work to the anonymity of a rural address. He had the four down, on first glance, for a local women’s business leadership group; the kind of set up he could not have been less interested in. But there was something about the self-possessed demeanour and the faultless grooming, not to mention those skirts; they could not be Diane von Furstenbergs! He had not expected to see many of those in Devon. One of the four shot him a warning glance and he span round in his seat, surprised by his guilty nervousness. As he reconnected to the speaker, he found he had missed some introductory remarks and that the talk was already imbedded in illustrative anecdote. The audience laughed, then looked at each other and laughed again. Something about a cabbage and calculations made by steam. He tried to focus, but the look he had received continued to bug him. Female aggression usually excited him, but the deep coldness of the glance had thrown his expectations out of gear.
A new image was thrown up on the screen. Like something from an old telephone exchange. Ah, not cabbage, but Charles Babbage, the inventor of the analytical engine and father of the computer, this really was ancient history; a local lad, apparently.
“Let me illustrate the significance of organised affective information and its politico-anthropological sensitivities, by sharing with you a brief if traumatic episode, a cautionary tale, from Charles’s life...”
The speaker had the knack of referring to historical events as though they had just happened outside the door and that he was a personal friend of those involved.
“... his own fault, actually. He had cultivated a habit of poking his nose into public business at every opportunity, and developed an instinct for great injustices and intervening with great force at those points where the issues were most ambiguous. Where angels feared to tread Mister Babbage rushed in, a genius-fool you might say. On the occasion in point, he was prey to an enthusiasm – a favourite of Jews, Mohammedans and other Puritans – for iconoclasm. Babbage’s target however was an idiosyncratic one, for he chose music, which is mostly acknowledged as having no real representational qualities other than a squeaky similarity to the call of birds and other animals. Nevertheless, our predecessor had made up his mind to wage war upon pavement musicians who were in the habit of regaling unwitting pedestrian audiences close to his home. When Charles’s letters to the London Times elicited no response from law-makers, he wrote his own piece of legislation outlawing a variety of instruments including penny whistles, doom boxes, cheap German saxhorns and bombordons, hurdy-gurdies and – most particularly – bagpipes.”
Laughter.
“This move was wholly consistent with his work in the British Association in which he fought manfully to remove all romance and metaphysics from science. Now he would take from the general mob all temptations of art and other fancies. Using his considerable influence he pushed through the Act, which now bore his name among the populace, and it turned out to be a bullet! For the rest of his life he was chased by an inexhaustible chorus of disgruntled whistlers, bangers, grinders, clangers and gut scrapers. They would form impromptu bands to serenade him from under his windows, they pursued him along the streets in musical crowds of up to two hundred strong.”
On the screen, from ‘Punch’ a Harry Furniss caricature of Babbage’s predicament.
“Repeating ad nauseam the same chord sequences, a few notes again and again, all with a blatant disregard for traditional tonal hierarchies; the effect was of a superband formed by Arnold Schoenberg, Philip Glass and The Adverts!”
Great hilarity; and some nervous checking to spot anyone unsure who The Adverts were. To help the slower ones, the speaker clicked up a video of the band from the Bay playing on Top of the Pops.
“The eye receives the messages,
And sends them to the brain.
No guarantee the stimuli must be perceived the same
When looking through Gary Gilmore’s eyes...”
With another click the frame was frozen and Gaye Advert stared out into the Museum meeting room from thickly darkness-lined eyes surrounded by a lightless anti-halo of jet-black hair. A chair was scraped unsteadily.
“They pursued him even to death, accompanying his coffin, banging and whistling, to the grave.”
A crossfade to a grotesque engraving of the chaos at Babbage’s funeral. The speaker had begun to enjoy his own parade of effects; he built towards his conclusion.
“This, gentlemen, and lady... ladies...”
Realising his mistake, instantly, he shouted at the top of his voice.
“TROLLS!!!!”
Heads that were beginning to turn, span back.
“Yes, trolls! The first instance of collective informational and communicated trolling! To protect the fundamental freedom to make a nuisance! The irony, of course, would have been lost on all parties, but Babbage’s inventions would create the best possible instruments for the right to cacophony and the buskers’ deregulation of tonal structure would arm the modernist shock troops soon to bring down the temples of romanticism so despised by the founder of cybernetics! Those who do not learn from history... and remember, Charles was a member of this society.... and some say TV Smith is too!”
The speaker mimed looking around the hall, but quickly stopped himself.
“My little joke... Charles was a signatory to the elevation of our greatest member, the father of modern archaeology, William Pengelly, to the Royal Society. Those who do not learn from history are destined, like bishops, serial musicians and one-chord-wonders, to repeat it. Forever!”
Knowing amusement all around.
“Let no one dare silence the cacophony, but rather, by subjecting its complex systems to our analyses, and extracting from it the serial music of psychometric patterns, let us benefit by the more effective programming of our machines. Thank you.”
The young CEO so wanted to sneak another glance over his shoulder. Despite the strange fear that still sat at the pit of his stomach, his curiosity was stronger, fuelled by his fear. For a reason he could not explain, he believed that he might understand better the meaning of the talk if he could see the four spooky females’ reactions to it. He waited until the applause was done and the audience were filing from their seats. However, the four seats were vacant; their reservation notices had gone. A kid in a hoodie making a brisk exit – probably a ‘homeless’ looking for somewhere warm, he thought – caught his attention; no women in white shirts. He pushed his way out through the lobby and into the street in the hope of catching a glimpse, but there was no sign of them. He made his way back through the town to his Jaguar XF; unsure, as it floated along the lanes back to the edges of Newton Abbot, quite what it was he had seen and heard. Later that night he received a visit at his hotel.
On the way to his car, flinching at the sudden cold, though neither knew the other, he had passed Mandi on her way to Museum.
Mandi was surprised at how crowded the town was. Perhaps the local sixth form college was between classes; there was a great emission of young people racing off in divers directions, hanging upon each other’s arms, vaping, texting and swinging along in groups of six or seven abreast, blown by gusts of a freezing wind. Mandi did her best to anticipate the dodges required to navigate the horde, using the shaft of the crossing beacon as a convenient protective barrier. She took a moment to scan the street; it was a clone town. There was nothing in the familiar shopfronts to suggest there was a harbour only a few metres away; at The Sett the proximity of the sea, the dunes, the sand affected everything. Here, nothing seemed to notice. Mandi watched the traffic lights change up through the colours, an approaching car slowing, and she prepared to anticipate the illumination of the green man, when a young lad, by age and appearance probably a student from the college, threw himself headlong into the bonnet of the first braking car.
For a moment Mandi thought the boy might have tripped, but there was something in his trajectory that was agentive, willed, demonstratively self-destructive. The boy lay before the wheels of the car, his body slack. Pedestrians on both sides of the road paused. The boy suddenly rolled twice from under the car and over into the opposite lane. Fortunately for the boy, nothing was moving that way, but now he was exposed to whatever turned the corner. Mandi stepped into the road. She did not enjoy a public role. Participating in a spectacle of communal spirit and responsibility always felt bogus and over- performed to her. But this kid was going to get himself killed unless someone did something. Mandi stood over the boy’s prone form, holding up her palm to a warily approaching van. She was shocked when the car against which the boy had just collided abruptly pulled away and speedily disappeared up the street. She was unsure of her next move; how well-placed was she to safely coax a clearly distressed boy, now curled up in a foetus shape, to the pavement? What right had she to save him from himself? And how pissed off was she that no one else seemed bothered enough to share in her discomfort? Enough to walk away?
She would be shocked again; the van she had halted, now gunned its engine, swerved around her and accelerated into an adjacent street. Whether it was a genuine assault on his own well-being or a cry for help, there seemed to be a general mood of indifference and spectatorship to the boy. This was immediately contradicted by two middle aged men who, separately, put down their shopping to come over and crouch over the young man, encouraging him to come to the pavement. Unexpectedly, the boy, without speaking or responding in any other way to either of the men, pushed himself up on his feet, and, folding in upon himself, wandered to the gutter and out of the road. Mandi breathed an irritated sigh of nervous relief; which turned to cold concern as the two men picked up their shopping and reintegrated to the passing crowds; they had done their duty to keep the highway clear.
For a moment the boy swayed from side to side, then ran headlong at an information board and struck it with his forehead, staggering backwards. Mandi felt the shock ripple through her stomach and ran towards the boy, who was still reeling. Did she have the right to touch him, to restrain him? Fuck the right, was she going to endanger her.... what? Livelihood? Career? ...for laying a hand on a child? How old was he? Sixteen? Thirteen? Jesus and Mary, she was caught in the web of her own invective, she had to think clearly, tactically. If she lunged at the boy he might run into the traffic which had resumed its busy progress. Yet, she dare not leave him.
So, she marched by his side, unspeaking, as he set off up the street. The boy darting angry glances at his unwelcome guardian. In this formation they made a hundred yards or so, neither saying a word, the crowds now petering out, both eventually staring ahead, Mandi primed at any moment to grab the boy if he ran for the wheels of a passing bus. She had no plan for how to bring this drama to a happy conclusion; no idea what to say, how to comfort, whether to be involved at all. Across the road, a pair of policemen were arresting a bearded male, who was arguing his case and swinging his arms in woozy gestures. Mandi ran to the nearest constable and tapped his arm. “I think there’s a boy, young man, he’s in danger of his life, of losing his life...”
“OK, OK, madam... we are just attending an incident here...”
“No, I think this is urgent, he just threw himself at a moving vehicle...”
“How badly injured is he?”
The constable looked around for a wounded body.
“He wasn’t really... but I am scared that he’s going to do something stupid and really hurt himself, unless you do something.”
“Well, what would like me to do?”
Mandi breathed in; an unintended inspiration. She was surprised that public safety had become quite such a laisser-faire operation; she had assumed that there was some specialisation in such matters. That it was not just a case of: well, guess for yourself.... that there was a procedure.
“Show me where he is.”
“He’s... He was proceeding...”
She winced.
“...fast, that way. I can’t see him now.”
She stared intently, but there nothing individual or distinctive in the stream of pedestrians. The wind had risen again, cold was descending, the grey of the sky soaked into the populace.
“Can you describe him?”
“Er, mixed race, maybe sixteen or seventeen, maybe much younger but I assumed he was from the college, black hair, black trousers, I can’t remember the colour of his top, like a sweat shirt I think, he was hitting his head on metal boards back there... I didn’t see his eyes, the colour of, quite short for a boy...”
“Thank you, I’ll phone that in straight away. Thank you for your help. Your concern. I’ll phone that in right now.”
And with that he turned away; Mandi unsure whether he really was phoning it in or just trying to get her off his back. She thought of going back and pulling rank, “do you know who I am?”, dropping Childquake’s name. No, she had done her best. Possibly. At least all that was required of her. More than the scores of others who saw the same thing as her and chose to do nothing. Or the least imaginable, and then deserted the scene. She would not even write of this. It was personal.
Mandi stumbled on with a grey contempt in her heart for the people all around her. In a way it was quite comforting; it felt like a return to the simple feelings she had had as a child. The world was evil and she would fight it. She glanced back; the constable was in conversation with his colleague. No sense of urgency. Mandi wondered at how she had been made to feel like a crazy person; she wanted to race back and berate the coppers, but then she would look crazier still. She wanted to know what this general indifference was; it wasn’t just racism, surely, it was something even deeper than that and she was going to...
