December

by Phil Rickman

  A bulb blows in one of the spotlamps, the way bulbs seem to at the Abbey, and Lee springs up from his stool with a cry of alarm. 'Fuck's sake, man, you're supposed to be the producer. You're supposed to make us feel relaxed!'

  Prof smiles. 'I was actually set up to be the engineer, working under Russell. Even for that I had to be conditioned. They sent another thick-skinned bastard, Steve Case, to kind of ... initiate me.'

  Lee moves towards the door. 'I need a coffee.'

  'Siddown. You'll need a coffin, you don't take some of this on board. I'm trying to help you, son.'

  'You're trying to screw me up, man.'

  'If that's what it takes,' Prof says. 'Listen, they set me up to "discover" the tapes and get them processed - baked, you know? Case pretended he didn't know about baking tapes and I bought it. Stupid. The idea was I'd listen to them. And not forget. Never forget. Not waking, not sleeping. Now you go and ask Case if he's heard those tapes right the way through, 'specially the stuff that begins with Aelwyn. No way. I should've realised earlier. He didn't know what I was on about when I was begging him not to release the album. And I thought that was an act.'

  'Shit,' says Lee. 'What is it about those tapes?'

  'I don't know, mate. That's why I'm here, God help me. I'm just giving you a friendly warning. Because you might not be a Little Innocent, but you could be playing way out of your league. And you might just be considered expendable, know what I mean?' Prof stands up and strolls back towards the control room door. He turns once and taps his nose. 'Word to the wise, eh?'

  Lee swallows. 'Can I go for that coffee now?'

  'Yeah. Or two coffees. Or make it three. And a bun. And a work-out with Michelle. You get what I'm saying?'

  'Don't come back for a couple of hours?'

  'Good boy,' says Prof.

  It's me, isn't it?' Dave lights up a Silk Cut. 'I can't get to it. Just haven't got the balls.'

  All this Don't Worry Tom stuff. It was never Tom. Tom just carried the can. Tom might have driven away in too much of a hurry afterwards but at least he didn't run out on the session, which Dave is scared he's going to do again.

  It's gone nine. The four of them are still in the canteen. It's a nice place, for a mobile unit. Tables with cloths on them, lamps in bottles, a cook and a waitress somewhere out of sight. All for them, the Philosopher's Stone, the cult band that never lasted long enough to become a cult.

  Simon, particularly, is looking tired tonight, and pale. Dave thinks last night's reworking of the Richard Walden story must have taken more out of him that he's admitting. He wonders what he's going to feel like tomorrow. After Aelwyn.

  'Davey,' Moira says. 'Think back. Last time, you seemed to forge an immediate link with Aelwyn. You were Aelwyn. You were scared. You were running like hell, all these guys after you, the clamour of men and horses, and then ...'

  'And then I lost it. Suddenly I wasn't scared any more. I'm thinking, this is wrong. But it wasn't wrong. I felt very confident, fairly relaxed. I had no thoughts of being pursued, no fear of death. And that was when it happened, the scene-shift.'

  'I saw the candles light up,' Moira says. The black candles - OK, dark brown, but probably blacker inside than even Tom suspected - the black candles flared up by themselves, all together in a pile, higgledy piggledy.'

  'I didn't see them.' Dave shakes his head, 'I must have been in New York by then. Maybe that was the point of transition. Like a cut in a film ... fade out, a moment of black and then fade up ... to what turned out to be the Dakota building. It was so out of context, it threw me completely. I had to get out.'

  'And you were relaxed, presumably, because Lennon was relaxed,' Moira says, if I've got this right, he was coming home from a mixing session or something. Everything was fine, happier than he'd been in ages; he was working again after a long time of no inspiration; he doesn't seem to have had any kind of premonition, even though this little bastard had been hanging round him for a couple of days. OK, why were you getting this; where's the link?'

  'Between Lennon and Aelwyn? Quite a few. Both singers and musicians, songwriters. And the peace thing. I've become quite a student of the Aelwyn myth. He wrote poems and he sang about peace, which didn't make him too popular with the establishment.'

  'So we've got ourselves a rough parallel,' Moira says, 'with Lennon - as peace campaigner - and the American conservative establishment.'

