by Phil Rickman
'Hold on.' Simon holds up a hand. 'I, er ... this is a bit embarrassing.'
'Spit it out, Si,' Tom says. 'We ain't got all night.'
'I think, before we open it, bearing in mind what we know of the history of this place, I should say, um, a prayer.'
'Shit.' Tom sits on the stone shelf, 'I keep forgetting. Pray on, mate. Pray on.'
Silly child. Disobedient child. 'Where have you gone?'
Panting, Meryl stops and looks around.
Mist and mist and mist. Grey mist, greeny-brown mist and thick mist where the trees are. No blue mist any more.
'Oh, my lady ...'
Meryl's alone.
Has the Lady Bluefoot gone off with Vanessa? Was Vanessa, in fact, the one to whom the Lady was attracted? Was some secret bond established between the gentle, scented shade and the strange, other-worldly child during the night she spent at Hall Farm? Is she - not Meryl - the one whom the Lady has come all this way to be reunited with?
Meryl moans aloud with frustration and anguish.
In the fog, she's become a tragic figure, cold and alone and betrayed. The fog has shown her the unpalatable truth: that the whole of her adult life has been a saga of self-deception. All she ever wanted were links with the Spiritual - a strong mystical dimension, a sacred source of strength and inspiration.
And the source has repeatedly been sealed against her. While people for whom the whole business is clearly quite abhorrent - people like Tom Storey - are the chosen ones. Outside the presence of someone like Tom, or even Vanessa, Meryl is nothing. It's all so crushingly unfair.
She doesn't see how she can ever go back to Hall Farm now, to Martin's kitchen and Martin's bed. It would be meaningless, The Lady Bluefoot was nothing more than a tease, a
trick.
Meryl kneels on the frosty grass, buries her head in her coat-sleeve and weeps softly. She's left the Abbey behind; there are no signposts, no pathways. Even the child has deserted her. It's cold and dark, and the vile fog clings to her like old sins.
But then,
swish
to the right of her.
But this time Meryl refuses to raise her head from the darkness of her sleeve despite
swish
to the left of her, but it will only be old, leaves clustering damply together in the hedgerow. And even if it's more than this, it will be just another taunt. 'Go away,' Meryl sobs. 'You don't want me. You don't care about me. You never did care. You're cold. You're heartless. Go away.'
And
SWISHSHSHSHSHSHSHH
Directly above her.
And the scent, lightly floral,
softening the mist, which caresses the back of Meryl's neck, eases her head gently from the crook of her elbow, and Meryl looks up, the tiny hairs on her arms prickling. And she looks up, the goosebumps rising. And she looks up, in the most sacred terror, to where stands the Lady Bluefoot in her gown of light.
'There's not enough light,' Simon moans. 'Has nobody got a torch?'
'Move back,' Moira urges. 'If everybody moves back we ought to be able to ...'
'Can't hold it much longer.' Tom grits his teeth. He's raised the stone about nine inches.
'It's no good.' Moira shakes her head. 'We've got to get the whole thing off.'
'Look, hang on ...' Prof goes down the studio, comes back with one of the stools. Now he understands, he wants to help all he can. Feels so bad at thinking they'd gone apeshit, even
Moira. 'Tom, if you can pull it back about three inches ... that's it.'
Prof has wedged the aluminium stool in the gap, but the metal is already starting to bend. 'Sod it.' Simon moves round to where the stool is collapsing. 'We've probably done half a million quid's worth of damage, we can go the whole way. Tom, you get that end ...'
Together, they push the stone until they've got it standing up. 'What do you reckon?' Simon looks at Tom.
'Drop it,' Tom says, and they let go.
The huge, ancient stone stands alone for almost a second before it keels over and smacks down on to the stone of the studio floor with a force which makes the cymbals shiver and the stone itself divide into a spider web of cracks before fragmenting in a muffled medieval duststorm.
Only Prof sees this happen. The others are staring into the hole. 'What is it?' Simon says eventually.
Prof takes a look.
It's like a compost heap turned over after a winter of rotting, except it's dry, and what seem like worms begin to disintegrate when Simon puts out a forefinger.