But what she was “going to” was quickly forgotten as Mandi realised that she was standing outside the Museum. Absorbed in the wash of passivity and the sharp elbows of anxious minimum wage consumers, she had forgotten why she was in the town. It was not to deal with the area’s suicide problem. Getting her bearings, she glanced up and down the street before leaving the rumble of the rising gale for the quiet of mummies and rhino teeth; opposite was a dull multi-storey car park, its upper level draped with wire nets to deter jumpers.
Chapter 32
1912
From the undulating miasmas of the Great End, rising through the seething waves that coursed through pillars without base or capital, came the aetherial numen. In life it had borne the name ‘Edmund Gurney’; now it had assumed a more anonymous and universal appearance. A centre parting still organised its hair, a thickly knotted tie hung loosely from its stiffened collar, and a large thick coat disguised its limbs; only the moustache, stretched like a pair of horsehair wings, had grown more eccentric and ornamental since the shuffling off of its mortal coil.
The numen stepped nimbly and carefully from the maid’s bedroom and began to make its way through the curling sheets of smoky vapour; spectral manta rays might have been swimming along its corridors in aqua-acrobatic displays. As the numen floated by the open door of the tiny ‘master’ bedroom, Smith was bent over a bowl of heated oil, driving billows of sickly effluvium with a giant cardboard sheet. The numen twitched; the last chance to check the balls of soft paper blocking both its nostrils. The elderly Smith waved it along the corridor impatiently.
Outside, the narrow street was effectively blocked by a line of landaus driven down from the great houses and palaces high above the Bay. It was incongruous in a street of such mean if respectable lower middle class types to see such a display of shining surface and glittering particulars. Only around the rims of the carriage wheels was the grimy evidence that, just to get here, the procession had passed – silently and with curtains pulled tight – through that part of the town where dead babies arrived in brown paper parcels and the bakers’ loaves were corrupted with sand.
Inside the house, the spectators were arranged in two ranks. In the hall, around the walls of the parlour and at its door hung the members of the Hexameron Essay Society, two junior members on guard on the modest front porch. Under the pretence of protecting their lungs from the ectoplasmic odour now seeping down the staircase, the Hexamerons covered their faces with scarves and kerchiefs in private and professional embarrassment. Not only were they exposing themselves to public ridicule, but inner ruin too. Those that had brought with them technical sensors, gridded charts and other devices by which to monitor and measure the reality of it all, had quickly squirreled them away in deep coat pockets.
Within this academic crust, the inner circle consisted of the great and the susceptible. Since the tiny coastal valley, once a den of mountain lions and nomads, had been ruined, first with cottages, then palaces and slums, concert halls and baby farms, the resulting layer cake had attracted from the Continent the last ailing remains of hereditary monarchies and aristocracies, the most wealthy of the domestic industrial classes and the hardened skin atop the nation’s literary Eton Mess. Representatives of each stratum were present and uncomfortable; palms flat on the cheap and greasy tablecloth. In the dim illumination of smouldering tow and Bengal fire, adding to the fug, it was hard for the impatient princesses, dukes, knights, magnates and belles to tell the patterns apart from the blooming stains of supper. Imperious Victor Bulwer-Lytton, jealously protective of his grandfather’s fantasy, lifted his dark eyes, swept a mop of ginger hair from the top of his aquiline nose, and bared his teeth as if to bring the whole thing to a halt. A princess giggled; one or two Hexamerons pulled their scarves a little higher.
“Now, I am here!”
The medium, Mrs Willet, sprang from her prone position, head down on the table, and jerked with a straight back into her chair.
“Urrrrrrgh!”
She exhaled with unnatural force; the patched curtains shook and the flapping wings of large birds could be heard outside. The flames in the room flickered.
“Good evening, your royal highnesses, good evening, my lords, ladies and gentlemen...”
At the mention of such titles, the sculptural indifference of Bulwer-Lytton’s features fell away to reveal a surprising vulnerability for a future Governor of Bengal.
“That’s Gurney!” whispered an elderly lady in the inner circle; the inadequacy and age of her best dress revealed that, rather than one of the modern witnesses, here was someone who had been on the spiritualist circuit for some years. “Welcome, Edmund! I can attest, ladies and gentlemen, and your royal... um... this is absolutely and without doubt the voice of our spiritual mentor, Edmund Gurney, brother of the three tragic Gurney sisters! Emily! Rosamund! Mary!”
Silence, but for the creaking of floorboards outside in the narrow hallway.
“My sisters are gone forever, the darkness of the Nile has swallowed them...”
Gasps passed from princess to lord to common shopkeeper.
“There is no return for the lost, but there is life in the hereafter. I promised I would come and come I have...”
There was something gruff and scratchy in Mrs Willet’s voice, but later the lady in the cheap evening dress would remark loudly on how closely her articulation had followed that of the living Edmund. A few strands of Mrs Willet’s black hair had fallen across her brow, a tiny trickle of perspiration was reaching out toward the brow of her nose. Her nostrils flared with excitement. Though not far from beginning the journey into middle age, hers was a handsome face, on a figure more statuesque than homely, but there was something else; a kind of smoothness in her manner that promised all kinds of accelerations and sudden mutations from one thing to another.
“I have spoken before, but tonight I will act. In the world of the living I made this plan, and now from the dead I will realise it!”
A sound like that of a breaking cello string rang out and died quickly away. The curtains shifted. A chill wind moved into the parlour. Smith, with a stiffening back, pulled himself in through the bedroom window, having given the signal for his assistant to open the back door to the cold of the meagre yard and outhouse. There was an acidic sharpness in the spiritual nip as it made its way to the parlour.
“In life, many of those who took the ordinary path felt authorised to demean my careers, but in the beyond, I have achieved everything that life denied to me. Now I will endow my spiritual line, the inheritance of my new supernal nobility, upon a child of your world. Conceived in flesh but forged in spirit; not since the time of the miracles have the two worlds been so close as now; the spiritual realm has answered you, my dear friends, it has seen your suffering and chaos, it has witnessed across time and space your crises, abolitions and overthrows and it is coming to your side. The saviour of the world is at hand!”
A voice from the top of the stairs shouted: “He is here!”
A hand placed firmly in the middle of the numen’s back. A shove. The numen began to descend the creeking steps, one at a time. One of the Hexamerons in the hall gasped as a limy glow filled the space behind the numen, while another Hexameron turned and ran, spinning through the front door and sprinting off down the deserted street and into the night. The greenish light began to fall inside the parlour; Mrs Willet’s face lit up like a mermaid’s. The Hexameron in the hallway backed into the room and all inside shrank back. A further “phutt” of limelight and the air was full of sparkling lights as if strange gases were escaping from the other world into this one. With the hallway free, Smith skipped quietly down the staircase, following the numen and adding new chemicals to the burning bucket. Green was followed by yellow and then red.
Around the parlour wall, the various scientific dignitaries had lowered their scarves, their mouths dropped open. A natural philosopher whispered to the populariser of the aquarium: “it’s not a fake!” The inner circle, their hands still flat down upon the tainted cloth, were swivelled round to watch the door. Slowly a figure, at first no more than a dark shape, began to edge into the opening. Yellow and orange gases broke over its head in waves. One or two of the inner circle glanced down to check the illustration of Gurney, a pencil sketch, provided with their invitations. Now girdled by the doorframe, the concealed bucket released a further surge of illumination and the occupants of the room collectively cried, shrank and exclaimed. Emerging through the fug, came the unmistakable wing-like moustache and the signature centre-parted head of Edmund Gurney.
Slats in the walls were heaved back, wallpaper tearing in angry shouts, and beams of limelight shone from the cavities, which momentarily blinded the occupants and illuminated the numen in startling detail. Motionless for a moment, the room holding its collective breath, the figure then shuddered for a moment as it received a gentle tug from the hidden Smith. It lurched backwards and the door slammed shut with a crash like the crack of doom!
Everyone in the parlour, including Mrs Willet, jumped and screamed. But Mrs Willet topped them all, throwing herself into a fit upon the table top, as the royal princesses turned to the woman in the cheap dress to come to her assistance.
“Hold her down,” commanded a male voice.
“No, you fool!” yelled the experienced spiritualist. “She’s in a trance, you could kill her!”
The men fell back, and Mrs Willet rose to her feet, her face on fire and in exultation.
“The annunciation is over,” she declared, “the séance has begun. Follow me.”
Outside, the sinister black box of a Brougham was turning into the street. A reading light shone within, an austere, corrupt and excited face looked out. The top-hatted driver, mindless of the parked landaus, drove up the side of the street, the carriage’s pair of black stallions shaking their heads, their staring eyes swivelling in their sockets, clanging and bumping the wheels of the parked landaus. The drivers of the landaus began to shout, but were silenced by those two Hexameron guards who had not left their posts at the front door of number 19. A flame or two from an ignited lamp began to appear in the top windows of the terrace. Outside the house, the Brougham came to a halt, the guards leapt forward to open the carriage and a figure familiar to society stepped down to the grimy surface of the street. He wasted no time in bounding up the impoverished set of steps and into the hallway. Mrs Willet was awaiting him, poised halfway up the staircase.
“Good god, what have we now!” exclaimed Bulwer Lytton.
The starry multitude hushed and shamed him.
“Who is that man?” whispered a princess, and the woman in the cheap dress replied.
“That is the prime minister’s brother.”
The thin, dark suited man, with a hint of wildness in his upturned wings of hair, climbed quickly up to Mrs Willet and offered his hand. Together they turned and climbed the narrow staircase toward the master bedroom, brushing aside the webs of smoke and vapour. As the inner circle rushed up the stairs to follow them, pushed from behind by the Hexamerons, torn by disgust at the depravity and desperation to see and know, they entered the layers of hot air, created by Smith and his buckets of pyrotechnica. In a moment the heavy coats and shawls, necessary in the chilly parlour, were discarded, thousands of guineas of fashion lay in piles along the edges of the corridor, while in the bedroom, Mrs Willet, seated on the bed, the thin man standing over her, was quickly divesting herself of all her undergarments, arranged to fall away quickly for the occasion. Once more the layers of the séance were repeated, as below so above, as in the parlour so in the bedroom: the inner circle of bare-shouldered princesses, wescot-naked lords and sweating spiritualists, while around the edges of the room and squeezed at the door were the shirt-sleeved denizens of the Hexameron Essay Society.
Twenty minutes later, the Brougham pulled away from outside the house, heading back towards London. Ten minutes later and the procession of laundaus was broken up and spread across the Bay. The few upstairs lights in other houses went out one by one. In the parlour of number 19, the spiritualist in the cheap dress served tea from a large pot, while the remaining Hexamerons sat around the table, an exuberant and flushed Mrs Willet at their head.
“I feel that it has happened. Everything that Edmund has promised is come down to us. A saviour is coming, a great leader, and the world is about to take a new shape.”
As she spoke, Smith’s assistant was helping his tired and ragged master up a small ladder beside the outhouse, and in a moment the two men had rolled over the low wall and dropped down into the back lane, making their way to the street where the single Brougham and the row of landaus had been replaced by a house-painter’s cart.
Smith leaned in to the three men in overalls.
