December

by Phil Rickman

  She laughed lightly, but Donald stayed sober-faced.

  'I was no' very discreet,' Moira said. 'It went to ma head in a big way, the glamour.'

  'Aye, well... The Duchess herself when she was young wis a wild and wanton creature, as your daddy ...'

  'No' what I'm saying, Donald. Wasny a question of promiscuity so much as, hey, look at me, I've got the Power, I can read your palm, your future in the tealeaves. And the exotic black dresses and stuff ... You parade around like that, you've got yourself a reputation in the music business almost overnight.'

  She told him about Max Goff, the independent record company boss who followed mysticism the way people followed Celtic and Rangers and was just as blinkered. How Max Goff had been told of Moira Cairns, the witchy woman.

  'He called me up. He said, "Would you like to realise your full potential? I can help you.'"

  She laughed. 'I thought, aw, hey ... Then he started talking money and nationwide tours and two-album contracts. I was just a kid, twenty, twenty-one. I started thinking - the way you do - I may never get an offer like this again. I mean, I was flattered. He liked the voice, the whole Celtic bit - this was before Clannad and Enya and all this ethereal, breathy stuff was hot. And then he hit me with the clincher.'

  Moira thought, The folly of youth, eh?

  'Which was working with Tom Storey, who was like, the guitarist. A musician's musician. Not the fastest or the loudest in the business; what they said about Tom - and it was true - was that it was the spaces, the spaces between the notes that sang the sweetest.'

  Donald nodded, maybe knowing where this was headed.

  'What it came down to was Tom had my own problem - except I didn't know it was a problem then and he did. And Dave had it too, and Simon. We'd been set up.' Moira smiled. Stupid, huh?'

  'We're all of us stupid,' Donald said, 'when we're young.'

  'Aye. Anyway, we made the one album together and it was fine. We understood each other, we meshed musically. Yeah, it was fine. Built up our confidence no end. And Goff was very fair; there was none of this "All-psychic Rock Band" stuff on the cover. Nobody knew about that, ostensibly, apart from Goff and us. Then he said he wanted to try something special. An experiment. There was this studio in a place he said was ... resonant. But nothing to worry about, this was an abbey, a holy place. Seen a lot of violence over the centuries, sure, but it'd survived, was therefore a strong place, full of ... potent spirituality. Jesus, I can't believe we swallowed that shit.'

  'You wis ...'

  'Wis young. Yeah. No excuse, Donald. No ... excuse ... at ... all. So, the idea was we'd talk to the Abbey and let it kind of talk to us, and come out with on album that told the story of the Abbey and maybe said something about us, too. This is where Breadwinner comes in.'

  Donald opened out the paper again and read the name. He looked up at Moira.

  'His name was Aelwyn,' she said. 'Known as Aelwyn Breadwinner, and he died at the Abbey many years ago. When did the Duchess write this, Donald?'

  The old guy shook his head.

  'When did she give it to you, then?'

  'Wid be a couple of days before she died, hen.'

  'Yes. And what did she say when she gave it to you?'

  'Well... she ... she had it in the wee box she kept by her bed, y'know? And she said, Donald, y'see where I'm putting this - it's for Moira. She said, if I see her I'll gie it her myself. If I dinna see her before I'm dead and buried …'

  He took off his hat. Tears had formed in his eyes like marbles.

  'Right,' Moira said, 'I know the box. Where she used to keep the stuff she d written down from dreams. Donald, I've asked you this before: she really had no feeling she was gonna die?'

  'If she knew ...' Donald rolled his head from side to side in anguish. 'If she knew, she didny tell me.'

  This hurt.

  'Nor me,' Moira said softly. 'And yet, from time to time, since the day she gave me the comb, she's been ... there. And it's been bugging the hell out of me, Donald. If she knew inside that she was gonna die, why did she no' send for me?'

  Donald was staring down at the paper, mouthing the words BREADWINNER and DEATHOAK over and over again.

  'Do you know why?'

  He looked up at her. His mouth stopped moving. Moira tried not to get riled but her next question came out in a low growl.