'Wood.' Moira says, it's the remains of the tree on which Aelwyn was crucified. The deathoak.'
Prof recoils at the smell, which he can't identify. 'How do you know that?'
Moira shrugs, 'I don't. And yet I do. You know?'
'How did you know it was under here? Under the desk?'
'Davey. I could hear it in the song that none of us could understand. It was just like we were ... on top of it. Aelwyn. The crucifixion. And what Davey said about the oldest music studio in the world. And what you said about the tape and its effect on you and what happened at the factory where you had it baked.'
Moira brushes dust from her hair. Her face is streaked with sweat and dirt. 'We might have a few extra faculties between us, but we couldn't create music that would do all that. When Simon said, why don't we just trash the place, I just... It had to be the studio itself. It had to be the Abbey. That make sense to you, as an engineer?'
Prof shrugs. 'If a fluorescent light can put a powerful buzz on to quarter-inch magnetic tape, what's this place likely to do to two-inch with twenty-four tracks to mess with?' He glances down the hole, doesn't like it and glances away. 'What the hell have I been mixing on?'
Simon says, 'Maybe this - by or under this oak tree - is where Walden had his vision.'
'Not God,' Moira says. 'Not the angelic host.'
'I don't like to think what he saw, but he needed a sacrifice. And then along comes the famous Aelwyn the Dreamer, bard and peacemonger. He's on the run, he needs somewhere de Braose can't touch him. Come in, come in, says genial Richard. Sit down, have a glass of French plonk, give us a song.'
'And then,' says Moira, 'one of the monks gets on his horse and goes back to this guy de Braose and says, "Hey, guess who we've got!" I don't think we need to go into the rest.'
She bends over the hole, sifts gently about with her fingers, looks up. 'Guess what.'
'He's here?' Simon joins her. 'I wondered about that.'
'These fragments are bone. Look ... You reckon they maybe chopped down the oak and built this stone thing around it and then put his body ...?'
'No room for a body,' Simon says. 'How about just his head? Maybe they put his head on the stump and erected the tomb around it. You can't tell from this mush.'
A shadow falls across the hole.
It is Tom. He takes a resigned breath and looks down. After a minute or two, he begins to shudder rigidly. Moira takes his hand, holds him back.
'What they did,' Tom says slowly, 'is dug the original foundations around the roots. Can you see the roots? No? They chop off the poor bleeder's head and they shove it into the roots.
So that the roots is, like, enclosing his head. Like serpents. Representing ... well, we all know what serpents represent. And then they wall him up. Encoded in evil. His eyes open, staring up into darkness. For centuries.'
Tom steps back, his own eyes hot with pain.
'We got to get this poor sucker out,' Tom says.
Squatting in bracken, Meryl is covered in blue light.
She looks at her hands: they glow softly blue. When she opens her mouth, she breathes in blue air.
She looked up once - almost - but the light was too bright and her head is bowed again.
Has she been praying? Did she pray to the Lady Bluefoot and the Lady answered?
Diaphanous curtains of blue, the luminescence of a grotto, fall around her. Like the grotto at Lourdes, recreated here in the wintry hills of Gwent. Meryl's whole body i
s racked with long shivers of ecstasy, a body electric in a cloak of electric blue.
Can she look into the face of the Lady Bluefoot, who stands so tall and still not three yards away?
Can she?
Dare she?
Meryl covers her face with her hands. Blue light seeps through her fingers.
Slowly, reverently, she rises to her feet. The Lady, her silvery-blue hair loosely bunched in a net, turns imperiously and glides away, those tiny, blue-shod feet lost now in the folds of her long gown, which falls into powder and tints the mist.
Meryl follows, bathed in grace.
Where are they going? Back to the cold stones of the Abbey? She thinks not. They are going home. Back to Hall Farm, where poor Martin waits, in mourning for his housekeeper and his house-ghost.
We're coming, Martin, we're coming.