“Must ‘ave been quite a party, guv’nor!”
“And that’s the last you speak of it...”
He placed a hundred guineas on the footrest. The foreman gasped and reached for the notes and they burst into flames, vaporising in seconds. The painters reeled back in astonishment, wide eyed and slack-jawed. Then a narrow anger began to return to their features as they realised that their bonanza was gone; an anger met full-on by Smith.
“Unless you want to see the rest of it go up in smoke, keep yer traps shut!”
And he slapped another hundred on the cart.
Chapter 33
Inside the lobby, April was waiting for Mandi.
“I’ve been expecting you!”
“How did you know I was coming?”
“I saw your missed call.”
But there had been no signal. Something must have got through eventually.
“I’ve got something very exciting to show you. But first, I would like you to meet some people who may be able to help you. Local history people...”
April led Mandi through the cluttered lobby, walls hung with venerable awards, plaques to patrons, a giant female Egyptian goddess and a small cabinet of oddities; on its middle shelf, a tray of small bones, claws and mostly teeth. The tray caught Mandi’s eye; there was something about the pattern of creamy ivory against the purply velvet of the display cloth. Inside the hall, the Museum’s Engagement Officer was morosely stacking chairs while the representatives of the Hexameron Essay Society were extracting memory sticks, packing away their projector and tidying up the notes and minute book. Mandi noticed how April waited patiently for the four men to conclude their conversation before interrupting.
She had a wide and ordinary face; almost moonish and plain. She gave no impression of depth or definition. There was no requirement, Mandi assumed, for archivists to be dull, but perhaps the attention to minute detail, the isolation among the records, the repetitive searching and recording of similar things might inevitably lead to an ironing out of temperament. She wondered if there were many volatile or angry archivists? Were there storerooms and records offices where the archives were regularly hurled at the walls in frustration? After a minute or so, the four men concluded their discussion and turned as one to Mandi. As though April were invisible.
“Yes, my dear?” The Chairman smiled, a little creepily; but not as creepily as Grant Kentish might have. “How can we help you?”
“O, er...”
Mandi turned to April.
“So sorry to bother you gentlemen, I’ve been helping this young lady with an enquiry about a manuscript and I noticed that you were meeting here today. I think her enquiry might have a local historical angle.”
Young? April seemed no older than Mandi; yet she spoke of her like her grandmother might. If Mandi ever had had the luxury of grandmothers.
“Well, that’s what we’re here for,” volunteered the lunchtime speaker. “What is the nature of your enquiry?”
This was all so tweedy and antiquarian. The manner, the turns of phrase, the sports jackets and the politesse; out of kilter with the state of the art projector, Iron Man charger, the micro-recording devices, the Sonos One speaker, the fitness trackers, tablets, the Kaiser Encores and 4G phones. One of the younger ones dangled the keys to a Lexus.
“I think Mandi might be interested to hear of any reflections you might have on the history of the Lovecraft family in these parts.”
“That would be the family of H. P. Lovecraft, the renowned American writer? Well, I think his kith and kin were long emigrated before he came along... but he was a strange character, obsessed with monsters that he would very successfully fail to describe properly; many-tentacled things lurking under the ocean, globular subterranean creeping things with eyes that came and went like rashes, if I’m not mistaken...”
“It was more the original family, the ancestors before emigration.”
“Ah well....”
“I think the last one was in an asylum at Newton Abbot. These were not sophisticated...”
“I think the great grandfather was a choirmaster – or maybe leader of the church band, was it? – in one of the village churches close to the Great Hill...”
“Yes, that is correct, and either he or... hmmm.... not sure, but one of the family was landlord at the beer house there, or it may have been an inn in those days... but if you are considering drawing some conclusions from our remarks, I suggest that you travel to New York, ride on the metro, visit Brooklyn... what this Lovecraft fellow feared was not our county, but the new urban technology, the rushing lights and racing winds of the New York subway, and.... of course, the African-Americans... those were the inspiration for his monsters.”
“It was an ordinary family with its own troubles; some dispute or other sees the great grandfather prised out of his position as head of the band... perhaps for low churchmanship, high churchmanship, they were major issues then... and some of the locals held eccentric views... I’m pleased to say that many of the most esteemed members of our Society have played a significant part in expunging the superstitions that once spoiled the county’s life...”
“I have been working on the finds from the Old Grotto...”
The lunchtime speaker turned on April as if she had impugned the Society.
“That man was a rank fool! Widger!! God! If only he had turned to Pengelly earlier! Instead, he spent twenty years digging up the most fabulous finds in order to prove that the Deluge was real!”
Mandi assumed that they were talking about a contemporary detectorist; she was amazed later when April explained that this was fury about events that happened a hundred and fifty years ago.
“Have you been able to make any sense at all of them?”
“You would have to ask Theo...”
April and the men turned towards the distracted Engagement Officer, who disappeared behind a stack of chairs. The men turned to April.
“O. No, not really. Unfortunately, as I think you know, there are no charts to explain where the various artefacts were found, or when, no markers on the finds themselves, so we have no idea at all at what levels of the cave floor the objects were found...”
“Then they are meaningless. Throw them back in the cave! That was a treasure trove of finds; ruined without some grid, the objects themselves are senseless... worthless... what could have been a space of learning and discovery is now just a black hole!”
April touched Mandi on the arm. It was a strange touch; a steely localised numbness like that immediately after a Lidocaine injection at the dentists.
“We are talking about the man who dug up that tray of bones in the lobby.”
“Was he a Lovecraft?”
“No! Though, I can see how you make the mistake! He was no less tortured by a fear of hobgoblins, poor man. No, Lovecraft was a secular materialist, in that way a modern individual, but one who liked to stare into the void left by God. Our amateur excavator...”
“Who was he?”
“A nobody. A draper’s assistant. Not a man of either learning or evolved intelligence. Combining – somehow! – a fervent belief in the literal meaning of the bible, that the universe was created at some time on a Thursday afternoon six thousand years ago, with whatever anyone told him at the pub. He was so terrified of the world, that in the end he took to getting home by running across the fields and vaulting the hedgerows rather than confront the hobgoblins that his fellow drinkers had told him lived in the lanes. In the end he gave up his job and spent all his time either at home or in the cave... twenty years...”
“Twenty years of destroying the archaeological record!”
“I hope, madam, that when you come to write up your research...”
“O, I...”
“That you place these men – Lovecraft and the draper’s assistant – in the correct context of the county. Not only were they wholly unrepresentative, not only were they from the lowest strata...”
“Like judging psychology by the values of a Viennese dustman!”
“This town was once the watering hole of the royal families of Europe, we had our own symphony orchestra, with premieres of new English symphonies...”
“And will again, Brian, now...”
“...and not only do the scholars of today dwell on them like lower animals fascinated by the faecal droppings of their own kind, but they have contributed nothing to the great progressive project of men like Pengelly, Froude...
“The engineer.”
“And the other...
“...Heaviside the prince of electro-magnetism, Babbage, you know obviously, Peacock and propulsion...”
“All members of our society...”
“And the great Cattell...”
“At one time and another...”
April broke their flow.
“Would you like to see the hyenas’ teeth, Amanda?”
“Then we’ll leave you to your bones and wish you no harm! By the way, we are members of The Hexameron Essay Society, this branch established 1865, our aim to preserve and promote the most progressive ideas in technology, philosophy and psychology intuited and developed here in the county. My name is Toby Jugg. You would be most welcome to visit us at our new headquarters.”
He offered his hand.
“If we can help you in any way with your studies, please don’t hesitate to call us.”
And he fished in his jacket, while the others, as if at a signal, plucked their goTennas from the table. The Chairman produced his Samsung Galaxy.
“Bump?”
“Sure.”
Mandi and the Chairman bumped phones and transferred their business card data. Then in a disturbingly short space of time, in a move like a credit card unfolding into an Ian Sinclair knife, the four Hexamerons gathered up their gadgets and, smooth as any Roman unit, rolled out through the double doors and were gone.
“Theo!”
There was no sign or sound of the Engagement Officer.
“O, let’s just go down and look at the teeth.”
Chapter 34
It was the Jaguar Man who, much to his surprise, was making his way up the lanes from the anonymous industrial estate to the former monastery. Two weeks before, he had attended his first lecture; now he was an agent of the Society and on his first assignment. Things moved quickly in the Hexameron world. He might not have been so amenable to this sudden promotion but for the encouragement of his boss. He had not quite worked it out yet, but there was some connection between the company’s global harvesting of information and the fine detail of this tiny local Society’s philosophies. Maybe they were providing the unambiguous solutions for the algorithms?
His briefing, however, had nothing to do with data and everything to do with “tradecraft”, the working up of a credible legend and the possibility of some kind of cosmic steganography; in other words, his target might be playing games; there might even be a signal woven within the fabric of everything, stemming from this one individual, which was driving the whole air loom!
Jaguar Man assumed that that last part was a test of his credulity.
Over the tall Devon hedgerows, up on the tips of his Berlin brogues, he caught glimpses of bulbous towers with exclamatory spikes. Yet, at the top of the hill, arriving at the entrance to the site, all sense of its former use seemed gone. There was nothing very holy about the functional buildings immediately inside the gate. Pleasant and well kept, enough of a 70s office feel to make him feel at home. Perhaps their thinking was the same as his boss’s: no one asks questions about dull places. The complex was now a residential home for seniors with good liquidity, and he was less than likely to be welcome trespassing beyond their PRIVATE sign. Yet, there was no one at the main office. What were they going to do to him? Beat him with their bus passes?
He was sure to meet someone on the paths snaking off to different buildings. Some friendly old dear would direct him to Mister Balfour-Willet.
There was no one on the paths. Although the weather had become increasingly and unseasonably mild, a cold spell had recently set in. Perhaps the elderly were keeping warm inside. The layout of the complex became clearer once Jaguar Man had cleared the reception area. There was a larger and older set up of ornate spires and large grey halls to his left; they presumably constituted the former monastery and convent. He had no idea how that had worked; unisex religious houses fell outside his experience. He was stronger on social psychology and contemporary consumer trends. On his right were the more recent flats, a bank of small but expensive homes replete with glowing windows and smart interiors, but no signs of life. Should he knock arbitrarily on a door?
Frustrated with himself, he elected to forgo the flats and press on through a patch of trees beyond an ornamental lawn, in the hope of something more inhabited turning up on their other side. The man he sought – Balfour-Willet – had served in the British security forces, so he might not be easy to find if he was avoiding visitors. To add further mystery to the man’s cv, it seems that in the 1960s he had become a monk, moved in here, joined the closed order that occupied the place at the time – closed by their own choice apparently – suitable for someone used to a clandestine lifestyle, he supposed. When it all folded and the nuns and the other monks moved on, he had left the order and stayed here. Something had hung onto him, or he had hung onto something; the guy was good at hanging on. Unless the information was all screwed up, he was well over a hundred years old.
