December

by Phil Rickman

  The pealing bells become a jarring snarl of metal and she is hurled out of heaven with her neck twisted round.

  The chair has collided with a big stone, projecting about two feet from the frozen grass.

  The engine whines helplessly.

  Isabel's head has been thrown back into the leather. Far above her, the arches seem to lean together as though about to collapse from the impact of a flimsy little electric wheelchair crashing into a big stone which the occupant hasn't seen, due to flashing her little lamp into the sky and fantasising about … flying.

  She knows the stone must also have smashed into a foot or an ankle. Guesses the skin is broken, probably bleeding - she's always slightly surprised to find that her unfeeling legs, which have to be bent like dolls' legs, still have actual blood running through them.

  But the possibility of abrasions and whiplash injuries are passed over as Isabel tries to reverse the chair and fails, slams back into the leather, drags with her hands at the chair arms and screams,

  'YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCH! '

  And feels even more furious and even more helpless when, instead of the massive shriek of rage which will cause the stone to disintegrate, the words emerge like a batsqueak and are swallowed by the mist.

  Isabel closes her eyes and breathes in and out a couple of times before attempting, calmly, to assess the situation.

  This doesn't take very long.

  For all the illusion of speed and vastness, the stone is not much more than half-way along the aisle, which itself can't be more than forty or fifty yards long.

  The stone seems to be the stub of a broken pillar. Whether it was here originally or been recently dumped here it's a bloody stupid place to put a stone, like a bollard in the middle of a motorway.

  Isabel has another go at reversing the chair, heaving her shoulders back. The motor dies in mid-whine.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  At the far end of the nave, where the mist is darkest, a yellow light glimmers dimly. It's probably in the south-west tower where the studio is. As distinct from the north-west tower where the lower part of Isabel's body died in orgasm.

  Not much life left in the bicycle lamp, either. She gives it a shake and directs what's left of the beam at the point of impact to see what can be done, if anything, to extricate the chair.

  When the bleary beam touches the spot, Isabel nearly faints with shock and, jerking her hand away, smashes the lamp against the stone and it goes out.

  'Simon!' she wants to shriek, with such force that it will penetrate the stone walls and the inner soundproofing and bring him rushing from his studio.

  But again, her voice is faint and feeble with fear.

  It can't be. It can't be!

  She shakes the lamp and hears the thin tinkle of the glass and the bulb falling into her lap. She takes off her mittens and runs both shaking hands under her cape and down her thighs and the hands come out soaked from wrists to fingertips.

  No!

  Plunges the hands down again, exploring what she can't see, can't feel - her hands are like a doctor's hands probing someone else's broken body. There is no pain at all, except in her mind.

  Which is still vividly filled with what it was shown in the lamp's last faltering beam: the jeans ripped way and the knees and shins sheeted with thick, dark blood, which wells and bubbles up through her fingers as she clasps the legs she hasn't felt, except in dreams, since December 1973.

  Nails? Crucifixion?

  This is not a recording studio, this is an asylum. The recording booth down there is a padded cell and the patient is displaying all the classic symptoms of advanced paranoid schizophrenia.

  Two minutes, Prof assures himself for maybe the fourth time. Two minutes, and then I'm out of here.

  His eyes flit along level-meters along the top of the panel lit up like the windows of a distant train. Two needles keep running over to the red, the way you normally get only with sharp, hard chords, quickly muted.

  Or hammer blows.

  Don't even imagine ...

  While all the other needles are hard over on the red.

  Which is - think about this, think technical - just about impossible. To get that, all twenty-four tracks would need to be recording simultaneously and there's just one guy in one booth with one guitar, and it's ...

  'fucking freezing in here!'

  'I know.' Moira hugging herself; Prof can feel her swaying from side to side. 'Come on, Davey ...' She sniffs, crying. 'Please let go, darlin'. Please let go.'

  'Can't stand this.' Prof covers his ears, but he can still see the illuminated meters; pop, pop, pop, go the little black needles.

  He turns away, turns his back on the mixing desk - first time he's ever done that - and leans with both hands on the back wall.