  'Why'd you have her rigged up wi' her eyes wide like something out the chamber of horrors?'

  Donald stared at her mournfully, lips stitched up like a badly darned sock.

  The vicar wondered how far he could trust Eddie Edwards. The old chap wasn't exactly a gossip, more a collector of gossip, who probably acquired much more than he gave out. The vicar decided he would take a small step towards him.

  Well,' he said tentatively. 'How do you feel about the Abbey?'

  'Drab,' said Mr Edwards. 'Neglected. And full of an old sorrow.'

  'Why sorrow?'

  'Perhaps it goes back to Aelwyn. You know of him.'

  'A little. Welsh harpist who witnessed the Abergavenny massacre in eleven ... er, eleven-something.'

  'Seventy-five. And fled the scene pursued by Norman soldiers. Came for sanctuary to the Abbey, and his pursuers caught up with him on the steps and cut him to pieces.'

  'Making him a kind of instant martyr. Every great ecclesiastical building should have one.'

  'So cynical, you are,' Mr Edwards said.

  'Aelwyn Breadwinner, they called him, didn't they? I often wondered why.'

  'Corruption of the Welsh, that is. The language hasn't been spoken much in this area, to its shame, for a couple of centuries at least. So, what happens, when they come across a difficult Welsh name, bit of a mouthful, turn it into an English word, they do, that sounds the same. Aelwyn Breadwinner indeed! If he ever existed.'

  The vicar blinked. 'I thought it was fully documented.'

  'Oh, the massacre is. Little doubt what happened there. Aelwyn may be no more than a legend, one of those romantic tales that no one ever bothers to go into, except for retired folk with time on their hands. There are a number of anomalies, see. Things that don't add up. I tell you what... if you're interested - don't want to bore you, see, us old retired folk can get carried away - if you're interested, I can take you through it some time.'

  'Yes,' the vicar said warily. 'I suppose I am interested.'

  'But still, you're a busy man with your fifty square miles your five churches to look after and your music ...'

  Mr Edwards paused.

  The vicar said nothing.

  'A shame, it is, that we don't have a Christmas concert in Ystrad any more. Could have given us a tune ...'

  The vicar said nothing.

  Mr Edwards beamed. 'I wondered if that was why you were interested in Aelwyn, see ...'

  'Did I say I was particularly interested?'

  'You being a fellow musician. What is now the cello? And the electric guitar?'

  'Bass.' The vicar sighed, gave up. 'The electric bass. But I don't play any more.'

  The vicar had carefully concealed his instruments in the loft - the old bastard must have been chatting up Mrs Pugh.

  'Shame. The wicker chair was wobbling with Mr Edwards delight at having got the vicar with his back to the wall at last. Were you in one of these pop groups, ever?'

  'I was, er, classically trained,' the vicar said. 'But I've never really done much with it.'

  Oh,' said Mr Edwards. 'There's sad. A good name, it is, for a musician, Simon St John.'

  'Sometimes ... Sometimes, Moira ...' Donald's voice slurred and broadened by his discomfort '... sometimes, the dead, they just willnae lie doon. Sometimes they'll no close up their eyes. y'ken?'

  Moira said, 'She lay down again, when she'd seen me. As if she'd said her piece.'

  'Aye,' Donald said.

  'Proving your point, huh?'

  Donald was silent for a moment, then he said, 'She wid always do things for you.'

  Meaning the times when the Duchess had a
ltered the course of human nature. Like when Moira had been defying her gran over the length of her hair and it was getting to a crisis point, complaining to the headmaster or some such. And something would happen to divert the old girl's attention, some minor ailment, or Gran's attitude would simply soften inexplicably.

  'See, this song, Donald - "The Ballad of Aelwyn" - no record was ever released, nor ever could've been. The recording was ... never finished. And I've never sung it since. What I'm saying, this song has never existed outside of that recording studio. The Duchess could never've heard it.'

  Donald remained expressionless. He wasn't at all surprised. Eventually, he looked down at the paper and then looked up at her again.