Jaguar Man wondered if he had been allowed to keep his cell, while everything around him was transformed into swish retirement flats, or whether he was in one of the warm flats and maybe even watching him now. He felt the chill of a man watched. The documents acquired by the Hexamerons indicated that Balfour-Willet had left holy orders, but might still wear a habit. Did he still believe and was he maintaining some kind of religious life here; even though the monastery had been closed for almost thirty years? He would have already been an elderly man then, perhaps he never fully understood the changes? So what comprehension would he have of the Hexamerons calling in their debts after a century? The man, as a child, even as a babe in arms, had played some role in their past, but how much was he likely to remember of that? Jaguar Man would tread carefully; best that the shock did not kill Mister Balfour-Willet! That, surely, was not the Hexamerons’ intention? So why send in Jaguar Man?
Rather than the thin windbreak he had expected, the gathering of trees was thick and crowded, the paths obscured by huge and bare Rhododendron bushes and a large tin shed. Instead of a further block of housing, he came to the old wall of the monastery grounds and a long plot of graves, marked off by a cast iron fence. Inside, the graves were decorated with crosses made of the same metal; Benedictine cross molines, the points of which ended in something like forked tongues or the wings of moustaches. One or two of the crosses had lost a limb and looked more like giant fish hooks. Another cross had sunk up to its arms as if the ground below had collapsed and it was trying to climb out of the grave.
Jaguar Man turned back and retraced his steps to the shed.
“Hello, Deirdre!”
The voice was somehow both vital and quavering. It sounded almost feminine.
“Come in, you silly little fool, come in! Don’t skulk about out there with a face like an early Christian martyr!”
On the edge of the tree line, looking out over the open fields beyond the monastery grounds, was a hooded figure, its back to the Jaguar Man. It was seated in a folding chair. By its side was a small easel on which sat an oil painting in a state of incompletion.
“Excuse me, sir...”
“Why, what have you done now, you little scamp?”
“Are you talking to me?”
The hooded head turned and Jaguar Man caught a flash of a white moustache, just as the first flakes of unseasonal snow began to dodge through the tree tops.
“Of course, I am, you damned little fool! Do you think I’m delusional? Don’t you dare ever try to steal my savings again! I’ve got my eye on you, young lady! I know your tricks!”
“I think you might have the wrong person.”
“No, you idiot, I know who I am! It’s you who has no idea who you’re dealing with...”
The old man broke into a hacking cough. He had turned his face back to the fields. Jaguar Man walked down to where he was seated by the easel and moved around to catch his face. He was not a monk; or, at least, he was not dressed as a monk. Despite the white moustache and the frail voice, the face under the hoodie was almost cherubic. A large patterned rug of red and black was pulled up to his chin. It was unclear quite how he had manipulated the palette and brushes that sat on the small table next to the easel.
“That’s better. Now I can see you, get an idea of you. What fool’s errand are you on today? No, don’t tell me, let me guess? You’ve come from those buffoons in the town; another of their wild goose chases. O, Deirdre, why do you do it? Why do they all do it! ‘Deirdre’ was the first to come and I’ve called every single one since by her name. Poor Deirdre! Poor all of them! Do you really know who they are? No, it’s not your fault, poor benighted lass! Have you come about the messiah?”
“Who?”
“O, what are they calling him now? Shiloh? The prophet? The Bagwan!”
This time the coughing fit doubled him over and Jaguar Man saw the explosion of long white hair that fell, shaking, from the hoodie until the attack had receded.
“I do beg your pardon, young lady! But we get so little opportunity for entertainment here that I always look forward to the arrival of a new Deirdre!”
“I’ve come to meet a Mister Balfour-Willet.”
“Have you, indeed? You’ve just missed him – he’s gone to Bristol to visit his parents!”
The fit returned, the old man doubled, and the long white hair, like the claws of a hermit crab creeping from its shell, showed themselves. Jaguar Man was becoming impatient.
“I’ll leave you, if you’re...”
“O, leave me, will you. Big threat! O, Deirdre, doooon’t leeeave me! Hahaha! O, Deeeeirdreee! Hahahaha! He gave his soul to Mary, you fool! That’s what I told Deirdre, that’s what I told all the Deirdres. Did none of them report back to station? What unreliable assets you have all turned out to be. Pengelly must be furious! How can you expect to meet with Mary if you have not been trained in her craft? If you have not been initiated, my sweet one! Mere novices, my God, Mary will eat you alive! She has girls like you for breakfast! With toast and marmalade! With her boiled egg! Hahahaha!”
“Where can I find this Mary?”
“You are a seeker, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know what you mean. Frankly, I haven’t got a clue what the fuck you are talking about, you old fool, but I’ve got to speak to Balfour-Willet and if he’s with Mary I want to see Mary.”
“Well, dear girl, if you think you are ready. She’s in the chapel, waiting for you.”
“Well, why the fuck couldn’t you say that in the first place, you old bastard?”
“And deny me my fun?”
“Fuck off.”
Jaguar Man climbed the grassy incline and turned down the path, making Berlin brogue-shaped tracks in the dusting of snow quickly gathered there. From behind he heard a cough. Not an involuntary one, this time. Reluctantly, he turned back to the aged cherub, who was turned towards Jaguar Man. For the first time he noticed the painting. He had taken it for granted that the hump of green represented one of the distant hills. Now, though, it looked more like a sea creature.
The old man fixed his stare, and then nodded his hood at the land above the path.
“You mean the shed?”
The old man’s laughter filled the trees. The flakes grew bigger. Looking up, snow landing on his nose and catching in his long eyelashes, Jaguar Man thought that he saw seagulls mixed up in the clouds.
“O, Deirdre, you really are a gas! If only we’d had girls like you in the service! We’d all be speaking German by now! Yes, in the shed, you little fool! She’s in the shed!”
And, turning back to enjoy his painting, the old man began to sing under his breath:
“Squirty Mary up from the deep,
Rode the big squid in her bare feet,
When she dropped her guts
She gave birth to fag butts,
And her secret’s hid under her creep.”
The shed was made of corrugated iron and painted a shade of green that reminded Jaguar Man of found footage movies set in deserted psychiatric institutions. Three wooden steps led up to a gothic door with two tall gothic windows either side. The shed itself was remarkably narrow, and he had assumed it held gardening tools and plastic sacks of insecticide and fertiliser. Above the door was another window, shaped like a clover leaf within which the mullions formed a triangle bisected by circles and parts of circles, always in threes. Either side of the narrow building were open but roofed wings with benches. He climbed the steps and knocked on the door.
If there was a reply it was softer than the falling snow. He tried the door and it was unlocked. Immediately inside was a small white chair, stood out in the darkness. For some reason he thought to turn and through the gothic frame of the open door, among the trees, the old prankster was waving a paintbrush over his easel. Jaguar Man turned back and felt breath fall out of his lungs. When he inhaled again the air was ice; a freezing sensation ran along his chest and down to his fingertips. Goddam weather forecast! An unnaturally bright statue of the Virgin Mary stood on a mediterranean blue altar, stained glass lights radiating from around her head. She was dressed in a dazzling white robe with a blue stole. Under one foot she trampled the thorned stem of a rose, while from a chocolate-coloured rock a great rush of warm blue water gushed in breakers and white horses.
Jaguar Man felt the need to sit.
Walking around the white chair, he was puzzled by the cork interior of the chapel, draping down the walls like bark tentacles. He sat in the white chair, less than a metre from the Virgin. He felt he ought to look up in adoration at her face, her eyes lifted like his. But he could not raise his eye line above the blue gushing spring, which seemed to move and curl and run. So rapt, he was, that he did not hear the grey wooden door close gently behind him; he only noted how the light around Mary was intensifying. He sat stock still, as outside the snow began to mount and the paths disappeared, filling the footprints of the old man and the lines in the snow where he had dragged the legs of his easel.
One of the residents found him. Walking her dog, she had looked in to check that the thaw had caused no damage. At first she thought to leave him; that perhaps he was a visiting relative deep in contemplation. When she returned and he was unresponsive to her polite enquiries, she fetched reception, who came and then rang the emergency services.
No one could understand why the young CEO of a thriving big data spin-off might choose to walk to a tiny chapel in the middle of woods and sit until he froze to death. There were no signs of foul play, no suicide note, nothing in his emails or texts to suggest that he was anything other than an ambitious operator, with prospects and no interest in religion or spirituality, keen to improve his wealth. They had no inkling that Jaguar Man was the first victim of a spiritual skirmish that was about to escalate.
Continue to Instalment 8
Go to the Bonelines homepage
Mandi strode up the beach in a vain attempt to clear her head. She had been surprised that the caretaker had not attended the ceremony. Perhaps he felt he needed to keep an eye on the camp, given that, for once, all its residents were absent. Mandi would enjoy bumping into him now; arguing over the meaning of the latest heap of flotsam and jetsam to wash up.
The ceremony had been followed by a buffet and mini-wake in the canteen. The ceremonial instruments were put away and guitars and violins appeared; folk tunes wafted over the gathering. The vegan caterers had excelled themselves; there were even foraged flowers to eat. How they had found these at the time of year was puzzling. The tastes were rich and strong. Yet, the wake was remarkably restrained and ordinary. The same embarrassed anonymities and dislocations that Mandi had felt at other drinks and nibbles after other funerals. Except that this time she was the focus of the sympathies. The only wrinkle was when the caretaker suddenly popped up to throw out a kid in a hoodie, drawn down over his face, nothing to do with the funeral, stealing food, Crabbe had said. In the scuffle the kid had dropped a black disc badge and the caretaker had thrown it after him.
Once it was decent to do so, Mandi had worked the room, saying her goodbyes and dishing out thanks, before escaping to the beach. There was no one else around. Not even dog walkers. The light was just starting to fade. The sea was flat. Mandi checked up and down the dunes, but there was no sign of the caretaker. She resorted to throwing stones into the waves.
“Everglades, everglades, everglades...”
There was something in the water. Twenty metres or so from the shore; a dark shape just beneath the surface. Mandi watched it carefully,
occasionally obscured by the white foam of a wave, but there was certainly something there. At times it seemed to show a wide reflective surface like the body of a seal or a large mammal, but there was no head lifted up above the surface, and what looked like the limbs of starfish spread out from its centre; then it would roll in a wave and the whole thing would appear more like a large bundle of rags, soaked through and close to sinking. It was hard to tell if it was moved by the waves alone or was treading water. Mandi took another stone and threw it so it landed a few feet from the shape. For a moment it did not react, but as another wave came tumbling in, breaking more as the shape approached the shore, it turned and for a moment Mandi saw what she thought was a jaw and three eyeholes, before it twisted again and slipped out of sight, replaced by what might have been a large filthy sheet or dark sail.
Mandi was still wearing her good shoes; she had not changed since the funeral. She looked around for a piece of driftwood to try and hook the thing and drag it to shore, but there was nothing long enough. She scanned the dunes once more; she was still alone. She would wait then. And ten minutes later the shape was within reaching distance. Mandi took a short and solid piece of wood and leaned over the water to drag it in. By now she knew what it was; a body.
Probably a man’s by the clothes. Once she had it out of the water, in some crazed hope that there might still be some life in it, she turned it over. What had been a face was pale and bloated, tiny crabs and sea slugs were escaping from the gaping caves in it; not just the eyes and mouth, but new openings. The police came very quickly. They sealed off the beach and the body was spirited away in an ambulance.
