And suddenly, he was alone.
Only a minute or two before, he had counted perhaps ten people sharing the space with him—visitors, and the volunteers by the door—and the low murmur of their conversations carried clearly to him, but now he noticed their speech had faded away, and when he looked around he was the building’s sole occupant.
Which was when he heard the whispering.
Many years before, when Marcus was just a boy, he had attended school with a lad named Oliver Lewin, who came from a bad family: thieves, drunkards, and worse, who farmed remote land, if their stewardship of it could even be accorded such a name, and lived lives of near poverty. The Lewins were cruel to their animals, cruel to their neighbors, and cruel to one another. It was said that the father, Ambrose, had fathered bastards on two of his daughters, but the infants emerged stillborn and were buried in unmarked holes on the Lewin lands—or the Lewins claimed they were stillbirths, when it was more likely that the mites were smothered as soon as they left the womb, especially if they were female.
The mother, Agnet, was a pathetic creature, a cousin to her husband, and no obstacle to his badness; perhaps even a facilitator of it, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to his predations on his own children until, it was said, Ambrose began to notice the ripening of his youngest girl, the apple of her mother’s eye, and Agnet—broken, silent, miserable Agnet—fed him a dish of death cap mushrooms, like some rural Claudius, sending him to join his bastards in the dirt. All this, too, in the middle of the twentieth century, but the country was different then—or perhaps, Marcus reflected, we only liked to tell ourselves as much, because he still perceived no shortage of abusers of women and children, except it was harder now to feed them poisoned mushrooms and get away with it.
But Marcus had permitted himself to become distracted. Oliver Lewin, Oliver Lewin…
Oliver was his father’s son in appearance and appetite, but more warped still, because the cousins’ blood had mixed badly in him. Families in Deerhurst—and Apperley, Walton Hill, even more distant Tewkesbury—warned their daughters to steer clear of him, and their sons, too. Although only in his teens, Oliver Lewin was base matter.
He terrorized Marcus, who was no match for him, but did so in the most disturbing of ways: by befriending him, by trying to make Marcus his creature, by imposing his company upon him. After school, or on Saturdays as Marcus walked home from football, or on evenings when his mother sent him on errands, Oliver Lewin would appear by his side, materializing from woods, from the shadows of walls, even from open fields, as though emerging elemental from the earth itself.
And always, always, Oliver Lewin would tell Marcus Godwin of what he liked to do to his sisters when they were alone with him, and what he wished to do to convent girls and schoolmistresses, to young brides and old widows, and what he might do to Marcus, too, if he ever told on him, or shared with others the substance of their conversations together; an outpouring of filth, a testament to depravities committed and yet to be committed, every word pouring like sour milk into Marcus Godwin until he could take no more and puked his disgust into the dirt, only to free up more room for fresh perversions.
The whispering in St. Mary’s sounded to Marcus like the worst emissions from Oliver Lewin’s mouth, and even though the words were spoken in another language, one with which Marcus was unfamiliar (one, he believed, that resembled no human tongue), still he grasped their import, and felt the exposure of his deepest self as surely as though he had been spatchcocked by a butcher’s blade. The voices were many in one, and they knew: they knew how much he liked to hear Oliver Lewin’s fantasies; how it was he who would wait for Oliver to appear, he who would loiter by tree and wall, hill and ditch, until Oliver arrived bearing the latest fruits of his imaginings; and how it was he who wanted to spend time with Oliver’s sisters, and not only the older ones but the youngest, Margrett, the one that Ambrose Lewin died too soon to pluck. Oh, the things Marcus would do to Margrett as she wriggled and screamed, as he lifted her skirt, as he pushed her head down…
And it was then that the figures on the windows at Fairford began to move, lowering their faces to him, the persecutors and the persecuted, human and non-human alike; and the fires burned brighter, and the redness spread like blood across the West Window, subsuming saints and angels, the saved and the damned, and finally, Christ Himself.
“No!”
Marcus Godwin heard his own voice echo from the walls, and looked around to find that he was not alone, and the visitors remained, the volunteers, too, and all were staring at him with expressions of shock. Before any of them could approach, before he had to contend with inquiries about his well-being, he was gone from St. Mary’s, gone from the churchyard, gone from Fairford, and had not returned since.
Because it wasn’t true, the things he’d heard. He had spent his childhood trying and failing to avoid Oliver Lewin—his adulthood, too, until someone put an end to Oliver, stabbing him to death in a remand cell while he waited to be tried for the rape of a student. Marcus was glad when he heard it. He never thought he would rejoice in the death of another human being, but Oliver Lewin proved the exception.
“I was never like him,” he said to the wind, to the dusk. “I never wanted to do such things.”
Yet now he could no longer tell if this was true. Was there not some dreadful part of him that might have behaved in such a way, given the opportunity, and the assurance that he would never be caught or punished for it? I am human, said the philosopher, and nothing human is alien to me.
But I never even imagined inflicting such hurt on another person.
“You did, in the church.”
The voices said those things, not me.
“But you pictured them in your mind. For a moment, you saw them. You saw yourself.”