  'Uuuuuuuh ...'

  'Prof...' Simon spins round. 'You OK?'

  It's … it's like the wall's been newly painted. It's slick and sticky and stinks: an acrid body-stench, bitter and metallic.

  A scream falls from the speakers, a long scream like a trail of fire.

  'Lights!' Moira's shrieking. 'Lights!'

  as Tom's shattering, squealing solo - out, spirits, out - explodes from the control-room speakers and out of the amplifier in the furthest booth, filling the stone vault with white-hot, blind fury ...

  and the lights go on ...

  (for one appalling second, to reveal the whitewashed walls bubbling butcher's red, and big globules dripping from the carved, vaulted ceiling like glistening scarlet stalactites.)

  ... and then go out, leaving whorls and firework-trails in the clouding air, and the wild blue flash ...

  'DAVEY!!!!!'

  ... would be just like another light-effect, if it weren't for the crackling and the extinguishing of all the lights on the panel and all the meters .

  and the new smell of cooking flesh.

  In the absolute darkness, 'Nobody move,' Prof croaks. 'Simon, you there?'

  'Yes. But Moira's ... Moira!'

  Prof stumbles to the door, leans out over the studio. 'Don't touch him, Moira. Whatever you do, don't touch him!'

  It might be that all the power's gone, but take no chances, it could be a blip, could come racing back. Prof locates the master switch on the wall, hits it with the heel of his palm.

  'OK,' he says. 'It's OK.'

  Knowing full well that it isn't.

  V

  The Abbey's Children

  It is not a word that Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones has encountered before.

  He writes it down on a beermat.

  TELEPORTATION

  'Through time,' Eddie Edwards adds tentatively.

  TIME, Gwyn writes, but he writes this word very slowly.

  It's the one he's having the most difficulty with.

  They've been in the pub over an hour, and Eddie has given up all hope of taking Meryl and Vanessa the back way to the Abbey. And perhaps, he concludes, this is just as well.

  Gwyn lays down his pen. 'I like to think I am, shall we say, more open-minded than the average copper.'

  More's the pity, Eddie thinks. An average copper would long ago have given this up as a waste of his time.

  'Inasmuch,' Gwyn says, 'as I was born and bred in a rural community and remain very much of that community and its belief-system. For instance, my father, a minister of the chapel, would never have dared deny the existence of the cannwyl gorff, the corpse candle, which floats through the air to herald a death. And, indeed, I myself have more than once encountered that which cannot be satisfactorily explained on a statement form; This is my position.'

  Gwyn leans forward on the threadbare bench. 'And so - let me get this right - you are telling me that this man St John is capable of teleporting - across time - certain household wares of the twelfth century.'

  'Gwyn,' Eddie says, 'I am not telling you he is doing this, nor even that it's happening to him. I am telling you what he believes is happening to him.'

  'Or what he says he believe
s is happening to him.'

  'No, I believe that he believes it.'

  'And if I believe that you believe that he believes, et cetera.'

  Gwyn throws up his hands in impatience. 'Where does that leave any of us?'

  Eddie feels stupid. 'Perhaps it solves your mystery of the appearing candle.'

  'Meaning that it has' - Gwyn spits out the unwieldy word in segments, 'de ... material ... ised. And has returned, presumably, to the twelfth century. Very good. But what about the non-vegetable constituent?'

  'The fat.'

  'The fat. Which, don't forget, was certified by experts as being - how can I put this delicately? - not so long off the bone. Certainly not eight centuries or more.'

  'Right.' Eddie assembles his thoughts like a gambler rearranging the cards in his hand, not the best hand he's ever been dealt. 'Now, this is not from me, OK? This is from what I have read over the past few days in certain dubious publications discovered among the theological tomes in the vicar's library.'

  'Go on.'

  'If what we have is an object - say a candle - directly teleported, by some molecular process on the very fringe of physics, from, let us say, the year 1175, then, if that candle was only a few months old when it was, er, sent, then ... Christ, Gwyn, do you think this is any easier for me, as a professional educator?'

