And that was how it had started. Maggie’s arrival had been a godsend for Doreen. Alice was an extraordinarily accomplished clairvoyant, but the pressures had taken their toll and one night her mind had shattered in the Oracle, fragmenting horrifically, and she’d fled into the darkness. The Sisterhood had never been without a Pythia, so when Maggie made her dramatic approach, Doreen accepted immediately. She then turned to the problem of finding Alice, but by that time she’d gone to ground in London, living off the streets and befriending pigeons.
Now Maggie stood before the entrance to the Oracle with Doreen and Sandra on each side. She hesitated. ‘Do you know, I can see why Alice didn’t like this place. It really creeps me out,’ she said softly.
‘Me, too,’ murmured Doreen, ‘so we’ll keep it as short as we can.’
‘Don’t let me dribble too much.’
‘We won’t.’
‘And I’ll need coffee. Lots of coffee. I definitely don’t want to miss lunch.’
‘Jenny’s already grinding the beans,’ said Sandra. Maggie nodded. Doreen pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped into the Oracle.
The place was old. Properly old! At well over four hundred years, Temple Hall was itself old in the traditional sense, but the Oracle beneath the Hall was ancient. The modest chamber where the Pythia made her pronouncements exuded age. Time had laden the atmosphere with a heavy aura of history. The Oracle was a subterranean Roman crypt built on a knotted confluence of ley lines, and Temple Hall had been constructed over it, protecting and incorporating it, absorbing the masonry into its own structure, but the Oracle was not an original part of the house and had stood alone for centuries before the Hall foundations were laid.
It was not a large chamber – only the Pythia and a few attendants ever entered – and in construction resembled an early Romano-Christian baptistry, windowless, bare, ascetic and rough, with a few plain circular columns here and there to support the arched roof. This was fortunate. Archaeologically inclined visitors, although few, needed to see the Oracle as something else and there was no greater disguise than to hide it in plain view as a small private baptistry. The Sisterhood had spun a yarn that it was the original temple for which the village of Temple Guiting was named, but the actual truth was far more astonishing and carefully hidden away from prying eyes. However, such structures were occasionally attached to houses of elevated status and so it excited no undue interest to find the Hall had been built over the site of the original chamber.
Maggie followed Doreen, ducking her head as she passed under the low lintel, her gaze already distracted. The Oracle smelt musty and faintly aromatic. Doreen lit several bronze oil lamps of exotic design, their dim light casting wavering shadows. Sandra closed the door behind them and stood guard. Doreen squeezed Maggie’s arm reassuringly. ‘You OK, honey? You look anxious.’
‘Anything to do with the Ginger Ninja disturbs me. I can feel it already without the smoke and booze.’ Maggie knew she was only a fraction as talented as Alice and frequently questioned her abilities. This self-doubt made her nervous.
‘You’ll cope. I’ll start the fire.’ She handed Maggie a stone pitcher. ‘Get this down your neck, girl!’
The sweet smell of apples rose from the pitcher. Temple cider, made from apples picked from the Hall’s own orchards, was potent enough to floor a charging hippo! Maggie sipped while Doreen busied herself building a fire.
The flagged floor of the chapel was bare and unadorned but for a small circular pit in its centre. This was passed off as the font to any outside visitor, the heart of the baptistry, but the stonework was charred and blackened, signifying the use of fire rather than water. Doreen piled dry branches into this pit and soaked them in oil. A match ignited the flames with a muted whoosh. The wood crackled and slumped as the fire settled. Smoke rose in a swirling column, strong and pungent from the sappy timber. The wood was juniper, cut from the upland forests of ancient Lycia in south-west Turkey. Sandra and Doreen waited for the initial surge of flames to subside, then brought forward a tall iron stool and placed its tripod feet into small recesses carved into the stone lip of the fire pit. Maggie shimmied herself up onto the crude seat and relaxed with her eyes closed, wreathed in smoke as the green juniper needles hissed and spluttered beneath her feet. She took another long draught of the strong cider. Then another. Smoke filled the Oracle, billowing back and forth before finding escape up the chimney above. The stones surrounding the chimney throat were blackened from centuries of use.