A young constable assured Mandi that there was no question of foul play; from the clothes and what remained of the contents of a wallet they had already identified the deceased as a missing person with a long history of psychiatric problems. “It’s a crying shame,” he said, “you have no idea how many of these poor souls wash up along this coast... we don’t make a big fuss about it obviously because of the holidaymakers... people don’t want to think of these poor fellahs washing up where they’re sun-bathing...”
“How many do you mean by ‘no idea’?” She really did have none. “Ten a year?”
The young policeman did not react.
“Ten a month?”
“I better be getting back...”
“How did you know to come so quickly?”
He nodded towards the dunes.
“The gentleman from Lost Horizon alerted us...”
The caretaker in his usual black was standing on one of the sandy brows.
“But... when I got here there were no footprints near the body...”
“Says he saw it from the tops, Madam. Recognised the pattern, when the sea leaves a body. You should know that these poor sods are very unhappy individuals, they have their own reasons for what they do and they deserve some confidentiality... I’d be grateful if you didn’t share our conversation. Just for good practice.”
Another snowflake.
Chapter 31
It was a surprisingly well attended meeting. Not simply in terms of numbers, but the side streets were cluttered for an hour with BMWs and what the Americans called SUVs. The Bay Museum had been hosting these events for years, or at least the organisation that hosted them was nominally the same – the Bay branch of the Hexameron Essay Society (an otherwise extinct entity, originally established as a conservative discussion group in the mid-nineteenth century by a Corpus Christi student opposed to the decadent ideas of the aesthete and author of the notorious final chapter of ‘The Renaissance’, Walter Pater) – but in recent times the society had received an infusion of younger blood. Publicised as a local historical society with a detailed interest in the work of local nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers, along with the predictable bookworms and retired academics, the meetings now attracted a new generation of local entrepreneurs, technologists from the two nearest university labs and from anonymous industrial estates, and dealers in intellectual property.
Business, on Hexameron afternoons, was a forbidden subject, however. Discussion focussed solely around ideas and their local histories. The Society’s aggressive championing of the role of the county (particularly its Bay area) in the pioneering of radical ideas in information technology, psychology and industrial design had at first created ripples and then loyalty among the more regionally patriotic of the small local village and town historians. Approving articles appeared in the nostalgia sections of local newspapers, then in their mainstream features; trade magazines and free sheets quickly picked them up and the Society’s name was mentioned at Rotary Club dinners, freemasons’ lodges, trade associations and Probus Clubs, filtering down through board room chatter and shop floor recommendations. Mostly male, mostly white, the shining faces that eagerly greeted the arrival of the chairman and speaker were now a familiar sight at the Museum. At the back of the room, staff from a local hotel, Russians in smart black and white uniforms, were discreetly clearing away the last of the champagne flutes and canapé crumbs.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen – and lady! – I am very pleased to welcome you all here today. There is no society business, so I suggest that we move immediately onto the main item on the agenda, and introduce you all to...”
The speaker, who in common with the chairman wore a black disc badge, glanced down at his notes, and paused, allowing a group of four young women, dressed in startling white shirts and dark grey flute knit skirts, to ease themselves in through the back doors, navigate the Russians, and take their places in four reserved seats on the back row. So silently and lithely did they enter that barely a head turned. One that did was that, for the time being, of a young CEO of a big data shell company that had spun off sensitive work to the anonymity of a rural address. He had the four down, on first glance, for a local women’s business leadership group; the kind of set up he could not have been less interested in. But there was something about the self-possessed demeanour and the faultless grooming, not to mention those skirts; they could not be Diane von Furstenbergs! He had not expected to see many of those in Devon. One of the four shot him a warning glance and he span round in his seat, surprised by his guilty nervousness. As he reconnected to the speaker, he found he had missed some introductory remarks and that the talk was already imbedded in illustrative anecdote. The audience laughed, then looked at each other and laughed again. Something about a cabbage and calculations made by steam. He tried to focus, but the look he had received continued to bug him. Female aggression usually excited him, but the deep coldness of the glance had thrown his expectations out of gear.
A new image was thrown up on the screen. Like something from an old telephone exchange. Ah, not cabbage, but Charles Babbage, the inventor of the analytical engine and father of the computer, this really was ancient history; a local lad, apparently.
“Let me illustrate the significance of organised affective information and its politico-anthropological sensitivities, by sharing with you a brief if traumatic episode, a cautionary tale, from Charles’s life...”
The speaker had the knack of referring to historical events as though they had just happened outside the door and that he was a personal friend of those involved.
“... his own fault, actually. He had cultivated a habit of poking his nose into public business at every opportunity, and developed an instinct for great injustices and intervening with great force at those points where the issues were most ambiguous. Where angels feared to tread Mister Babbage rushed in, a genius-fool you might say. On the occasion in point, he was prey to an enthusiasm – a favourite of Jews, Mohammedans and other Puritans – for iconoclasm. Babbage’s target however was an idiosyncratic one, for he chose music, which is mostly acknowledged as having no real representational qualities other than a squeaky similarity to the call of birds and other animals. Nevertheless, our predecessor had made up his mind to wage war upon pavement musicians who were in the habit of regaling unwitting pedestrian audiences close to his home. When Charles’s letters to the London Times elicited no response from law-makers, he wrote his own piece of legislation outlawing a variety of instruments including penny whistles, doom boxes, cheap German saxhorns and bombordons, hurdy-gurdies and – most particularly – bagpipes.”
Laughter.
“This move was wholly consistent with his work in the British Association in which he fought manfully to remove all romance and metaphysics from science. Now he would take from the general mob all temptations of art and other fancies. Using his considerable influence he pushed through the Act, which now bore his name among the populace, and it turned out to be a bullet! For the rest of his life he was chased by an inexhaustible chorus of disgruntled whistlers, bangers, grinders, clangers and gut scrapers. They would form impromptu bands to serenade him from under his windows, they pursued him along the streets in musical crowds of up to two hundred strong.”
On the screen, from ‘Punch’ a Harry Furniss caricature of Babbage’s predicament.
“Repeating ad nauseam the same chord sequences, a few notes again and again, all with a blatant disregard for traditional tonal hierarchies; the effect was of a superband formed by Arnold Schoenberg, Philip Glass and The Adverts!”
Great hilarity; and some nervous checking to spot anyone unsure who The Adverts were. To help the slower ones, the speaker clicked up a video of the band from the Bay playing on Top of the Pops.
“The eye receives the messages,
And sends them to the brain.
No guarantee the stimuli must be perceived the same
When looking through Gary Gilmore’s eyes...”
With another click the frame was frozen and Gaye Advert stared out into the Museum meeting room from thickly darkness-lined eyes surrounded by a lightless anti-halo of jet-black hair. A chair was scraped unsteadily.
“They pursued him even to death, accompanying his coffin, banging and whistling, to the grave.”
A crossfade to a grotesque engraving of the chaos at Babbage’s funeral. The speaker had begun to enjoy his own parade of effects; he built towards his conclusion.
“This, gentlemen, and lady... ladies...”
Realising his mistake, instantly, he shouted at the top of his voice.
“TROLLS!!!!”
Heads that were beginning to turn, span back.
“Yes, trolls! The first instance of collective informational and communicated trolling! To protect the fundamental freedom to make a nuisance! The irony, of course, would have been lost on all parties, but Babbage’s inventions would create the best possible instruments for the right to cacophony and the buskers’ deregulation of tonal structure would arm the modernist shock troops soon to bring down the temples of romanticism so despised by the founder of cybernetics! Those who do not learn from history... and remember, Charles was a member of this society.... and some say TV Smith is too!”
The speaker mimed looking around the hall, but quickly stopped himself.
“My little joke... Charles was a signatory to the elevation of our greatest member, the father of modern archaeology, William Pengelly, to the Royal Society. Those who do not learn from history are destined, like bishops, serial musicians and one-chord-wonders, to repeat it. Forever!”
Knowing amusement all around.
“Let no one dare silence the cacophony, but rather, by subjecting its complex systems to our analyses, and extracting from it the serial music of psychometric patterns, let us benefit by the more effective programming of our machines. Thank you.”
The young CEO so wanted to sneak another glance over his shoulder. Despite the strange fear that still sat at the pit of his stomach, his curiosity was stronger, fuelled by his fear. For a reason he could not explain, he believed that he might understand better the meaning of the talk if he could see the four spooky females’ reactions to it. He waited until the applause was done and the audience were filing from their seats. However, the four seats were vacant; their reservation notices had gone. A kid in a hoodie making a brisk exit – probably a ‘homeless’ looking for somewhere warm, he thought – caught his attention; no women in white shirts. He pushed his way out through the lobby and into the street in the hope of catching a glimpse, but there was no sign of them. He made his way back through the town to his Jaguar XF; unsure, as it floated along the lanes back to the edges of Newton Abbot, quite what it was he had seen and heard. Later that night he received a visit at his hotel.
On the way to his car, flinching at the sudden cold, though neither knew the other, he had passed Mandi on her way to Museum.
Mandi was surprised at how crowded the town was. Perhaps the local sixth form college was between classes; there was a great emission of young people racing off in divers directions, hanging upon each other’s arms, vaping, texting and swinging along in groups of six or seven abreast, blown by gusts of a freezing wind. Mandi did her best to anticipate the dodges required to navigate the horde, using the shaft of the crossing beacon as a convenient protective barrier. She took a moment to scan the street; it was a clone town. There was nothing in the familiar shopfronts to suggest there was a harbour only a few metres away; at The Sett the proximity of the sea, the dunes, the sand affected everything. Here, nothing seemed to notice. Mandi watched the traffic lights change up through the colours, an approaching car slowing, and she prepared to anticipate the illumination of the green man, when a young lad, by age and appearance probably a student from the college, threw himself headlong into the bonnet of the first braking car.
For a moment Mandi thought the boy might have tripped, but there was something in his trajectory that was agentive, willed, demonstratively self-destructive. The boy lay before the wheels of the car, his body slack. Pedestrians on both sides of the road paused. The boy suddenly rolled twice from under the car and over into the opposite lane. Fortunately for the boy, nothing was moving that way, but now he was exposed to whatever turned the corner. Mandi stepped into the road. She did not enjoy a public role. Participating in a spectacle of communal spirit and responsibility always felt bogus and over- performed to her. But this kid was going to get himself killed unless someone did something. Mandi stood over the boy’s prone form, holding up her palm to a warily approaching van. She was shocked when the car against which the boy had just collided abruptly pulled away and speedily disappeared up the street. She was unsure of her next move; how well-placed was she to safely coax a clearly distressed boy, now curled up in a foetus shape, to the pavement? What right had she to save him from himself? And how pissed off was she that no one else seemed bothered enough to share in her discomfort? Enough to walk away?
She would be shocked again; the van she had halted, now gunned its engine, swerved around her and accelerated into an adjacent street. Whether it was a genuine assault on his own well-being or a cry for help, there seemed to be a general mood of indifference and spectatorship to the boy. This was immediately contradicted by two middle aged men who, separately, put down their shopping to come over and crouch over the young man, encouraging him to come to the pavement. Unexpectedly, the boy, without speaking or responding in any other way to either of the men, pushed himself up on his feet, and, folding in upon himself, wandered to the gutter and out of the road. Mandi breathed an irritated sigh of nervous relief; which turned to cold concern as the two men picked up their shopping and reintegrated to the passing crowds; they had done their duty to keep the highway clear.
