‘Shall we pray?’ he said, in an insidious voice.
‘Yes!’ said Hannah Dooley.
Mum sat at the table and pushed the grey hair back from her eyes. She pressed her hands together. They were red and raw from cooking and washing, and the lines on her face seemed to have multiplied since I last looked at it. ‘Norman,’ she said quietly, ‘is very, very near.’ Mrs Danby, who was dressed in sporty tweeds, as if for a shooting party, gave a superior kind of nod. I wondered whether there was anything in the teaching of Tai-Ping that could get me through the next half an hour. I thought about sei-sei-ying, or the condition of being a birch leaf in early autumn, but did not find it helpful. What was needed here, rather than a meditative technique, was a pump-action shotgun.
I had no choice. They were all sitting waiting for me. With a mounting feeling of dread, I went to a chair at the far end of the table from Quigley and lowered my head in the gloom. Quigley stretched out both his arms across the table and looked up at what was left of his roof.
‘O Jesus, we seek Thy help. As our church is itself in a confusion Thee Thyself often experienced when on this earth in places such as, for example, Gethsemane, which was, by anyone’s standards, a pretty tough time for You. Hear us now as we attempt to contact Simon’s father, and help him in the great spiritual work that awaits him in this prime time of his boyhood!’
He shot me a quick look from under those bushy brows. I kept my eyes down. Emily was looking at me in a way I found frankly flirtatious.
Suddenly Quigley stopped praying. His old lady was bearing down in her chair and generally showing signs of getting off the psychic runway in double-quick time. She hadn’t even frothed yet.
I was two down from her, but I could see Hannah Dooley wince as Marjorie started. Quigley stopped, clearly expecting her to give it a bit of movement, but, instead, she went into a sort of mammoth clench. She bound her brows and bit her lower lip and generally carried on like someone with serious constipation. After a quite incredibly long time she said, shaking her head wildly, ‘No!’
Everyone looked a touch put out. In twenty years of psychic work, Marjorie Quigley had never yet refused her fence. I looked up and saw Emily looking at her mum in consternation.
Her mum shook her head again. ‘No no no no no!’ she said. She gave a huge sigh. ‘There’s no one there!’
Look. This was ridiculous. We’re going out to lunch, or what? We knew there were loads of people there. We’d only just put down the phone to them. The woman was just not doing her job and getting through.
She started to tap herself on the forehead. ‘Total blank,’ she said. ‘Nothing there at all!’
We did her the favour of pretending that she was not talking about her own lack of brains.
She bit her lip furiously. ‘Damn!’ she said, like a tennis player who has just lost a point. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!’
Mrs Danby leaned across and took her hand. ‘Gently,’ she said. Then she looked at me and sighed. ‘Norman always liked to go gently.’
This struck me as amazingly suggestive. Why was she looking at me like that? I looked across at Mum, and found she was looking at Mrs Danby with an expression I did not recognize. It could have been fear or sympathy or irritation or a combination of all three. I thought about her and about Dad and the Danby woman. I had no idea, really, what any of them thought or felt.
Mrs Danby was simpering at Mum. When she’d finished simpering, she said, ‘I blame myself!’
My mum looked vaguely hurt. She scratched herself behind the ear and said, ‘Oh don’t do that, Mrs Danby!’
‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ Mrs Danby said darkly, ‘Veronica would never have gone to that wine and cheese party. Or to Angmering, for that matter.’
Everyone started to sigh and shake their head. Mrs D held up her claw-like hand. Quigley started to ooze humility. He bowed forward over the table. He got his head so low you could practically see the cleft in his buttocks. ‘Oh Mrs Danby,’ he said, in the tone of voice he usually reserves for Jesus Christ. ‘Oh Mrs Danby!’
Mrs Danby smirked. She didn’t have to do a lot to get results. But I’ve noticed that a certain amount of loot helps to invest even your most casual remarks with a certain significance.
Mrs Danby shook her lizard-like head and pointed at me dramatically. ‘When all’s well with the boy,’ she said, ‘we will come into our own!’