It was not I.
“Believe that, if it helps. Lie to yourself, you beggar, you bore, you dying beast.”
Marcus closed his eyes, and prayed softly to St. Mary the Virgin, letting the wind carry his orisons to her.
Which was when he heard a sound from inside Odda’s Chapel.
CHAPTER XXXV
Thanks to the early meeting with Moxie, Parker was able to catch the 10:25 a.m. United flight from Portland to Newark. He tried to read the New York Times on the plane, but an article on the ongoing tensions between the FBI and the White House brought him back to his conversation with Moxie. He wondered if Ross had returned to New York or was still down in Arizona. The former, he thought: Arizona was a feint, a distraction in the form of a young woman’s body. Ross would now be waiting to hear from Parker about Louis’s intentions. He probably already knew that Parker had booked a flight to New York. It would only have been a matter of pressing some buttons on a keyboard and accessing the credit card records. If Parker were to persist in his pursuit of Quayle, he would have to be more careful about covering his tracks, unless he wanted Ross monitoring his every move.
Alex, Louis’s preferred livery driver, was waiting to collect Parker and take him to the Upper West Side building occupied by Angel, Louis, and Mrs. Bondarchuk, their sole tenant, who, along with her Pomeranians, functioned as the building’s first line of surveillance and defense. Parker rarely liked staying in other people’s homes, preferring the privacy of a hotel room, but Angel and Louis were different, and the former’s illness caused Parker to want to make life as easy as possible for all concerned. Mrs. Bondarchuk opened the door to him as he reached the first step, and gave him an all-enveloping hug, although he barely knew her. She smelled faintly, but not unpleasantly, of rum and cookies, and gratefully accepted a gift box of hand-dipped chocolates that he’d picked up from Dean’s Sweets on Fore Street before leaving Portland.
Angel met him on the second floor.
“Good to see you up and about,” said Parker.
“It’s cancer, not an amputation.”
“Still.”
Angel showed Parker to his room.
“I hear we’re going to Amst
erdam,” said Angel.
“Are you well enough?”
“I’m going, even if it kills me.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. It might cast a shadow over the trip.”
“And after Amsterdam?”
“England.”
Angel reached out for the doorframe with his left hand, and leaned into it. He tried to make it seem casual, but Parker could see the tiredness on his face.
“They almost killed Louis last time,” said Angel.
“Yes.”
“In return, he wants to kill them. Twice over, if he can.”
“It’s understandable.”
“But he’s getting older. We both are. You are, too, but you’ve got more time.”
Parker waited.
“Ten years ago, even five, Mors would never have been able to take Louis down,” said Angel. “No one could. Now it’s different. What I’m saying is, he can’t watch your back the way he used to. He’ll try, like I will, just as you’ll watch ours, but he’s in pain, and we’ll be more vulnerable than before.”
“We’ll find help. We always do.”
“You seem very sure of that.”
Parker took in the guest room. It was nicer than most hotel suites he’d stayed in, and contained reminders of Angel’s and Louis’s presence, since each occasionally had cause to retreat to it. Neither ever took it personally if the other needed space for a while. He saw some of Louis’s music, and artifacts from his heritage—Minié balls; a Charleston slave badge; and a travel guide for Afro-Americans from the 1940s detailing hotels, restaurants, and gas stations where their custom would be accepted without violence or humiliation—along with small items of African and Asian art. Parker could recall the provenance of most, remembering an evening some years earlier during which Louis had explained the history of each.
Meanwhile, contained in a glass cabinet on one wall was a complete set of tools used by nineteenth-century burglars, the “second-story” men: jimmies and heavy chisels; the “little alderman,” a thin wedge of steel used to open safe doors; skeleton keys; drills and bits; cans of oil and powder; and a bottle of chloroform, to render an occupant unconscious, if required, by its application to a sponge, which would then be attached to a length of string on a stick and suspended over the person’s bed from the window before the burglar entered the room. Angel, in his turn, had told Parker all this, carefully detailing the use of each item, handing them over so he could feel the weight, admire the craftsmanship.
These men were his friends, and more, much more.
But Quayle had to be found, whatever the risks.
“I have faith,” said Parker.
“In God?”
“No, in you, and in Louis. In all those like us.”
“There aren’t many like us.”
“There are enough.”
Angel gave up using the door for support, and sat on the guest bed.
“Why is Quayle so important, aside from almost killing Louis?”
“Because of what he’s trying to do,” said Parker.
“Which is?”
“He may be trying to bring about the end of the world.”
Angel took this in.
“Well,” he said at last, “since you put it like that. So Quayle’s a fantasist?”
“Probably, but a fantasist with ambition. The people he killed in Maine, in Indiana, they almost certainly weren’t the first, which means they won’t be the last, because he still doesn’t have what he wants. I think Quayle has left a long line of bodies behind him. It’s time that was stopped.”
Angel was watching Parker closely.
“But Quayle is different, isn’t he? You believe that. I can see it in your face.”
“The more I find out about what he’s looking for,” said Parker, “the more he troubles me.”