  Deathoak? It's just a nonsense word,' Moira said uncertainly it's all nons—'

  She felt her throat constrict.

  In a much smaller voice, she said, if this ... this shit was corning through to her ... if it was, like, coming for me and she intercepted it, you know? Something coming out of the past, and she caught it? Was that why she wouldn't have me come to her? Thinking she could deal with it on her own, just like she sorted out Gran, way back? That how it was, Donald?'

  Moira sighed.

  'It's me should be dead, not her. Everybody here knows that, you can see it in their faces.'

  'Ach,' Donald said, 'she had a stroke. She wisny expecting it. There is no evidence otherwise.'

  'Yeah. Time I grew up.' She stood up, folded the paper and stuffed it in her bag. 'I realise that. Maybe that's why I gave the comb back.'

  He rose at once to his feet. 'The comb?'

  Moira said, 'Don't get mad at me. She needed it more, I figured if she'd put herself in the way of this shit, she needed the protection of the ancestors more than me. OK?'

  'What?' She saw the flicker of fear in his old eyes, quickly doused, like a poacher's light in the woods. 'What have you done?'

  'Aw,' Moira said uncomfortably, 'I just put the comb in the coffin with her. Between her hands.'

  'What?' Now sorrow swam openly with naked terror in the bottomless pools of his eyes. 'You buried the comb?'

  'Made sense, Donald.'

  'Sense? You stupid wee bitch, what wid you know about sense? You're as bloody green now as when you took that man's gold. By Christ ...!'

  He snatched his hat off, clutched it to his chest, inserted forefingers of each hand into the hole and tore the hat the length of its crown. 'By Christ, hen, you're on your own now, all right. And naked.'

  It was the third day. Time for the tapes to rise from the grave. Prof Levin had been hanging around his flat all morning, waiting for the call. Steve Case had rung him twice, the first time before nine a.m., demanding to know if they had a result.

  Prof had called Audico at nine. No, Maurice was not in yet. Things sounded confused. He'd left a message. Tried again at eleven; no answer. No answer? This was a bloody factory!

  When the phone finally rang, mid-afternoon. Prof was at the bathroom mirror, idly trimming his beard, mostly white nowadays; did that look distinguished or decrepit?

  Maurice said, 'Your tapes, Prof.' He sounded upset, regretful, weary as hell. Bad news, then.

  'Oh well,' Prof said, for some reason relieved, it was worth a try.'

  There was a long pause.

  'You've been busy today,' Prof said. 'I rang several times.'

  The silence in the phone was cavernous.

  'You could very well say that,' Maurice said after a while, and there was another silence and then he said, very precisely, 'Mr Levin, would you like to do me one great big favour? Do you think' - a tremor under his voice - 'that before I lose control of myself and throw the bastard things into the furnace, there is any chance of you getting these tapes out of my factory, and soonest?'

  V

  A Moth in Winter

  First there was no light and no sound.

  He waited.

  After a few seconds, he thought he'd break the silence with a light laugh, just to show he wasn't taking this at all seriously, wasn't letting it get to him. But he was on his own in the dark, so who was he trying to convince?

  Maurice, of Audico, had said,

  'You think I'm joking? You think I'm having you on? I'm not. Listen, there was nearly a walk-out. I've had a deputation in here. I've had the police. You think this is funny?'

  Prof Levin had put the wooden box on the back seat of his car but kept seeing it in his mirror and thinking about what Maurice had said. It was just a black wooden box, brass corners, broken brass lock. Just a wooden box.

  He'd pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the M25, coming back into London - and he'd stowed it away in the boot before setting off again.

  Which was a completely ridiculous thing to do.

  Also, he hadn't taken it into his flat last night, but left it in the car boot in the lock-up garage he rented.

  Which was crazy; he'd had his car nicked twice from this garage.

  'They're probably laughing about it now, Prof, the ones who know. Well, you do, don't you, when it's all over? There are things you don't want to believe. Well, I'm still not laughing.'