I felt they had money on me. You know? Like I was a horse or something.
Mrs Danby was well away. She broke her hands free of the grip of those on either side of her and pressed her palms to the table. ‘Thou seest me, Lord,’ she said. ‘Thou seest this boy also. Help him! Grant that he be not in Error! Help him back to the circle! And may he be the healing of the things I wrought with his father!’
‘Wrought’, eh! What had she and my dad wrought, I wondered? Suddenly I was in Error! Error is pretty bad. If you’re in Error you are one step away from the thumbscrews. If there had been less enthusiasm among the congregation for ufology, maybe they would have devised a public punishment for me.
People who fail the church are sometimes made to appear at morning service ‘as they were first made before God’, which these days usually means in their underclothes. If they have been just very bad, and if they have someone to stand up for them, they are given three strokes of the whip, usually by Sheldon Parry, the born-again television director, and then made to put on a short green smock for the duration of the service. If they have been very, very bad and are not well connected inside the church, the man with the wart gobs all over them, people chuck potato peelings at them and then they are turned out into Strathclyde Road in their underpants.
I was moving dangerously close to the potato peelings. This much was obvious. I checked under the jeans to make sure I wasn’t wearing the Donald Duck boxer shorts.
‘Yes,’ said Quigley, looking at me. ‘Grant that what he has seen may not be a thing sent to tempt him!’
Pike made a kind of snuffling noise, and Mrs Quigley tried once again. She took the hands of those on either side of her, lowered her head and gave a constipated grunt. She grunted until sweat stood out on her brow. She grunted so hard there seemed a very strong chance she might drop a turd right there and then. But, after a minute or so, she shook her hands free, waggled her head furiously and said, ‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’
They were in a meeting, guys! Mozart was talking to Rose Fox. Rose Fox was talking to Vivaldi. My dad was tied up with Dickens or waiting for General Franco to turn up.
‘Damn!’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’
‘Precious . . .’ said Quigley.
‘Fuck!’ said Mrs Quigley. ‘Fuck! Fucking arseholes!’
Everyone looked at her oddly. It was OK for her to do this kind of thing when in a mediumistic trance, but this wasn’t quite that, was it? She was, allegedly anyway, compos mentis. If this kind of thing was allowed to continue, she might well start swaggering into Sunday service and shouting things like ‘Bugger!’ or ‘Piss off!’ if she found someone in her seat.
‘My darling . . .’
It was then that it happened.
Leo Pike, in forty years of attending Spiritualist seances, had never made much impact on the spirit world. He had an aunt in Leicester who had died of double pneumonia in 1964, but she had never wanted to speak to him. In fact, none of the dead, famous or unfamous, had ever shown any interest in Pike. And, as far as I had been able to judge, the feeling was pretty mutual. In all the years I had been watching him, he had, as far as I could tell, absolutely fuck-all interest in them. You could wheel in Julius Caesar and Pike would just sit there, peering at him through his gold-rimmed glasses.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when Pikey, without prior warning, started to hum like a top. At first I think most of us thought it was some electrical appliance. Then we noticed that the Pike head was sort of pulsing backwards and forwards like a mechanical toy.
Nothing unusual in th
at. Pike’s head quite often pulses backwards and forwards like a mechanical toy. In fact, he has an extraordinary repertoire of mannerisms, all of which could be reasonably mistaken for possession of one kind or another. There isn’t a moment when the lad isn’t twitching or jerking or going into spasm. So, at first, we saw nothing unusual in his bonce doing the rhumba on top of his neck.
Then his toupee started to slip.
Pike’s rug was a topic of endless fascination in the First Spiritualist Church. I can still remember the day when it walked into all our lives. I must have been about nine, but I still remember my dad putting his back to the door, after Pikey had gone home from a seance.
‘Did you see it?’ he said in hushed tones. ‘Did you see it?’
‘Sssh, Norman,’ said my mum. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’
But it was impossible not to talk about it. One minute, there he was with a few scraps of grey hair plastered across his scalp – the next he looks like a prizewinner at Cruft’s Dog Show. This wasn’t just any old wig, you know? It looked like it had been grown in a tropical rainforest.