  'We know the FBI was watching him. We know he was expected to be a thorn in the side of the incoming Reagan regime. We know that Government agencies were determined to prevent him becoming an American citizen. And when he did get his green card, the people who were happiest were the ones the FBI saw as dangerous radicals.'

  Dave opens out his hands 'And yet he saw New York as a sanctuary. It was the one place he felt safe - ironically.'

  Like Aelwyn and the Abbey.' Moira helps herself to one of Dave's cigarettes. 'The place he thought he was safest was the place that killed him. And also ... Have I said something?'

  Simon is staring at her.

  'Monks,' Tom says suddenly, 'I seen monks. Either side the gate. While you and Simon was out looking for Dave.'

  'The monks killed him,' Simon says quietly, with certainty, 'Richard Walden knew de Braose wanted Aelwyn dead. When Aelwyn turned up in search of sanctuary he was invited in, and then …'

  'Aaaaah!' Dave's chair crashes over as he leaps to his feet, backing away from the table. The ashtray in front of him is full of bright red, foaming blood.

  'Davey!'

  Moira's holding him. He smells her perfume, essence of long beaches, grey sea and wide sky. Please don't let her die, please don't let her die ...

  'It's OK, Davey, you've had a shock. You were right all along. There was nobody following Aelwyn. He was confident of sanctuary and he had a hell of story to tell. Come on, sit down.'

  There's only ash in the ashtray. Only ash. Dave closes his eyes. When he opens them, Moira is exchanging meaningful glances with Simon. 'Sorry,' Dave says. 'Nothing. Trick of the light.'

  'I can't explain this,' Simon says. 'I don't suppose we ever will. But maybe it all went wrong because the vision of Aelwyn was wrong. And the premonition Dave received was the closest parallel, in a ...a contemporary event, to what really happened to Aelwyn. There's a theory, isn't there, that Mark Chapman did what he did under some kind of hypnotic suggestion planted by the CIA or some outfit like that.'

  Dave says, 'I don't mean to sound apocalyptic or anything, but wherever Lennon is, maybe he's trying to get something across.'

  He talks about the Liverpool power failure in the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of December, in the thirteenth year since ...

  Simon's shaking his head. 'We could go on all night ...'

  'One more thing. You remember, "On a Bad Day", Simon?'

  'Sure. I've wondered how much that was troubling you. All I can say is, don't lose any sleep, Dave. It was no more than a normal reaction. Double Fantasy really was a piece of crap.'

  Dave stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray that didn't have blood in it. He has the feeling this has become Don't Worry Dave night.

  'We can't prove the Aelwyn theory,' Moira says. 'But we can test it. Can you handle that, Dave? Think about it. Aelwyn as your baby. Whatever you want, we'll go with it. Excuse me.' Pushing her chair back, 'I'm away to the girls' room.'

  When she's gone, Simon says quietly, 'OK, what's wrong, Dave? Is it Moira? That things haven't worked out how you hoped?'

  Dave looks up. If only that was all it was.

  He lights another cigarette, hands shaking, and he does what he should have done days ago. He tells Simon and Tom about the black bonnet. Moira's black bonnet.

  Simon is silent for a long time. So long that Dave's worried Moira's going to come back from the loo before he can get a reaction. When she doesn't, he decides this is probably a set-up. She wanted Simon to get out of him whatever it was he was afraid to tell her.

  Eventually, S
imon says to him, 'Dave, can I put a theory to you? I mean, shoot me down in flames ...'

  'Go on.'

  Simon talks for over ten minutes. Occasionally, Tom makes an observation. Moira has had time for a complete manicure. Afterwards, Dave says, 'I didn't know. I didn't know any of this.'

  What Simon has told him is that after he ran out of the studio that night, whatever had begun did not end. For the rest of them, it was only just starting to happen.

  It began with the usual extraneous sounds - voices in the cans, whispers, vague ribbons of laughter. What some people call spirit-voices and Simon calls 'psychic fluff'.

  Simon had already laid down his bass track and was now closeted with his cello and his viola, double-miked. Soon, it was as if the instruments were making their own sonorous responses

  to external stimuli, electrical impulses by-passing Simon's mental control, taking the music into ever deeper and darker places.