  Prof had arrived shortly before ten a.m. at this tiny commercial studio under a scruffy South London record shop. It had been discreetly hired by Steve Case, who was to meet him here at twelve, not before, OK?

  Recording engineers were just technicians who put the gilt on other people's creativity; not their job to question anything. Well, sod that. The bloke in the shop was a dozy bastard; Prof had bluffed his way into the studio, no great problem.

  He unpacked the box. The tape looked very clean; despite everything, Maurice's people had done a proficient job, obviously. He wound the first reel into the machine, around half a dozen metal capstans, on to the take-up spool. There were twin speakers, on a tilt, just above his head.

  He hit the 'play' button and - as he usually did - removed his glasses and switched off the lights.

  A mistake, although he didn't realise it at first.

  'This factory is - what? -four years old? It's on a business park, for God's sake. It's surrounded by other factories, all air-conditioned, dust-free, hi-tech units. Before they turned it into a business park, it was a football pitch, a school playing field. You know what I'm saying, Prof? I'm saying it wasn't an old battlefield or an overgrown graveyard or anything like that. Shit, I can't believe I'm saying this to you at all...'

  On the first half dozen reels, he found four songs, unmixed, several takes of each. Scraps of conversation, musicians talking to each other - a handful of men and one woman. The producer, whose voice came in occasionally, sounded like Russell Hornby. One of the musicians had a bit of Merseyside in his voice could well have been Dave Reilly.

  Who would the sound engineer have been? Someone he knew?

  The songs were good, although they didn't make a lot of sense, especially a hard blues piece, gruffly sung by Storey about a man with … two mouths, was that? A man with two mouths? He wished he'd seen those papers Steve had taken away, probably a track list.

  But there was one song he could get the measure of, This was a live take, the whole band playing together, instead of the usual jigsaw.

  This number was over seven minutes long, about a prophet of some kind with a Welsh-sounding name, who

  ... came down from the mountains

  with a harp on his shoulder

  and dreams of the future ...

  It was one of those songs like Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' which got bigger and more complicated, more violent, a male and a female singing alternative verses. No mistaking the voices; Dave Reilly and the Cairns woman.

  Prof changed the reel, found another version of the same song, even longer. But this was a quieter version; he could hear all the words. There was this very gruelling episode in the middle where this prophet bloke witnesses what seems to be a multiple murder in a stone-walled banqueting hall during a meal, swords and knives and axes coming out, people getting stabbed and hacked to death over th
e table, dishes running with fresh blood.

  Not too pleasant.

  Also the woman was singing in a very curious wav, as if she wasn't thinking about the words or the tune or the rhymes or the timing. I was as if she was watching the dreadful scene happening in front of her eyes as it were, and describing what she could see in words which just seemed to fall into place.

  Like improvising, but it couldn't be.

  Afterwards, the prophet guy was running away, accompanied by lots of pounding bass, chips of acoustic rhythm guitar, streamers of lead guitar like bird calls.

  And then, after a long, tense silence, it all started to get very peculiar.

  'We ran a few feet of tape first - don't worry, we weren't trying to listen to it. There was a lot of wow, as you'd expect and one awful smell, like overcooked liver or something. So we gave up and put the reels in the ovens, divided them up between all three ovens, turned on the heat, locked the room. As normal. You don't want anybody going in there messing up your settings, turning up your levels … it could be disastrous, right?'

  The quality of the silence altered. It had become like ... like a vastness. As if he was standing not in a tiny studio but in a huge ballroom with all the lights out.

  There was a hollow resonance. The hollow resonance of death, Prof thought suddenly.

  What the bloody hell did that mean?

  He'd seen the word

  DEATH

  in capitals on the paper Steve had taken out of the envelope they'd found inside the box.

  Now, obviously, some of this was his imagination, due to the location of the grotty little studio, this tatty, plastic room buried in the earth or whatever passed for earth in South London, no windows, no slit of light beneath the door - not even a tiny red pilot on the tape machine, which was the cast-off he'd asked for to test the gunged-up tape, and its pilot light was broken.