For weeks we had talked of little else. How was it held on? Was it stitched? Was it pure will power? Was it, perhaps, Blu-Tack? One woman was prepared to swear she had seen Sellotape on the back of Pike’s neck.
And now it was moving. The more his head jolted backwards and forwards, the further down his scalp it crept. By the time he had finished rocking, his fringe hung over his eyes. When he finally spoke, it was as if his voice was coming out of a large, brunette bush.
‘O Lord,’ he said, in a high-pitched voice. ‘O Lord!’
We all just goggled at him. I mean, no one had ever seen Pike do this before. Right? Then he slewed round hard in his chair. His wig was now at a slight angle. He looked as if someone had just hung a mop on his nose.
From behind the toupee came a deep, deep voice. ‘How y’all doin’? it said, in a strong American accent. ‘An’ how’s little Nelly?’
19
No one had an answer to this.
For a moment I thought Quigley was going to tell him to snap out of it. But then my mum said, in a timorous voice, ‘Do you mean Nelly Woodhouse that was with the Guardian Building Society?’
There was a silence. Then Pike said, in the same Texan drawl, ‘Don’t rightly know, ma’am. Don’t rightly know.’
Mrs Danby was looking at Pike with a new respect. This all went to show just how far Quigley had slipped since I Testified. Time was when no one would dare open their trap in front of Mrs Quigley.
‘The spirits wander,’ said Mrs Danby, ‘and find their homes in new bodies.’
Everyone nodded with fantastic respect. ‘The spirits wander,’ right? You heard Mrs Danby. She said the spirits wander, and she has a Rolls-Royce, guys! I thought to myself that, however far they had wandered, if they ended up in the body of Leonard Arthur Pike they must be really desperate.
Pike started to sing ‘Home on the Range’ in quite a loud voice. I had never heard Pike sing in real life, so I couldn’t tell how this spirit voice matched up to the real one. Whoever was talking to us from Over Yonder, however, knew all the words.
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
And the deer and the antelope play . . .
I thought there was a strong chance that some of the lads might join in, but this proved not to be the case. Pike gave us all four verses, including the one about the wagon train being painted green, which I had never heard before. When he had stopped, there was silence. Nobody could follow that. We all looked at Pike. What was he going to do next? Would it be with or without music?
‘I’ll mosey on down now,’ he said, now sounding as if he came from Alabama rather than Texas. ‘I’ll mosey, ah guess.’
‘Stay, spirit!’ said Mrs Danby. ‘Who are you?’
Pike gave a deep chuckle. ‘Tex,’ he said. ‘Tex is my name.’ Then he started to sing ‘Home On the Range’ again.
I don’t think we would have worn all four verses again (especially the one about the wagon being painted green) but, when he got to the line about the deer and the antelope playing, he burst into tears.
‘What’s the matter, Tex?’ asked my mum.
‘Little Nelly!’ said Pike, now sounding vaguely Australian. ‘Little Nelly Woodhouse died on the prairie!’
That was all we could get out of Tex. Mrs Danby tried. My mum tried. Even Quigley abandoned his dignity and had a go. But Tex had nothing more to say to us. I still wake up at night and think about Nelly Woodhouse. It was haunting, somehow.
There followed the longest silence I can ever recall at a seance. Pike just sat there with a toupee and tears all over his face, and we sat there staring at him.
After three or four minutes Quigley said, ‘He’s in deep, deep trance.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘he is very, very far away.’
Mrs Danby nodded.
‘I have been where he is,’ La Quigley continued, ‘and it is a bleak and lonely place.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby.
Mrs Q was finding her way back into the action.
‘It is a place,’ she went on, ‘where the soul is buffeted by winds and violent storms and feelings from the old, old time.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby.
Before Mrs Quigley could start drawing us maps of the terrain on the far side of the Veil, Pike gave an absolutely agonized scream. It really was scary – I kid you not. What was even weirder was, it sounded like his own voice.