  There was foreboding and trepidation ... the rolling thunder of approaching death.

  Prof could tell Dave about this, Simon said. About the impact it made on him nearly fourteen years later, on tape, the death sequence which began with Aelwyn.

  Moira was at the core of it. There was a moment, Simon says, when he was afraid Moira was actually going to die, and he couldn't do a thing about it; he felt like - who was it now Merlin? - a prisoner in a lightless cavern at the bottom of a very deep pool.

  In the end, it was Tom who may have saved her. Tom realising where it was headed ... that subtle forces had been invoked by the combination of the band and the night and the location - what Moira called the 'toxic cocktail' - and that it was going way too deep, 'I just let rip,' Tom said modestly, recalling his blazing, high-pitched electric shriek which Simon said Prof had described as being like a chainsaw, ripping the fabric of the music and the night and ... and Moira - Prof had thought it was an attack on Moira. In fact, it released Moira; it was an attack on death.

  'And I'm wondering,' Simon says now, 'if Moira's been carrying the memory of that around with her ... you know, the closeness of death? You say you saw it around her on an old album cover ... I don't know, maybe her mother's death, too? A premonition of that ? She's full of self-recrimination over her mother, I know that much. She thinks her mother absorbed … what? The death that was coming to her?

  'Nuffink's ever what it seems, Dave,' Tom says. 'That's the only bleeding certainty in this life.'

  On the way back to the studio, as if it's been arranged, they pass Lee Gibson. 'Just popping over for a coffee,' Lee says cheerily. 'Good luck, guys.'

  'Give her one for me,' Dave says crudely. It's become an in-joke. None of them really knows whether Lee is sleeping with the admin assistant.

  Dave is looking happier than Moira's seen him since they got here. She gives his hand a squeeze. He gives her a grin. They're going to do it. They're going to lay Aelwyn's unhappy ghost and a few of their own. After tonight, it's downhill all the way.

  Moira glances up at the two shadowy towers, about twenty-five yards apart, the bitten-off top of the ruined one almost obscured by the frigid mist. The heavy truck with the hydraulic platform is still parked in the courtyard behind what is now the TMM tower; restoration will resume as soon as the band's out of here. So much to restore.

  you have some damage to repair.

  Tonight, Mammy. Tonight.

  The cold bites. The tower house looms over them, a single, watchful light in one of the upper rooms.

  The place observes her, she feels again, with an ancient knowledge. And a frightening edge of derision.

  III

  Bluefoot

  Night and mist obscure the great rock overhanging the church as Eddie walks up the lane, worrying.

  Always mist in this valley in winter. But it shouldn't be too bad, see, it's a reasonably distinct path ... for those who dare take it.

  Eddie is still far from sure about going to the Abbey, is not sure why they're going, even if Meryl is. But he has to go with them; he's an old-fashioned man and would hate to think of women and children - well, one woman and one child - walking that path at night to emerge among the decaying stone teeth in the very mouth of Walden's abbey.

  The other problem is: what are they going to do about Isabel? She isn't the type of person to sit demurely at home with her knitting, waiting for news. Isabel is a doer, a mover.

  And Isabel in love is probably unstoppable.

  There should be headlights on this machine, Isabel thinks. Why did nobody think to fit sodding headlights?

  She has an elderly bicycle lamp on her lap; its glass has a crack across one corner and rattles. The lamp illuminates the road for no more than about five yards ahead, which is not that much of a problem because the electric wheelchair is grinding along so slowly that even a geriatric hedgehog wouldn't break a sweat getting out of the way.

  But the narrow road is empty. A hedgehog would at least be a bit of company. The verges and undergrowth are silent with frost. The wheelchair whines.

  It's very, very cold. Isabel wears her woollen cape and mittens and a white ski-hat with daft-looking brown reindeer on it. She's someone you see and feel sorry for, or so she hopes. For the first time in her life, this is what she hopes.

  That's another first.

  But the first first, the most dramatic first is that she's glided out of the front gate of the cottage ... and turned right.