For a moment the boy swayed from side to side, then ran headlong at an information board and struck it with his forehead, staggering backwards. Mandi felt the shock ripple through her stomach and ran towards the boy, who was still reeling. Did she have the right to touch him, to restrain him? Fuck the right, was she going to endanger her.... what? Livelihood? Career? ...for laying a hand on a child? How old was he? Sixteen? Thirteen? Jesus and Mary, she was caught in the web of her own invective, she had to think clearly, tactically. If she lunged at the boy he might run into the traffic which had resumed its busy progress. Yet, she dare not leave him.
So, she marched by his side, unspeaking, as he set off up the street. The boy darting angry glances at his unwelcome guardian. In this formation they made a hundred yards or so, neither saying a word, the crowds now petering out, both eventually staring ahead, Mandi primed at any moment to grab the boy if he ran for the wheels of a passing bus. She had no plan for how to bring this drama to a happy conclusion; no idea what to say, how to comfort, whether to be involved at all. Across the road, a pair of policemen were arresting a bearded male, who was arguing his case and swinging his arms in woozy gestures. Mandi ran to the nearest constable and tapped his arm. “I think there’s a boy, young man, he’s in danger of his life, of losing his life...”
“OK, OK, madam... we are just attending an incident here...”
“No, I think this is urgent, he just threw himself at a moving vehicle...”
“How badly injured is he?”
The constable looked around for a wounded body.
“He wasn’t really... but I am scared that he’s going to do something stupid and really hurt himself, unless you do something.”
“Well, what would like me to do?”
Mandi breathed in; an unintended inspiration. She was surprised that public safety had become quite such a laisser-faire operation; she had assumed that there was some specialisation in such matters. That it was not just a case of: well, guess for yourself.... that there was a procedure.
“Show me where he is.”
“He’s... He was proceeding...”
She winced.
“...fast, that way. I can’t see him now.”
She stared intently, but there nothing individual or distinctive in the stream of pedestrians. The wind had risen again, cold was descending, the grey of the sky soaked into the populace.
“Can you describe him?”
“Er, mixed race, maybe sixteen or seventeen, maybe much younger but I assumed he was from the college, black hair, black trousers, I can’t remember the colour of his top, like a sweat shirt I think, he was hitting his head on metal boards back there... I didn’t see his eyes, the colour of, quite short for a boy...”
“Thank you, I’ll phone that in straight away. Thank you for your help. Your concern. I’ll phone that in right now.”
And with that he turned away; Mandi unsure whether he really was phoning it in or just trying to get her off his back. She thought of going back and pulling rank, “do you know who I am?”, dropping Childquake’s name. No, she had done her best. Possibly. At least all that was required of her. More than the scores of others who saw the same thing as her and chose to do nothing. Or the least imaginable, and then deserted the scene. She would not even write of this. It was personal.
Mandi stumbled on with a grey contempt in her heart for the people all around her. In a way it was quite comforting; it felt like a return to the simple feelings she had had as a child. The world was evil and she would fight it. She glanced back; the constable was in conversation with his colleague. No sense of urgency. Mandi wondered at how she had been made to feel like a crazy person; she wanted to race back and berate the coppers, but then she would look crazier still. She wanted to know what this general indifference was; it wasn’t just racism, surely, it was something even deeper than that and she was going to...
But what she was “going to” was quickly forgotten as Mandi realised that she was standing outside the Museum. Absorbed in the wash of passivity and the sharp elbows of anxious minimum wage consumers, she had forgotten why she was in the town. It was not to deal with the area’s suicide problem. Getting her bearings, she glanced up and down the street before leaving the rumble of the rising gale for the quiet of mummies and rhino teeth; opposite was a dull multi-storey car park, its upper level draped with wire nets to deter jumpers.
Chapter 32
1912
From the undulating miasmas of the Great End, rising through the seething waves that coursed through pillars without base or capital, came the aetherial numen. In life it had borne the name ‘Edmund Gurney’; now it had assumed a more anonymous and universal appearance. A centre parting still organised its hair, a thickly knotted tie hung loosely from its stiffened collar, and a large thick coat disguised its limbs; only the moustache, stretched like a pair of horsehair wings, had grown more eccentric and ornamental since the shuffling off of its mortal coil.
The numen stepped nimbly and carefully from the maid’s bedroom and began to make its way through the curling sheets of smoky vapour; spectral manta rays might have been swimming along its corridors in aqua-acrobatic displays. As the numen floated by the open door of the tiny ‘master’ bedroom, Smith was bent over a bowl of heated oil, driving billows of sickly effluvium with a giant cardboard sheet. The numen twitched; the last chance to check the balls of soft paper blocking both its nostrils. The elderly Smith waved it along the corridor impatiently.
Outside, the narrow street was effectively blocked by a line of landaus driven down from the great houses and palaces high above the Bay. It was incongruous in a street of such mean if respectable lower middle class types to see such a display of shining surface and glittering particulars. Only around the rims of the carriage wheels was the grimy evidence that, just to get here, the procession had passed – silently and with curtains pulled tight – through that part of the town where dead babies arrived in brown paper parcels and the bakers’ loaves were corrupted with sand.
Inside the house, the spectators were arranged in two ranks. In the hall, around the walls of the parlour and at its door hung the members of the Hexameron Essay Society, two junior members on guard on the modest front porch. Under the pretence of protecting their lungs from the ectoplasmic odour now seeping down the staircase, the Hexamerons covered their faces with scarves and kerchiefs in private and professional embarrassment. Not only were they exposing themselves to public ridicule, but inner ruin too. Those that had brought with them technical sensors, gridded charts and other devices by which to monitor and measure the reality of it all, had quickly squirreled them away in deep coat pockets.
Within this academic crust, the inner circle consisted of the great and the susceptible. Since the tiny coastal valley, once a den of mountain lions and nomads, had been ruined, first with cottages, then palaces and slums, concert halls and baby farms, the resulting layer cake had attracted from the Continent the last ailing remains of hereditary monarchies and aristocracies, the most wealthy of the domestic industrial classes and the hardened skin atop the nation’s literary Eton Mess. Representatives of each stratum were present and uncomfortable; palms flat on the cheap and greasy tablecloth. In the dim illumination of smouldering tow and Bengal fire, adding to the fug, it was hard for the impatient princesses, dukes, knights, magnates and belles to tell the patterns apart from the blooming stains of supper. Imperious Victor Bulwer-Lytton, jealously protective of his grandfather’s fantasy, lifted his dark eyes, swept a mop of ginger hair from the top of his aquiline nose, and bared his teeth as if to bring the whole thing to a halt. A princess giggled; one or two Hexamerons pulled their scarves a little higher.
“Now, I am here!”
The medium, Mrs Willet, sprang from her prone position, head down on the table, and jerked with a straight back into her chair.
“Urrrrrrgh!”
She exhaled with unnatural force; the patched curtains shook and the flapping wings of large birds could be heard outside. The flames in the room flickered.
“Good evening, your royal highnesses, good evening, my lords, ladies and gentlemen...”
At the mention of such titles, the sculptural indifference of Bulwer-Lytton’s features fell away to reveal a surprising vulnerability for a future Governor of Bengal.
“That’s Gurney!” whispered an elderly lady in the inner circle; the inadequacy and age of her best dress revealed that, rather than one of the modern witnesses, here was someone who had been on the spiritualist circuit for some years. “Welcome, Edmund! I can attest, ladies and gentlemen, and your royal... um... this is absolutely and without doubt the voice of our spiritual mentor, Edmund Gurney, brother of the three tragic Gurney sisters! Emily! Rosamund! Mary!”
Silence, but for the creaking of floorboards outside in the narrow hallway.
“My sisters are gone forever, the darkness of the Nile has swallowed them...”
Gasps passed from princess to lord to common shopkeeper.
“There is no return for the lost, but there is life in the hereafter. I promised I would come and come I have...”
There was something gruff and scratchy in Mrs Willet’s voice, but later the lady in the cheap evening dress would remark loudly on how closely her articulation had followed that of the living Edmund. A few strands of Mrs Willet’s black hair had fallen across her brow, a tiny trickle of perspiration was reaching out toward the brow of her nose. Her nostrils flared with excitement. Though not far from beginning the journey into middle age, hers was a handsome face, on a figure more statuesque than homely, but there was something else; a kind of smoothness in her manner that promised all kinds of accelerations and sudden mutations from one thing to another.
“I have spoken before, but tonight I will act. In the world of the living I made this plan, and now from the dead I will realise it!”
A sound like that of a breaking cello string rang out and died quickly away. The curtains shifted. A chill wind moved into the parlour. Smith, with a stiffening back, pulled himself in through the bedroom window, having given the signal for his assistant to open the back door to the cold of the meagre yard and outhouse. There was an acidic sharpness in the spiritual nip as it made its way to the parlour.
“In life, many of those who took the ordinary path felt authorised to demean my careers, but in the beyond, I have achieved everything that life denied to me. Now I will endow my spiritual line, the inheritance of my new supernal nobility, upon a child of your world. Conceived in flesh but forged in spirit; not since the time of the miracles have the two worlds been so close as now; the spiritual realm has answered you, my dear friends, it has seen your suffering and chaos, it has witnessed across time and space your crises, abolitions and overthrows and it is coming to your side. The saviour of the world is at hand!”
A voice from the top of the stairs shouted: “He is here!”
A hand placed firmly in the middle of the numen’s back. A shove. The numen began to descend the creeking steps, one at a time. One of the Hexamerons in the hall gasped as a limy glow filled the space behind the numen, while another Hexameron turned and ran, spinning through the front door and sprinting off down the deserted street and into the night. The greenish light began to fall inside the parlour; Mrs Willet’s face lit up like a mermaid’s. The Hexameron in the hallway backed into the room and all inside shrank back. A further “phutt” of limelight and the air was full of sparkling lights as if strange gases were escaping from the other world into this one. With the hallway free, Smith skipped quietly down the staircase, following the numen and adding new chemicals to the burning bucket. Green was followed by yellow and then red.
Around the parlour wall, the various scientific dignitaries had lowered their scarves, their mouths dropped open. A natural philosopher whispered to the populariser of the aquarium: “it’s not a fake!” The inner circle, their hands still flat down upon the tainted cloth, were swivelled round to watch the door. Slowly a figure, at first no more than a dark shape, began to edge into the opening. Yellow and orange gases broke over its head in waves. One or two of the inner circle glanced down to check the illustration of Gurney, a pencil sketch, provided with their invitations. Now girdled by the doorframe, the concealed bucket released a further surge of illumination and the occupants of the room collectively cried, shrank and exclaimed. Emerging through the fug, came the unmistakable wing-like moustache and the signature centre-parted head of Edmund Gurney.
Slats in the walls were heaved back, wallpaper tearing in angry shouts, and beams of limelight shone from the cavities, which momentarily blinded the occupants and illuminated the numen in startling detail. Motionless for a moment, the room holding its collective breath, the figure then shuddered for a moment as it received a gentle tug from the hidden Smith. It lurched backwards and the door slammed shut with a crash like the crack of doom!
Everyone in the parlour, including Mrs Willet, jumped and screamed. But Mrs Willet topped them all, throwing herself into a fit upon the table top, as the royal princesses turned to the woman in the cheap dress to come to her assistance.