Doreen waited. Maggie needed to fall into her oracular trance, coaxed there by the narcotic juniper smoke and gut-rot cider. Frankly, there was nothing scientific about the process, nothing that could be quantified or corroborated by measurement. It would without doubt fail the most basic empirical test and to any reasonably rational mind was a load of old hokum.
Like bending spoons, watching water flow uphill and charming warts, it shouldn’t work – but it did. Spectacularly.
The Pythia drained the pitcher with another long swig and handed the empty to Sandra. She wiped her lips delicately. ‘That’s a strong one,’ she muttered. ‘Jenny must be spiking it with gin!’
‘Better not,’ replied Doreen.’ I don’t want you falling off that stool again.’
‘I can hold my drink, Gaia,’ she retorted. ‘Well, most of the time, anyway.’ She composed herself and closed her eyes. ‘Remember, I’m not as plugged in as Alice. Something might come my way, but it might not.’ Maggie had a healthy respect for Alice’s gift. She saw where Maggie couldn’t – and she was very aware that Doreen knew this as well.
They waited. Minutes passed. Sandra put another branch on the fire, even though the atmosphere inside the Oracle was already thick. She coughed behind her hand. ‘That’s nasty,’ she whispered to Doreen. Maggie was almost entirely obscured within the rising column of blue-grey smoke. ‘I don’t know how she stands it!’
Maggie groaned softly and Doreen silenced Sandra with a flick of the wrist. They both leaned forward, instantly attentive. The Pythia spoke only once and, for some reason Doreen could not fathom, electronic recording instruments only ever picked up static inside the Oracle, so it was important to listen to every word Maggie uttered.
‘We must move with care,’ she intoned, her voice entirely flat and empty. ‘Men are plotting.’
‘Here we go,’ breathed Doreen. The Pythia dived straight in, no messing. This was about James Timbrill. ‘Tell me of these men,’ she asked in a louder voice.
‘There are five. They are avaricious. One lies close to death.’ There was a pause. ‘One of the others is responsible.’
‘Are they near?’
‘Lingfield.’
‘Yes?’
‘12.15. Dirty Laundry.’
‘Thank you, Pythia,’ Doreen said gravely. This was a reliable and useful extra source of income for the Sisterhood. The only trouble they had was finding a betting shop within a fifty-mile radius that had not banned them for life. ‘And the five men?’
‘Look to the rising sun.’
‘The sun rises in the east,’ said Doreen.
‘Yes, to the east. Not far. I see glass towers beside a winding river.’
‘A city?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘A bridge that rises and falls.’
‘London?’
‘Perhaps.’ The Pythia was invariably enigmatic. As always, this required precise questioning.
‘Is the bridge old or new?’
‘Many say it’s old. We would say it’s new.’
Doreen considered this. The Sisterhood had such a long history that they more or less regarded anything later than the sixteenth century as still under warranty. The ambiguous answer probably meant the bridge was at the very least Victorian. ‘Can you see more?’
‘A strong place of many walls filled with brightness.’
‘The Tower,’ murmured Sandra. ‘The Crown Jewels.’
‘Yes.’
> ‘The men are in London.’
‘Yes. They control the lives of many. They own much, they desire even more.’
‘Businessmen?’
‘Their power comes from money. Money is their god. They seek more. Foolish, foolish men, but very dangerous,’ warned Maggie ominously.
‘What has changed? Why have they stirred? Why now?’
‘Something new disturbs them, something we must protect at all costs.’
‘Will there be conflict?’
‘Yes.’
‘When will the conflict come?’
‘It has already started. They have attacked once, they will again. The man has already suffered. His woman is next and those dear to her. She needs our help.’ This confirmed Alice’s assessment. It seemed certain that Celeste Timbrill was in peril.
‘How can we help?’
There was a long silence. Maggie’s eyes suddenly opened despite the stinging smoke, but her gaze was dull and distant. She inhaled the acrid vapours without coughing, even though Doreen and Sandra gasped asthmatically and fought for breath. Her trance was deep and of an intensity Doreen had never seen before. Wary of the potential for disaster after Alice’s catastrophic breakdown, she was prepared to shove Maggie off the stool at the first sign of distress, but the Pythia remained serenely calm. ‘I cannot say what I see. The visions are so strange,’ she murmured eventually.