The Lady Bluefoot flickers in the mist and Meryl hurries behind. The lovely ghost makes her own tunnel of light, and it's so warm inside that Meryl sheds her coat and lets the mist take it. Cocooned in blue, she skips across the bracken and down into frosted pastures.
We're coming, Martin, We're coming back.
Meryl dances freely, at one with the winter night. She glides over furrows filled with fresh ice, through a hawthorn hedge without feeling it, between the boughs of sleeping trees.
And she's waiting.
The Lady Bluefoot has stopped and turned to face Meryl, opening her arms, her long sleeves a blur of light.
Oh, yes.
They're standing on level ground in a clearing; no trees, no stones. The Lady beckons and Meryl hesitates for a second.
This is the moment.
Can she?
Dare she?
A blue finger is crooked.
'Oh, yes!' Laughing with joy, Meryl runs into the clearing, a roaring in her ears, a squealing she's never felt so happy - and her own arms open wide to embrace …
... the rigid, bony shoulders.
To kiss ...
... the rotting, withered corpse-cheek.
There was no way he could have seen her. Even Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones, following close behind in his own car, will testify to this.
Well, sure, they were going fast, both of them - a child's life at stake.
'Martin! No!' Shelley screams, and rams her back into the seat, instinctively bracing herself for the impact, thinking this will add reverse momentum as Martin hits the brakes.
But Shelley never thought this was how it happens, that it could be quite so horrible, as the Jaguar breaks both the woman's legs and throws her spinning on to the bonnet, so that her face is suddenly in the windscreen, wide-eyed, wide mouthed, lips torn back over teeth smashed by the glass.
Shelley cowers as the car howls and lurches to a stop, full of headlights from behind, to show the empty driver's seat, the blur of Martin hurling himself out, leaving his door wide open.
She sits there, almost relaxed, for what could be minutes but was probably only seconds, listens to the soporific, low hum of voices. And then she quietly lets herself out of the car and walks around the bonnet on legs like sponge.
The woman in the headlights is flimsily clad for such a night, pale silk blouse is torn and soaked with blood. Martin is kneeling over her, his head buried in a half-exposed breast.
The scene shimmers, dreamlike.
Martin's sobbing. There's blood all over the breast and over his face. He doesn't care; he presses his face into the breast. He's shaking, his arms tightly around her; she isn't. She's very calm and still.
Meryl smiles happily through the bubbling blood where she's bitten through her tongue.
VII
Stricken Angel
The words C. F. Martin & Co are indented in the side of the black guitar case Simon carries out of the door of the studio.
Tom, Moira and Prof follow him out.
'Excuse me,' Prof says, 'but I'm not getting this. Where is he going?'
'He's going to the other tower, Prof.' Moira stops in the doorway and they watch Simon stroll, head down, across the frosted grass, the guitar case swinging from his right hand. The tower with no roof. He reckons you can climb to the top and when you emerge you're above the mist line when the sun comes up over the Skirrid. When the sun rises you're no longer the Abbey's, you're under the influence of... something else.'
'But that's hours off. He's gonna stay up there until daylight? Just him and the bones?'
'Hopefully, just him and the bones.'
She doesn't sound too sure.
'You're worried, aren't you, girl?'
'Maybe. Just give me a few minutes, huh?' Moira walked away from him into the mist. 'I need to think.'
The mist lit by blue.
Gwyn Arthur Jones stands up, a reassuring hand on Martin's shoulder, to find blue revolving lights behind him. What's going on? He's not sent for any troops. Has that bloody Eddie ...?
Blue revolving beacons, the simultaneous slamming of doors.
'OK, just stay where you are, please.'
Gwyn recognises them both. PCs Burwarton and Griffiths.
'Radio for an ambulance, boy,' Gwyn says. 'Come on, don't piss about.'
'I beg your pardon, mate, we decide when to ...'
Gwyn directs his torch beam at his own face.
'Oh, shit. Sorry, sir, I didn't recognise you, sir.' The boy looks confused. 'What's happening, sir? We were told a chap had electrocuted himself up at the Abbey.'
'Were you indeed? Well, now you're dealing with an RTA. Get an ambulance.'