“Hold her down,” commanded a male voice.
“No, you fool!” yelled the experienced spiritualist. “She’s in a trance, you could kill her!”
The men fell back, and Mrs Willet rose to her feet, her face on fire and in exultation.
“The annunciation is over,” she declared, “the séance has begun. Follow me.”
Outside, the sinister black box of a Brougham was turning into the street. A reading light shone within, an austere, corrupt and excited face looked out. The top-hatted driver, mindless of the parked landaus, drove up the side of the street, the carriage’s pair of black stallions shaking their heads, their staring eyes swivelling in their sockets, clanging and bumping the wheels of the parked landaus. The drivers of the landaus began to shout, but were silenced by those two Hexameron guards who had not left their posts at the front door of number 19. A flame or two from an ignited lamp began to appear in the top windows of the terrace. Outside the house, the Brougham came to a halt, the guards leapt forward to open the carriage and a figure familiar to society stepped down to the grimy surface of the street. He wasted no time in bounding up the impoverished set of steps and into the hallway. Mrs Willet was awaiting him, poised halfway up the staircase.
“Good god, what have we now!” exclaimed Bulwer Lytton.
The starry multitude hushed and shamed him.
“Who is that man?” whispered a princess, and the woman in the cheap dress replied.
“That is the prime minister’s brother.”
The thin, dark suited man, with a hint of wildness in his upturned wings of hair, climbed quickly up to Mrs Willet and offered his hand. Together they turned and climbed the narrow staircase toward the master bedroom, brushing aside the webs of smoke and vapour. As the inner circle rushed up the stairs to follow them, pushed from behind by the Hexamerons, torn by disgust at the depravity and desperation to see and know, they entered the layers of hot air, created by Smith and his buckets of pyrotechnica. In a moment the heavy coats and shawls, necessary in the chilly parlour, were discarded, thousands of guineas of fashion lay in piles along the edges of the corridor, while in the bedroom, Mrs Willet, seated on the bed, the thin man standing over her, was quickly divesting herself of all her undergarments, arranged to fall away quickly for the occasion. Once more the layers of the séance were repeated, as below so above, as in the parlour so in the bedroom: the inner circle of bare-shouldered princesses, wescot-naked lords and sweating spiritualists, while around the edges of the room and squeezed at the door were the shirt-sleeved denizens of the Hexameron Essay Society.
Twenty minutes later, the Brougham pulled away from outside the house, heading back towards London. Ten minutes later and the procession of laundaus was broken up and spread across the Bay. The few upstairs lights in other houses went out one by one. In the parlour of number 19, the spiritualist in the cheap dress served tea from a large pot, while the remaining Hexamerons sat around the table, an exuberant and flushed Mrs Willet at their head.
“I feel that it has happened. Everything that Edmund has promised is come down to us. A saviour is coming, a great leader, and the world is about to take a new shape.”
As she spoke, Smith’s assistant was helping his tired and ragged master up a small ladder beside the outhouse, and in a moment the two men had rolled over the low wall and dropped down into the back lane, making their way to the street where the single Brougham and the row of landaus had been replaced by a house-painter’s cart.
Smith leaned in to the three men in overalls.
“Must ‘ave been quite a party, guv’nor!”
“And that’s the last you speak of it...”
He placed a hundred guineas on the footrest. The foreman gasped and reached for the notes and they burst into flames, vaporising in seconds. The painters reeled back in astonishment, wide eyed and slack-jawed. Then a narrow anger began to return to their features as they realised that their bonanza was gone; an anger met full-on by Smith.
“Unless you want to see the rest of it go up in smoke, keep yer traps shut!”
And he slapped another hundred on the cart.
Chapter 33
Inside the lobby, April was waiting for Mandi.
“I’ve been expecting you!”
“How did you know I was coming?”
“I saw your missed call.”
But there had been no signal. Something must have got through eventually.
“I’ve got something very exciting to show you. But first, I would like you to meet some people who may be able to help you. Local history people...”
April led Mandi through the cluttered lobby, walls hung with venerable awards, plaques to patrons, a giant female Egyptian goddess and a small cabinet of oddities; on its middle shelf, a tray of small bones, claws and mostly teeth. The tray caught Mandi’s eye; there was something about the pattern of creamy ivory against the purply velvet of the display cloth. Inside the hall, the Museum’s Engagement Officer was morosely stacking chairs while the representatives of the Hexameron Essay Society were extracting memory sticks, packing away their projector and tidying up the notes and minute book. Mandi noticed how April waited patiently for the four men to conclude their conversation before interrupting.
She had a wide and ordinary face; almost moonish and plain. She gave no impression of depth or definition. There was no requirement, Mandi assumed, for archivists to be dull, but perhaps the attention to minute detail, the isolation among the records, the repetitive searching and recording of similar things might inevitably lead to an ironing out of temperament. She wondered if there were many volatile or angry archivists? Were there storerooms and records offices where the archives were regularly hurled at the walls in frustration? After a minute or so, the four men concluded their discussion and turned as one to Mandi. As though April were invisible.
“Yes, my dear?” The Chairman smiled, a little creepily; but not as creepily as Grant Kentish might have. “How can we help you?”
“O, er...”
Mandi turned to April.
“So sorry to bother you gentlemen, I’ve been helping this young lady with an enquiry about a manuscript and I noticed that you were meeting here today. I think her enquiry might have a local historical angle.”
Young? April seemed no older than Mandi; yet she spoke of her like her grandmother might. If Mandi ever had had the luxury of grandmothers.
“Well, that’s what we’re here for,” volunteered the lunchtime speaker. “What is the nature of your enquiry?”
This was all so tweedy and antiquarian. The manner, the turns of phrase, the sports jackets and the politesse; out of kilter with the state of the art projector, Iron Man charger, the micro-recording devices, the Sonos One speaker, the fitness trackers, tablets, the Kaiser Encores and 4G phones. One of the younger ones dangled the keys to a Lexus.
“I think Mandi might be interested to hear of any reflections you might have on the history of the Lovecraft family in these parts.”
“That would be the family of H. P. Lovecraft, the renowned American writer? Well, I think his kith and kin were long emigrated before he came along... but he was a strange character, obsessed with monsters that he would very successfully fail to describe properly; many-tentacled things lurking under the ocean, globular subterranean creeping things with eyes that came and went like rashes, if I’m not mistaken...”
“It was more the original family, the ancestors before emigration.”
“Ah well....”
“I think the last one was in an asylum at Newton Abbot. These were not sophisticated...”
“I think the great grandfather was a choirmaster – or maybe leader of the church band, was it? – in one of the village churches close to the Great Hill...”
“Yes, that is correct, and either he or... hmmm.... not sure, but one of the family was landlord at the beer house there, or it may have been an inn in those days... but if you are considering drawing some conclusions from our remarks, I suggest that you travel to New York, ride on the metro, visit Brooklyn... what this Lovecraft fellow feared was not our county, but the new urban technology, the rushing lights and racing winds of the New York subway, and.... of course, the African-Americans... those were the inspiration for his monsters.”
“It was an ordinary family with its own troubles; some dispute or other sees the great grandfather prised out of his position as head of the band... perhaps for low churchmanship, high churchmanship, they were major issues then... and some of the locals held eccentric views... I’m pleased to say that many of the most esteemed members of our Society have played a significant part in expunging the superstitions that once spoiled the county’s life...”
“I have been working on the finds from the Old Grotto...”
The lunchtime speaker turned on April as if she had impugned the Society.
“That man was a rank fool! Widger!! God! If only he had turned to Pengelly earlier! Instead, he spent twenty years digging up the most fabulous finds in order to prove that the Deluge was real!”
Mandi assumed that they were talking about a contemporary detectorist; she was amazed later when April explained that this was fury about events that happened a hundred and fifty years ago.
“Have you been able to make any sense at all of them?”
“You would have to ask Theo...”
April and the men turned towards the distracted Engagement Officer, who disappeared behind a stack of chairs. The men turned to April.
“O. No, not really. Unfortunately, as I think you know, there are no charts to explain where the various artefacts were found, or when, no markers on the finds themselves, so we have no idea at all at what levels of the cave floor the objects were found...”
“Then they are meaningless. Throw them back in the cave! That was a treasure trove of finds; ruined without some grid, the objects themselves are senseless... worthless... what could have been a space of learning and discovery is now just a black hole!”
April touched Mandi on the arm. It was a strange touch; a steely localised numbness like that immediately after a Lidocaine injection at the dentists.
“We are talking about the man who dug up that tray of bones in the lobby.”
“Was he a Lovecraft?”
“No! Though, I can see how you make the mistake! He was no less tortured by a fear of hobgoblins, poor man. No, Lovecraft was a secular materialist, in that way a modern individual, but one who liked to stare into the void left by God. Our amateur excavator...”
“Who was he?”
“A nobody. A draper’s assistant. Not a man of either learning or evolved intelligence. Combining – somehow! – a fervent belief in the literal meaning of the bible, that the universe was created at some time on a Thursday afternoon six thousand years ago, with whatever anyone told him at the pub. He was so terrified of the world, that in the end he took to getting home by running across the fields and vaulting the hedgerows rather than confront the hobgoblins that his fellow drinkers had told him lived in the lanes. In the end he gave up his job and spent all his time either at home or in the cave... twenty years...”
“Twenty years of destroying the archaeological record!”
“I hope, madam, that when you come to write up your research...”
“O, I...”
“That you place these men – Lovecraft and the draper’s assistant – in the correct context of the county. Not only were they wholly unrepresentative, not only were they from the lowest strata...”
“Like judging psychology by the values of a Viennese dustman!”
“This town was once the watering hole of the royal families of Europe, we had our own symphony orchestra, with premieres of new English symphonies...”
“And will again, Brian, now...”
“...and not only do the scholars of today dwell on them like lower animals fascinated by the faecal droppings of their own kind, but they have contributed nothing to the great progressive project of men like Pengelly, Froude...
“The engineer.”
“And the other...
“...Heaviside the prince of electro-magnetism, Babbage, you know obviously, Peacock and propulsion...”
“All members of our society...”
“And the great Cattell...”
“At one time and another...”
April broke their flow.
“Would you like to see the hyenas’ teeth, Amanda?”
“Then we’ll leave you to your bones and wish you no harm! By the way, we are members of The Hexameron Essay Society, this branch established 1865, our aim to preserve and promote the most progressive ideas in technology, philosophy and psychology intuited and developed here in the county. My name is Toby Jugg. You would be most welcome to visit us at our new headquarters.”
He offered his hand.
“If we can help you in any way with your studies, please don’t hesitate to call us.”
And he fished in his jacket, while the others, as if at a signal, plucked their goTennas from the table. The Chairman produced his Samsung Galaxy.
“Bump?”
“Sure.”
Mandi and the Chairman bumped phones and transferred their business card data. Then in a disturbingly short space of time, in a move like a credit card unfolding into an Ian Sinclair knife, the four Hexamerons gathered up their gadgets and, smooth as any Roman unit, rolled out through the double doors and were gone.
“Theo!”
There was no sign or sound of the Engagement Officer.
“O, let’s just go down and look at the teeth.”