‘Try again.’
‘It darts here and there like a feather in the wind. It speaks like a child. It has no guile.’
‘Is it a child?’
‘No.’
‘What is it?’
‘It tells the truth.’
‘A man?’
‘No.’
‘A woman. It must be a woman.’
‘It is not human.’
‘How can that be?’ protested Doreen, nonplussed at the unexpected answer.
‘I cannot say. It has no place in my memory.’
‘No place in your memory?’
‘It is not human!’ repeated Maggie. ‘Yet somehow it is. So strange,’ she whispered again, closing her eyes. ‘So very strange.’
‘Not human.’ Doreen’s brow furrowed in concentration. ‘Yet it has human qualities?’
‘The very best. How valuable it would be to us. How precious. It wields much power, even though it knows it not. That is why the men of the lights desire to control it. They cannot be allowed or much will be lost.’
‘Is it a machine? Some kind of computer, perhaps?’
‘It is not made by the hand of man. It springs from Mother Earth.’
Doreen nodded. She’d heard such a pronouncement before. The Pythia was telling her that whatever it was, it was certainly natural. ‘Look again, Pythia,’ she urged. ‘Tell me what you see.’
There was another pause. Maggie swayed slightly on her iron stool, hardly surprising since she’d just downed a quart of Jenny’s wicked rhino-flattening cider in record time. Alcohol infused her mind, liberating the visions within, but there was only a limited time before the booze welled up to overpower her trance. She groaned softly, then hiccupped with surprising violence. ‘I cannot see,’ she mumbled. ‘Its mind is so strange. There is no connection. It is not human.’
‘Guide me, Pythia,’ pressed Doreen gently. ‘You have never failed us before. I am Gaia. Show me the way.’
‘It purrs.’
‘It purrs?’ exclaimed Doreen, in a state of some considerable confusion. ‘Is it a cat?’
‘No, it does not have enough legs, yet it purrs.’
‘I do not understand. I need to know more.’
‘It has a child’s love for its mother.’
‘But it is not a child.’
‘No. It is not human,’ reasserted the Pythia firmly.
‘Can you see a shape? Is it large or small?
Maggie inclined her head slightly, as if listening intently to a distant whispering voice. ‘A colour! I see a colour.’
‘What colour do you see?’
‘Blue. So blue!’ Then, with increasing wonder. ‘Yes, so beautifully blue.’
Doreen caught her breath, a sudden blaze lighting her eyes. Her face flushed with excitement. ‘Is it an animal?’ she asked firmly.
‘Yes.’
Sandra turned to Doreen, puzzled. ‘What kind of an animal is blue and purrs?’
‘Yes, I have it,’ said Doreen, smiling for the first time since entering the Oracle. ‘You say it darts here and there like a feather. Like a feather, Pythia. Is it a bird?’
Maggie swayed again, fully immersed in her visions, even though the smoke was dying down now. The Oracle stank of burnt juniper, a scorched, rank, aromatic pungency. Her closed eyes fluttered and rolled continuously beneath their lids as if she were in deep REM sleep.
‘No. Yes. Maybe.’
There was no doubt she was sitting on the fence with that one.
Doreen persisted. ‘I ask again, Pythia, do you see a bird?’
‘Yes, I see now. It is a bird. A big bird.’
‘And it is blue?’
‘As blue as the sky. Find it and you will find salvation.’
‘Of course, it had to be. I know exactly where to find this bird,’ said Doreen, relaxing with a small smile of triumph.
‘The macaw,’ muttered Sandra, nodding.
‘Yes,’ said Maggie firmly. ‘Yes, Gaia, she is nearing her time at last. Salvation for us will come through them both, the blue bird and the woman. The two are as one, like mother and son. Look for the blue bird and you will find all you seek, but you must find it quickly. These men will attack very soon. Before the next full moon. You must hasten. Much will be lost if she falls.’
‘What is the nature of this attack?’