  'I think ...' Gwyn Arthur closes his eyes '... that my humble police brain is becoming over-fatigued. I'd like to deal with something possibly more concrete. The arrival of the handicapped child. You're not, I trust, suggesting she has been …'

  'Teleported, I think not. But there's something odd.'

  'Indeed.' Gwyn Arthur finishes the half-pint which has lasted him for a good forty-five minutes, in spite of Eddie's repeated offers to buy him a replacement. It suggests to Eddie that the policeman's claim to be 'off duty' was somewhat relative.

  'Let's move on.' Gwyn stands up, pipe between his teeth. He has the demeanour, Eddie thinks, of a policeman teleported directly from the 1930s or before.

  'Why are you smiling, Eddie?'

  'I wasn't. Not really.' Eddie stands up too.

  'I want to go to the vicarage,' Gwyn says, 'and talk to the woman. God almighty, there may even be something which falls within the general curtilage of what we might call police business.'

  Moira's sitting on the drumstool, the Martin M38 in her arms, hugging it to her breast and rocking to and fro, eyes closed, making a keening sound.

  Like a seagull, Prof thinks.

  Nobody has spoken.

  The only sound is the keening.

  The last sound was the sound of pumping breath. Simon's mouth on Dave's then wrenched away, a gasp of air and back down, and Simon looking up, shaking his head, eyes glassy with tears, while Dave's own eyes are wide and clear and full of frozen terror.

  Dave is dead.

  Dead in a flash. A single blue flash dividing the black air like a razor.

  They've all known this from the moment of the flash and Moira's trailing, curdled shriek of self-berating, God-cursing outrage.

  First the outrage, now the remorse.

  Prof stares in disbelief at the empty booth, at the space where Dave lay before Tom bent down and lifted the body in his arms and Simon ran ahead and opened the rear door for him. They have taken him - although no one has said so - to the Portakabin, the oasis of space which is not Abbey.

  In the air, a mingling of rich and awful smells, the obscene reality of sudden death.

  Dave is dead.

  Dave Reilly, who agonised fourteen long years over the killing of John Lennon, has been blown away even more suddenly.

  Gone.

  The booth is empty.

  The walls and the vaulted ceiling are perfectly white again, and, if a little damp, no longer icy to the touch.

  Prof remembers the verse Dave sang towards the end.

  Echoes of slaughter

  The wine turns to water

  the water to blood

  the blood back to water.

  And the blood on the walls (cemented in blood, who said that?) turned to water and the water seeped down to the socket into which was plugged the McCarthy Dual amplifier on which sat Dave Reilly, as was his wont.

  As Prof suspected, the earth wire has been removed from the amplifier's plug. This is not uncommon in recording studios, where earthing sometimes causes a hum.

  The McCarthy is built like a packing case, with metal corners and a metal handle where Dave was sitting.

  With who knows how many volts surging through it, the McCarthy chassis is a killer.

  And so everything is eminently explainable. At the inquest, the coroner will call for a new safety code for recording studios.

  So neat. All ends tied. A large wreath from TMM and a small obituary in Q magazine.

  The keening has died away. Moira looks up. Her eyes reflect the pain Prof feels, and also the glitter of cold rage, white surf on a distant shore.

  Prof walks slowly across to the drums. 'And we're both thinking, why did we let this happen?'

  Both of them knowing he isn't talking about studio safety, unearthed amplifier flex.

  'The optimism when you came back just now ... the really good atmosphere ... the way Simon scored last night. Dave thought, I know he did, we all thought . .

  'That we were winning,' Moira says.

  'What's so ironic,' Prof says, 'is he was more worried about you than himself. He thought it was you who was ... under shadow. He kept seeing ... well, you know what he was seeing.'

  Moira's black hair has fallen over her eyes. She doesn't brush it away. She goes on hugging the guitar, as if she's absorbing the last essence of Dave.