  Never before has she done this in the chair; seems incredible, but it's true. Everything lies to the left: the church, the village hall, the school as used to be, the pub, the house of anyone she's ever wanted to visit. And, of course, the way out of the village.

  To the left lies civilization.

  To the right: heartbreak, death, the Abbey.

  And so never before, in the chair.

  And, even before the advent of the chair, never alone.

  And never in the dark. It was afternoon, quite a fine afternoon for the time of year, when she'd gone with Gareth and his little haversack containing, among other items, one of those blow-up airbeds you took to the seaside but which would lie equally well on a stone floor at the top of an old, ruined tower.

  But she wouldn't have gone there in the dark, not even for Gareth who was two years older, a grown man, a man of the world.

  Not that Isabel is particularly afraid of the dark, even now.

  No more so, anyway, than the average chair bound cripple wondering how she's going to kick an attacker in the balls with toes she hasn't been able to wriggle in over two decades.

  What's more unnerving than the night is the slowness of the blasted chair. Keeps making her think the bloody batteries are about to give out. Thank God that this is a valley road, following the river, with no major humps and pitches.

  And thank God that Meryl's not with her, with her talk of spirits and life beyond the grave.

  Is he right, Isabel? Is this path impossible for a wheelchair?

  I know which one he means. Used to. As a kid. Yes, he's right, damn it. I'll have to go the usual way, by the road.

  But that's hopeless; they'll never let you in.

  Deal with that problem when I come to it.

  Well, take some of this. Please.

  Oh that's daft ... They're definitely not going to admit a crippled crank with a plastic bin sack full of soil on her knees.

  Take it anyway. We can't manage it all.

  But the only thing on Isabel's knee, as the wheelchair moves through the night with all the speed and grace of an old badger on Valium, is the bike lamp with the cracked glass.

  They don't exactly stroll in singing, with their arms around each other, but Prof has detected a distinct raising of spirits.

  They've worked something out. Obviously.

  Dave goes directly to his booth and thumbs a chord on the new Martin. 'Hey, listen to this!'

  'Brilliant,' Tom says, 'I heard you was having lessons again.'

  'What's wrong?' Prof adjusts one of Dave's mikes. 'You're gonna
sit on the amp, as usual, I take it.'

  'Yeh. No, nothing wrong. Listen. The bugger's in tune! Whenever I leave a guitar for five minutes in this studio, it's always way out of tune when I get back. Used to drive Russell spare. Now, listen to this ... spot bloody on. After over an hour. Unprecedented! It's an omen. We'll get it right, now, I can feel it. I'm locked into it.'

  'Don't go talking about omens,' Moira calls over. It's unlucky.'

  Dave throws his plectrum at her. 'Only if you'd superstitious.'

  'Superstitious?' Tom crosses himself. 'Me?'

  'By the way,' Dave says to him. 'I took that dead albatross out of your booth. It was starting to smell.'

  'You bastard, I was teaching him to talk.'

  Dave and Simon exchange grins.

  Psychic humour, Prof thinks. Whatever next.

  'Right, then,' he says. 'Aelwyn, The Ballad of. Go for it then, shall we?'

  The mist's getting thicker, Eddie thinks, as he crosses the road to the vicarage. But not that bloody thick.

  'Ah. Mr Edwards.'

  This is smoke, from a familiar pipe.

  'If you're on your way to see your good friend, the vicar, I'm afraid he's not there.'

  With that damn pipe and his long mac, Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones looks like nobody so much as Sherlock flaming Holmes.

  'But perhaps you know that already, Eddie. Man like you. Nose to the ground.'

  Eddie recovers some composure. 'Why is it, Gwyn, that you only come out at night, like a bloody vampire.'

  'Hmmph.' The policeman looks affronted. 'No one's ever said that before. Pig, I get usually. And Filth. Anyone would think I was not welcome. Especially at the vicarage. What an extraordinary woman. And do you know ...'

  Gwyn Arthur throws his long shadow over Eddie under the second of the village's three lamp posts. ... she's staying in his house but claims she doesn't know where he's gone. The vicar, this is. Oxford, she says. Or somewhere. Now, isn't that odd?'

  'Gone to stay with friends, he has.'