But before he could elaborate, they heard the front door opening, and the yapping of assorted Pomeranians heralded the return of Louis.
“Bob Johnston will tell you more, over dinner,” said Parker. “How’s your appetite?”
“I tend to skip the appetizers, sometimes the entrées, too.”
“You were getting kind of heavy, but no one wanted to say.”
Angel stood, and patted his belly.
“Every cloud…”
CHAPTER XXXVI
The autopsy on Romana Moon’s remains was delayed due to administrative issues in which Priestman had no interest, over which she had no control, and about which she was not inclined to cause a fuss anyway. Sisterson, the pathologist, was doing her a favor by fast-tracking the autopsy—there was never a shortage of bodies to be examined—but there seemed to be little doubt about how Moon had died: she had suffered stab wounds to her torso, and her throat had been cut, so the only important questions that remained to be answered were left- or right-handed, and the length of the blade.
Priestman had been with Kevin Moon, Romana’s father, and Romana’s sister when they formally identified her body. Kevin Moon was a small man in his late forties, who worked as a site foreman for a construction company. He liked the TV series Doctor Who—liked it a lot—which was how his daughter had ended up with the name Romana, after one of the fourth Doctor’s companions. Funny, Kevin Moon said, but Romana had never much cared for Doctor Who, except it wasn’t funny at all, because he was talking about his dead child, while the surviving one held his hand. He’d left his wife at home, with friends and relatives.
“She didn’t need to see her little girl that way,” Moon explained, as though any explanation were required, or the opposite were true of himself.
Priestman had made another run out to the moors that day to check on the CSIs, and the progress of the canvass, just in case anyone had noticed an unfamiliar vehicle on the night Romana died. In addition, a brace of officers, including a couple from West Tynedale who had been co-opted into the team for their knowledge of the area, were also questioning residents and confirming their alibis, since it remained possible that Romana had been killed by someone living locally. The CSIs were doing their best, but there had been more rain, and privately they felt that they’d been lucky to get a tent over the two locations—killing site and discovery—before it started bucketing down, because any other evidence had probably been washed away by now. They’d keep looking, though, because that was the job. You kept looking until there was nothing left to find.
And then you looked some more.
Finally, she’d taken the time to speak again with Douglas Hood, accompanied by Hynes. Hood still wasn’t entirely off Priestman’s radar—she had a natural distrust of people who seemed too helpful—but as with the ex-boyfriend, Simon Harris, she didn’t get a sense of Hood as a killer. Also, as Hynes pointed out, if Hood had killed Romana Moon, then he was going out of his way to aid the police in his own apprehension.
Hood’s home was more comfortable than Priestman had expected. She’d been anticipating gray stone and unfinished furniture, as well as a pig in the kitchen; there were elements of the first two, but no sign of the latter. Hood lived in a centuries-old cottage that was almost cozy inside, in a very male way, dominated by a modern flat-screen television in the living room, and a surprising number of books, mostly paperbacks of 1970s espionage novels. They’d gone through the circumstances of his discovery of the body for a third time, and discussed Hood’s movements on the night of the killing, which hadn’t amounted to much at all, according to Hood, because he’d been in bed. Eventually, Priestman went with her instincts, which were that Hood was as straight as he appeared, and they spoke some more about the Familists.
“I still find it surprising that the memory of them has persisted for so long,” said Priestman.
They were drinking strong tea made by Hood from leaves, and served from a tin pot.
“Why?” said Hood. He sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Because they left here centuries ago.”
“They might have, but the damage was already done by then.”
>
“In what way?”
“Their presence changed the landscape. They scarred it. They built on it, and dug down into it. They murdered aboveground, and buried the evidence below.”
“Are you saying the land remembers them?”
“Course it does. Nature remembers, and the land is part of nature. The Familists, they understood nature better than anyone, because their god was in it and of it. You think it was a coincidence that they chose Northumbria, and these moors, as the location for their church? I don’t know of any other Familist chapels, except the one that was built here. Most of the Familists, they venerated in houses. They didn’t go raising churches, except in this place.”
“Why?”
“Because this was once the center of Christianity in Britain. Northumbria held the holy island of Lindisfarne, and Whitby Abbey, and gave the world Cædmon, the first Christian poet in Old English. But in those times, the influence of Christianity didn’t extend much farther than the monastery walls. Beyond them, the people believed in gods of the land, gods you could see and touch, because they were in the rivers, the trees, and the crops. That was the kind of god the Familists venerated, and so they set their church here, in the place where Christianity started, to remind folks of what had gone before, of what was sleeping in the soil.”
“Do you think the Familists have returned?” said Hynes.
Hood shrugged. “I can’t say if they have or not, only that it’s of no consequence beyond the murder of that poor girl.”
“Why is that?”
Hood sipped his tea.
“Because whatever they worshipped never went away.”
* * *
THE NEWSPAPER AND TELEVISION people were already running with the Familist angle. There’d been no hope of keeping it quiet, not really. Worse, though, it was all over the Internet, which, as Priestman feared, had drawn out the crackpots. According to Hynes, the press office had already logged a number of calls from people claiming to be druids.
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