  'The one person you're never gonna see it on,' she says very quietly, 'is yourself. There was a death hanging over us - fourteen years ago, the Abbey was due a death. Dave was in the frame, through Aelwyn, and then this Dakota business comes through and he gets the hell out and the death passes across the studio and starts to hover over me.'

  Prof decides he's no longer frightened by this kind of talk, just angry. He glares at the walls of whitewashed stone. The Abbey. The fucking Abbey.

  'I felt it,' he says. 'I felt that death. When I heard the tapes.'

  'Yeah. It can be just so ... alluring. Like sleep. As simple as that. All you want to do is drift away. Moments of extraordinary peace. Ecstasy, almost. That's death at its most insidious. And I was headed down that road ... and then good old Tom comes in with the most brutal guitar break ... just like tonight's.'

  'Why didn't it work tonight?'

  'Because the Abbey knew. It'd happened once and the Abbey digested the information. It was Dave ...'

  Moira stops to regain self-control.

  '... Dave. Who said something like, this is the oldest recording studio in the world. And he was right. It stores emotions and hatred. And blood.'

  'If... this death ... was passed across to you, where did it go next? Did Tom ...?'

  'Sure.' The words overflowing from Moira now. 'Tom thought he could deal with it. But when we came back here with Dave after his Dakota stuff, there's Tom striding around the courtyard rambling about the ghosts he's seen and getting more and more worked up - and everybody thinks the poor guy's cracking up. But Tom thinks - and I can see this now, isn't hindsight wonderful? - Tom thinks, I have to get out of here ... I have to take the death away from the Abbey and then maybe it'll, like dissipate in the fresh air or something.'

  'Only it doesn't work like that.' Prof is thinking of Soup Kitchen, who took death all the way back to their rooms in Oxford.

  'No. I remember Tom screaming at Russell for the keys to the Land Rover. And I'm saying, no, hang on, and Russell - Russell just walks away, because the bastard, God rest his sordid soul, knows the keys are in the Land Rover. Russell's become the agent of the Abbey. Those who co-operate with the Abbey find they come to no harm at all in the material world.'

  'Right.' Prof is thinking of a Rolls-Royce Corniche parked outside the Manor.
And then a body hanging from a tree. 'I wonder how it caught up with him.'

  'Something in the night.'

  To counter a shiver, Prof walks quickly over to the glass panel and peers through into the control room. The spool is still running, although the tape has wound itself through. He has to destroy that tape. He doesn't want that being played to any inquest.

  Inquest.

  'Poor Dave,' he says uselessly.

  Poor Davey, poor Debbie.'

  Jesus.' Prof realises. 'Tom was carrying the ... the death … when he ... when they crashed.'

  He looks across at the booth where an amplifier became an electric chair.

  Execution.

  Crucifixion.

  'Way things are go ... win"

  'That it then, Moira? That ii for another seven sodding, fucking years?'

  'Correct,' another voice says, a flat voice, matter-of-fact, without emotion or concern.

  Sile Copesake has come in the back way.

  'You can all go home now,' he says, 'if you like.'

  No lights on. No sound.

  Martin hammers again on the vicarage door. It's a modern door with a glass pane in it which he wants to put a fist through.

  Shelley shakes the handle. 'Vanessa!'

  'It's no good.' Martin thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his Barbour jacket, stands back, looks towards the upper rooms.

  No sign of life.

  Shelley is back on the threshold of a breakdown. 'Why are they doing this to us? Why?'

  'I don't think that woman was lying. She didn't seem the type. She seemed sincere. This is the right place, isn't it?'

  'No,' Shelley snaps. 'That's why it says "vicarage" on the gate. Oh, this is a nightmare, Martin. It just goes on and on like this damned mist.'

  'OK, look. Let's go back to the Abbey and get Tom out. It's his daughter. Time he shared some of the burden, don't you think?' Martin takes Shelley's arm. 'Come on.'

  As they emerge from the gate, a tall man and a short man are crossing the road towards them.

  'Another thing that bothers me,' Martin says, 'is Meryl. Where is Meryl?'

  Prof says coldly, 'We were just talking about you, Sile.'