‘Mr Marr!’ he yelled. ‘Mr Marr!’
I leaned forward. ‘What about Mr Marr?’
But Pike went on screaming. It was a horrible sound. As if someone was being hurt, badly. The sort of noise you imagine coming from a torture chamber. ‘Mr Marr! Mr Marr! Mr Marr!’
‘What about him?’
Then a new voice came out of him. It was a mechanical, grating sound from deep in his throat. I’m not easily spooked, but I didn’t like this voice. It reminded me of the voice that had started all this, the night my dad died. ‘I serve a different master,’ said the voice. ‘I serve other gods!’
It was well weird. No one was holding hands any more. We were all staring at Pike. As we watched, his wig fell forward over his nose and landed on the table in front of him. No one tried to pick it up. Pike continued to stare ahead of him, but his eyes weren’t focused on anything.
‘Where are you from?’
Pike gave a glassy smile. His head turned to me, just the way Mrs Quigley’s had done when she passed on that first message from my dad. And, when he spoke, I’ll swear it was my father’s voice coming out of him. It sounded just like him.
‘I’m a long way away, Simon,’ said my dad. ‘I really am a long, long way away.’
‘Dad . . .’
Then the mechanical voice cut in on him, like a radio changing channels. ‘Our planet is dying,’ said the mechanical voice. ‘We have no food or water. Help us, please! We have no food or water.’
Quigley’s eyebrows drew in tight. He wasn’t sure about this at all.
‘Our sun is weak,’ said the mechanical voice. ‘Our canals are dying. The moon is in its last quarter. Help us, please!’
‘How can we help?’
That’s my mum. If she met an alien in Wandsworth High Street, she’d be telling it the way to the supermarket and offering it free babysitting before you could say ‘flying saucer’.
I wasn’t sure what Mrs Danby thought of all this. She was gazing at Pike in bewilderment.
Before Quigley could interrupt, I leaned forward and said, ‘From which planet are you?’
I practically spelt this out. I wanted this thing to hear me loud and clear. It didn’t, however, answer me directly. Which, if you think about it, isn’t surprising. Anyone – even an advanced being from the other side of the universe – who is forced to use Leo Pike as a channel of communication is bound to experience transmission difficulties.
‘From which planet?’
&
nbsp; Pike’s head was still facing me. At my last question there was movement behind the eyes. You could see a thought stirring, but you couldn’t say if it was Pike’s or not.
Then the voice started again, cracked and dry. ‘Our planet is old and tired. The craters are dying. There is no night now. We need food and water.’
Whinge, whinge, whinge, eh? When we finally meet beings from another galaxy, all they do is moan! As I was thinking this, Pike started to laugh and the voice took on more colour. It didn’t sound mechanical now. It sounded sneaky and mean, like a kid that thinks it’s got away with something.
‘We got Marr,’ it said. ‘We fixed Marr good!’
‘Which planet?’ I said again.
I was getting annoyed, as well as frightened. But before I could say any more, my dad’s voice came back.
‘Don’t look any further, Simon, please,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous. Please don’t look for me any further. We all have to die, my darling. I didn’t want to go! I didn’t want to leave you! But I’m dead. You must stop looking for me . . .’
‘Dad . . .’ I almost shouted.
But, as I did, the mechanical voice came back, loud and clear. ‘I am Argol, from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear. And I bring death with me. I am the bringer of death to your world!’
Pike clambered to his feet and tried to walk forward. The table was in the way, but he was still trying to move. Emily Quigley started to scream. Pike’s legs went up and down like someone walking the wrong way along a travelator. He still stared straight ahead as he ploughed into the heavy dining-table.
Then, suddenly, he picked it up and flung it across the room. Pike isn’t a big guy, but he did this like he had been in secret weight-training. As the table fell against Mrs Quigley and my mum (who started to cry), Pike just kept on walking, like a robot responding to an invisible signal. When he got to the wall, he didn’t stop. He just kept trying to walk through it.
They Came From SW19 Page 17