Chapter 34
It was the Jaguar Man who, much to his surprise, was making his way up the lanes from the anonymous industrial estate to the former monastery. Two weeks before, he had attended his first lecture; now he was an agent of the Society and on his first assignment. Things moved quickly in the Hexameron world. He might not have been so amenable to this sudden promotion but for the encouragement of his boss. He had not quite worked it out yet, but there was some connection between the company’s global harvesting of information and the fine detail of this tiny local Society’s philosophies. Maybe they were providing the unambiguous solutions for the algorithms?
His briefing, however, had nothing to do with data and everything to do with “tradecraft”, the working up of a credible legend and the possibility of some kind of cosmic steganography; in other words, his target might be playing games; there might even be a signal woven within the fabric of everything, stemming from this one individual, which was driving the whole air loom!
Jaguar Man assumed that that last part was a test of his credulity.
Over the tall Devon hedgerows, up on the tips of his Berlin brogues, he caught glimpses of bulbous towers with exclamatory spikes. Yet, at the top of the hill, arriving at the entrance to the site, all sense of its former use seemed gone. There was nothing very holy about the functional buildings immediately inside the gate. Pleasant and well kept, enough of a 70s office feel to make him feel at home. Perhaps their thinking was the same as his boss’s: no one asks questions about dull places. The complex was now a residential home for seniors with good liquidity, and he was less than likely to be welcome trespassing beyond their PRIVATE sign. Yet, there was no one at the main office. What were they going to do to him? Beat him with their bus passes?
He was sure to meet someone on the paths snaking off to different buildings. Some friendly old dear would direct him to Mister Balfour-Willet.
There was no one on the paths. Although the weather had become increasingly and unseasonably mild, a cold spell had recently set in. Perhaps the elderly were keeping warm inside. The layout of the complex became clearer once Jaguar Man had cleared the reception area. There was a larger and older set up of ornate spires and large grey halls to his left; they presumably constituted the former monastery and convent. He had no idea how that had worked; unisex religious houses fell outside his experience. He was stronger on social psychology and contemporary consumer trends. On his right were the more recent flats, a bank of small but expensive homes replete with glowing windows and smart interiors, but no signs of life. Should he knock arbitrarily on a door?
Frustrated with himself, he elected to forgo the flats and press on through a patch of trees beyond an ornamental lawn, in the hope of something more inhabited turning up on their other side. The man he sought – Balfour-Willet – had served in the British security forces, so he might not be easy to find if he was avoiding visitors. To add further mystery to the man’s cv, it seems that in the 1960s he had become a monk, moved in here, joined the closed order that occupied the place at the time – closed by their own choice apparently – suitable for someone used to a clandestine lifestyle, he supposed. When it all folded and the nuns and the other monks moved on, he had left the order and stayed here. Something had hung onto him, or he had hung onto something; the guy was good at hanging on. Unless the information was all screwed up, he was well over a hundred years old.
Jaguar Man wondered if he had been allowed to keep his cell, while everything around him was transformed into swish retirement flats, or whether he was in one of the warm flats and maybe even watching him now. He felt the chill of a man watched. The documents acquired by the Hexamerons indicated that Balfour-Willet had left holy orders, but might still wear a habit. Did he still believe and was he maintaining some kind of religious life here; even though the monastery had been closed for almost thirty years? He would have already been an elderly man then, perhaps he never fully understood the changes? So what comprehension would he have of the Hexamerons calling in their debts after a century? The man, as a child, even as a babe in arms, had played some role in their past, but how much was he likely to remember of that? Jaguar Man would tread carefully; best that the shock did not kill Mister Balfour-Willet! That, surely, was not the Hexamerons’ intention? So why send in Jaguar Man?
Rather than the thin windbreak he had expected, the gathering of trees was thick and crowded, the paths obscured by huge and bare Rhododendron bushes and a large tin shed. Instead of a further block of housing, he came to the old wall of the monastery grounds and a long plot of graves, marked off by a cast iron fence. Inside, the graves were decorated with crosses made of the same metal; Benedictine cross molines, the points of which ended in something like forked tongues or the wings of moustaches. One or two of the crosses had lost a limb and looked more like giant fish hooks. Another cross had sunk up to its arms as if the ground below had collapsed and it was trying to climb out of the grave.
Jaguar Man turned back and retraced his steps to the shed.
“Hello, Deirdre!”
The voice was somehow both vital and quavering. It sounded almost feminine.
“Come in, you silly little fool, come in! Don’t skulk about out there with a face like an early Christian martyr!”
On the edge of the tree line, looking out over the open fields beyond the monastery grounds, was a hooded figure, its back to the Jaguar Man. It was seated in a folding chair. By its side was a small easel on which sat an oil painting in a state of incompletion.
“Excuse me, sir...”
“Why, what have you done now, you little scamp?”
“Are you talking to me?”
The hooded head turned and Jaguar Man caught a flash of a white moustache, just as the first flakes of unseasonal snow began to dodge through the tree tops.
“Of course, I am, you damned little fool! Do you think I’m delusional? Don’t you dare ever try to steal my savings again! I’ve got my eye on you, young lady! I know your tricks!”
“I think you might have the wrong person.”
“No, you idiot, I know who I am! It’s you who has no idea who you’re dealing with...”
The old man broke into a hacking cough. He had turned his face back to the fields. Jaguar Man walked down to where he was seated by the easel and moved around to catch his face. He was not a monk; or, at least, he was not dressed as a monk. Despite the white moustache and the frail voice, the face under the hoodie was almost cherubic. A large patterned rug of red and black was pulled up to his chin. It was unclear quite how he had manipulated the palette and brushes that sat on the small table next to the easel.
“That’s better. Now I can see you, get an idea of you. What fool’s errand are you on today? No, don’t tell me, let me guess? You’ve come from those buffoons in the town; another of their wild goose chases. O, Deirdre, why do you do it? Why do they all do it! ‘Deirdre’ was the first to come and I’ve called every single one since by her name. Poor Deirdre! Poor all of them! Do you really know who they are? No, it’s not your fault, poor benighted lass! Have you come about the messiah?”
“Who?”
“O, what are they calling him now? Shiloh? The prophet? The Bagwan!”
This time the coughing fit doubled him over and Jaguar Man saw the explosion of long white hair that fell, shaking, from the hoodie until the attack had receded.
“I do beg your pardon, young lady! But we get so little opportunity for entertainment here that I always look forward to the arrival of a new Deirdre!”
“I’ve come to meet a Mister Balfour-Willet.”
“Have you, indeed? You’ve just missed him – he’s gone to Bristol to visit his parents!”
The fit returned, the old man doubled, and the long white hair, like the claws of a hermit crab creeping from its shell, showed themselves. Jaguar Man was becoming impatient.
“I’ll leave you, if you’re...”
“O, leave me, will you. Big threat! O, Deirdre, doooon’t leeeave me! Hahaha! O, Deeeeirdreee! Hahahaha! He gave his soul to Mary, you fool! That’s what I told Deirdre, that’s what I told all the Deirdres. Did none of them report back to station? What unreliable assets you have all turned out to be. Pengelly must be furious! How can you expect to meet with Mary if you have not been trained in her craft? If you have not been initiated, my sweet one! Mere novices, my God, Mary will eat you alive! She has girls like you for breakfast! With toast and marmalade! With her boiled egg! Hahahaha!”
“Where can I find this Mary?”
“You are a seeker, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know what you mean. Frankly, I haven’t got a clue what the fuck you are talking about, you old fool, but I’ve got to speak to Balfour-Willet and if he’s with Mary I want to see Mary.”
“Well, dear girl, if you think you are ready. She’s in the chapel, waiting for you.”
“Well, why the fuck couldn’t you say that in the first place, you old bastard?”
“And deny me my fun?”
“Fuck off.”
Jaguar Man climbed the grassy incline and turned down the path, making Berlin brogue-shaped tracks in the dusting of snow quickly gathered there. From behind he heard a cough. Not an involuntary one, this time. Reluctantly, he turned back to the aged cherub, who was turned towards Jaguar Man. For the first time he noticed the painting. He had taken it for granted that the hump of green represented one of the distant hills. Now, though, it looked more like a sea creature.
The old man fixed his stare, and then nodded his hood at the land above the path.
“You mean the shed?”
The old man’s laughter filled the trees. The flakes grew bigger. Looking up, snow landing on his nose and catching in his long eyelashes, Jaguar Man thought that he saw seagulls mixed up in the clouds.
“O, Deirdre, you really are a gas! If only we’d had girls like you in the service! We’d all be speaking German by now! Yes, in the shed, you little fool! She’s in the shed!”
And, turning back to enjoy his painting, the old man began to sing under his breath:
“Squirty Mary up from the deep,
Rode the big squid in her bare feet,
When she dropped her guts
She gave birth to fag butts,
And her secret’s hid under her creep.”
The shed was made of corrugated iron and painted a shade of green that reminded Jaguar Man of found footage movies set in deserted psychiatric institutions. Three wooden steps led up to a gothic door with two tall gothic windows either side. The shed itself was remarkably narrow, and he had assumed it held gardening tools and plastic sacks of insecticide and fertiliser. Above the door was another window, shaped like a clover leaf within which the mullions formed a triangle bisected by circles and parts of circles, always in threes. Either side of the narrow building were open but roofed wings with benches. He climbed the steps and knocked on the door.
If there was a reply it was softer than the falling snow. He tried the door and it was unlocked. Immediately inside was a small white chair, stood out in the darkness. For some reason he thought to turn and through the gothic frame of the open door, among the trees, the old prankster was waving a paintbrush over his easel. Jaguar Man turned back and felt breath fall out of his lungs. When he inhaled again the air was ice; a freezing sensation ran along his chest and down to his fingertips. Goddam weather forecast! An unnaturally bright statue of the Virgin Mary stood on a mediterranean blue altar, stained glass lights radiating from around her head. She was dressed in a dazzling white robe with a blue stole. Under one foot she trampled the thorned stem of a rose, while from a chocolate-coloured rock a great rush of warm blue water gushed in breakers and white horses.
Jaguar Man felt the need to sit.
Walking around the white chair, he was puzzled by the cork interior of the chapel, draping down the walls like bark tentacles. He sat in the white chair, less than a metre from the Virgin. He felt he ought to look up in adoration at her face, her eyes lifted like his. But he could not raise his eye line above the blue gushing spring, which seemed to move and curl and run. So rapt, he was, that he did not hear the grey wooden door close gently behind him; he only noted how the light around Mary was intensifying. He sat stock still, as outside the snow began to mount and the paths disappeared, filling the footprints of the old man and the lines in the snow where he had dragged the legs of his easel.
One of the residents found him. Walking her dog, she had looked in to check that the thaw had caused no damage. At first she thought to leave him; that perhaps he was a visiting relative deep in contemplation. When she returned and he was unresponsive to her polite enquiries, she fetched reception, who came and then rang the emergency services.
No one could understand why the young CEO of a thriving big data spin-off might choose to walk to a tiny chapel in the middle of woods and sit until he froze to death. There were no signs of foul play, no suicide note, nothing in his emails or texts to suggest that he was anything other than an ambitious operator, with prospects and no interest in religion or spirituality, keen to improve his wealth. They had no inkling that Jaguar Man was the first victim of a spiritual skirmish that was about to escalate.
Continue to Instalment 8
Go to the Bonelines homepage