'One's already on its way, sir. For the chap at the Ab—'
'That's a formality, Kelvyn? Is he dead?'
'So we understand.'
In that case, when it comes, get this woman shipped to Nevill Hall. Not that there's any hope here either. You'll need a statement from this gentleman. Be kind to him; she dashed out
in the road directly in front of him, as I'll be confirming when you take my statement. Later. Understood?'
'What about the Abbey, sir?'
'I shall deal with that. And I'll be taking the lady with me. Is all that clear, Kelvyn?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Splendid,' says Gwyn Arthur. 'Come away now, Mrs Storey, there's nothing you can do.'
In the corner of the ruins, where it seems a bite has been taken out of the tower, where there are fences for the protection of the public and a sign that warns you to keep out, a shadow detaches
itself from the wall and stands amid the rubble in front of Simon.
'You feeling brave tonight, Simon?'
Simon stops. The plastic handle of the guitar case is sweaty in his hand.
'Piss off, Sile.'
'Nice language for a vicar.'
'If you don't get out of my way,' Simon says, keeping his voice tight, 'the vicar's going to take this guitar case and ram it up your fucking balls.'
Sile sniffs. 'That's Reilly's case, isn't it? Why do you want to take Reilly's guitar for a walk? Some mystical ritual I don't know about?'
Simon makes no reply.
'What's in the case, Simon? Aelwyn's bits?'
Simon says, 'I'm going to count to five.'
Sile laughs. 'Which film was that in, lad?' He puts out an amused hand to pat Simon gently on the cheek. Simon reels back, but he isn't quick enough. He feels a bite of cold air on the left side of his face.
Sile chuckles. As he walks away, Simon hears the click of the knife blade snapped back into the handle. 'That should fetch him,' Sile says nonchalantly. 'Good luck, lad.'
Her long skirt skims over the ankle-deep frozen grass; it's like walking across a hairbrush.
The thought of a hairbrush leads to thoughts of a comb held in dead hands on a white-clad, dead breast six feet under Scotland. And from there to loneliness, emptiness, helplessness and depression.
It would never have worked out with Davey, would it? All these years knowing they were consecutive links on the Abbey's chain of death. Well, she knew it - all he could see, presumably, was
his own death taunting him as a black halo around Moira's head.
You can't win. Don't ever think you can interpret the signs and the portents; you're always going to be wrong in one tiny crucial detail.
Oh, Davey.
She inhales a sob, seeing again that vivid blue flash which lights up the whole booth. And thinking of another blue flash, a glorious delphinium blue, in a seedy room in the Clydeview Private Hotel.
Deathoak, breadwinner - all the clues written in neon.
Clues which we cannot possibly be expected, and certainly can't be meant, to decipher ... until it's too late.
Being 'psychic' is a son-et-lumière of superficial special effects, so glamorous, and then you realise that it's really just a sick joke. That it isn't going to help you or anybody. Except maybe materially, and sooner or later that has to be paid for.
The great shadow-arches of the black Abbey of Ystrad Ddu are gathering like locked horns over her head as she walks into what used to be the nave.
Taking a last look back towards the north-west tower, wedged in mist the colour of wet concrete; even if there was a light up there, the top of the tower would still be invisible in this.
Up there: Simon and Aelwyn and Dave. Dave's guitar case, fragments of Aelwyn's skull. All seriously symbolic.
And they could just as easily be false symbols. That one small crucial element could be either wrong or missing. It's all anyone can think of to do, to take Aelwyn and Dave into the night, and it's really such a feeble gesture against a tradition of hard evil going back eight hundred years.
She feels helpless and hopeless. What the hell are you doing here, hen? You directed them to the deathoak and that's your part over, huh?
It would probably be the best thing for all of them if she gathered up her things and left.
And dwell on it for another seven years? And then?
This is when Moira literally stumbles upon the body in the wheelchair.
Tom and Prof wind up in a corner of the canteen without much hope between them, only a pot of tea.
Prof rubs his eyes. 'I used to be an engineer. A month ago, I was just an engineer.'