‘Violence. Be careful, Gaia.’
‘What must I do?’ asked Doreen decisively.
‘Have courage. All is not yet lost, but the bird and the woman must be gathered in quickly. That is your part. Your action will set things in motion, like the tiny drop of rain that starts a thunderstorm. It is your only hope against this wickedness. They will follow her to their doom. Here, it must be here, where we can help, but it is very dangerous. Stray only a little and the Sisterhood will be destroyed. Take c-courage and, and you –’ she suddenly pointed at Sandra. ‘You are going to have such … such a lot …’ Maggie’s words became increasingly disjointed as she finally wilted under the relentless alcoholic onslaught of the cider.
‘Yes, Pythia, what am I going to have?’ asked Sandra urgently, but it was too late. Maggie began to emerge from her trance, coughing and hiccupping. Her head snapped up and her eyes suddenly popped open.
‘That’s your lot, Gaia! No more! Hope it wasn’t too bad,’ she slurred in her normal voice, then sniggered helplessly. The Pythia of the Sisterhood of Helen was now completely and hopelessly blootered.
‘Damn,’ muttered Doreen. ‘I needed just a few more seconds.’ The nature of these things defied any logic. It was pointless Maggie re-entering her trance; the visions pertaining to the attack would not be repeated. If Doreen persisted in her questioning, then the Pythia would simply sink into silence, a sort of grumpy oracular sulk. She only ever pronounced once.
Doreen could not help but feel disappointed. Had it been Alice on the stool, then the information would have poured in, but Maggie had done her best. Self-doubt plagued her, clogging her mind, affecting her vision. Most of what she’d said was already known. However, Doreen was now aware of several new facts. There were five men ranged against them and these men were already weakened by their own internal strife. That they will very soon make their move against Celeste Timbrill and her famous macaw had already been guessed by Alice, but it looked like Doreen would now have to intervene personally, which was a little worrying. Doreen was not a woman of action. Unless it involved curling tongs, of course. Then came the intriguing prophesy about Sandra. Now, what was going on there? Was it to do with the coming conflict or something completely unrelated? Experience had taught Dore
en not to discount anything said by the Pythia, however seemingly trivial.
‘Yeah, yeah, OK, so we’re in for a choppy ride, but what about me?’ Sandra was almost hopping from foot to foot in exasperation. ‘Come on, Maggie, you can’t leave me hanging like that.’
‘My, is the world spinning or is it me?’ Maggie slid off the stool and collapsed in a giggling heap at Doreen’s feet, embracing her legs. ‘No, I’ve had a think about it and decided it’s definitely me. God, that cider has some punch. Take some home for Bernie. He’ll love it.’ The Pythia sighed happily, a dreamy smile of contentment on her rubicund face. ‘I do love you, Gaia,’ she mumbled, ‘and you always wear the most gorgeous shoes. Very comfy. Oh, yes, and Sandra, you’re going to have sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex! About bloody time, too.’ Moments later, she was asleep, snoring gently with her cheek resting on Doreen’s burgundy and tan Mary Janes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
How quickly hair grows.
Philosophers and academics worldwide occasionally gather to debate really important questions, to ponder weighty matters, and these admirably lofty intellects sometimes amuse themselves by considering those professions without which humanity could not survive, professions for which there will always be a demand, and the greatest minds on earth always boil it down to just two; undertakers and hairdressers. Celeste mused upon this, the subject of the last Royal Institute Christmas Lecture, as she drove from Prior’s Norton to Tewkesbury. She had no immediate plans to engage the former, but the mirror revealed a need to employ the latter. Her hair remained as it always had been: long, wavy, thick, a glorious sweep of the most gorgeous tint of vibrant copper, a colour which unfailingly turned heads each time she walked down the street.
Celeste’s route could frequently be determined by the breadcrumb trail of men lying concussed at the bases of lamp posts across town. Just join the dots.
The hue remained completely natural and she’d still, after all these years, never met anyone who had exactly the same unique shade. She’d let it grow since marrying. James liked it that way. He adored the way it was now long enough to sprout from the crown of her leather hood and still cascade in flowing tresses over her shoulders and breasts.
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