by Phil Rickman
With the comb and the cloak and the ...
'Long-haired girls. Always The long, dark hair.'
Dic.
'After a charity gig. She was waiting for him in the car park. About twenty-one, twenty-two. About my age. Long, dark hair.'
The craving kept alive in the darkness of shop-doorways and the backs of vans.
And manipulated. And moulded and twisted.
Stanage has recreated me as spirit-bait for Matt. He's taken my soul and thrown away the husk.
But why, Moira wondered, so physically, achingly tired now, enclosed in the roots of a malformed oak tree, an electric lamp on her lap, why can I think so well? Why can I see all this so clearly, unless that's to be my final torture?
That and a dawning, unquenchable hatred for Matt Castle.
Frank made his way, quietly as his shoes would allow, up the narrow iron stairs, past the deep fermenting-tanks. Up another flight, past the coppers. It were bloody dark, but Frank had been up here that many thousand times it didn't matter. And the smell, the lovely, familiar smell. Better than sight, that smell. Better than women.
Halfway up the third flight leading to the mash tuns, Frank choked back what he thought was going to be a hiccup but turned out to be a sob. He stopped in a moment of despair. How was he going to live the rest of his life without this wondrous rich, stale, sour, soggy aroma? How was he going to survive?
He clambered to the top, staggered out on to the deck clutching for support at the thick copper pipe connecting the malt mill to the mash, the big Luna around him, his old mates. Get um out, a voice was rasping in his gut. Gannons. Get the bastards out. Get the brewery back for Bridelow.
He leaned, panting, over the side of one of the tuns and his breath echoed in its empty vastness.
One more flight. He went three-quarters way up to a door that'd always been kept locked for safety's sake for as long as he'd worked there.
Voices behind it.
'... not terribly subtle. What time is it?'
'Coming up to eleven-fifteen.'
'No time for that, then. Really, I' - a light laugh, half-exasperated - 'just can't get over what you've done. I really didn't think you were that clever. Now, look. You know, presumably, that we mustn't actually kill you. Not yet, anyway.'
'Don't care. Do what you want. You're just a slag. Couldn't have a ...'
A crash. A moan. A rolling on floorboards.
All right, come on, pick him up. Sit him next to his dear daddy. Let him have a good whiff. Bind his arms very firmly, palms up, OK? And at approximately ten minutes to twelve … are you listening? At ten minutes to twelve, you can open his wrists.'
Frank was in a fog. He heard it all but couldn't make sense of the words and some kept repeating on him.
Kill... whiff... palms up ... open his wrists.
It was a woman's voice, not a local accent. More words rambled down the steps, Frank's brain tripping over them, sometimes he seemed to hear the key words before they joined actual sentences.
Trickle.
'Don't go mad. Just want a trickle at first. Steady plop, plop, plop. We'll be well into it by then. Once you get the trickle going, you come back and join us. Very quietly. You say nothing.'
Blood to blood.
'What if he screams?'
'He won't. If he does, you can cut another vein. Slow release is best. I mean, I was going to do this anyway; this way we get an instant connection, blood to blood.'
blood to ...
'Oh, yeah? And who would it have been if this one hadn't suddenly become available?'
. . . blood?
'Oh. Right.'
Frank's hands were sticky on the iron stair-rail. Brain couldn't handle it. Past his bedtime. Turn back, go home, sleep it off, eh? But there was a voice he recognized, the voice that said it didn't care, the voice that called the female voice a slag. The voice of the owner of the wrists which would be opened at precisely ten to twelve, but just a trickle unless it screamed.
Frank screamed. Frank was screaming now.
As all the lights went on, Frank screamed, 'Dic!' as a figure shimmered in the doorway at the top of the steps and a new smell mingled with the malted air, a smell just as warm, just as rich, just as moist, but ...
The new smell went up Young Frank's nose and forced his mouth wide open like a bucket. He belched up half a gallon of beer and bile, which spouted up in a great brown arc and then slapped down on the metal steps.
'Manifold. You dirty, uncouth lout. Should have guessed.'
Frank looked up into supercilious, wrinkling nostrils.
He began dumbly to move up the steps, his shoes skidding on his own vomit, his hands trying to make fists, his chest locked tight with hatred, his drink-rubbery lips trying to shape a word which eventually came out like another gob of harsh sick.
'...Horridge...'
Gonna have you, said the rough voice in Frank's gut. This time gonna take you apart, you smarmy twat.
He slipped, and his hands splashed on the steps.
Shaw Horridge stood quite relaxed in the doorway, a shred of a smile on his lips. 'You are an absolute oaf, Manifold.'
Frank's fists turned into claws and he took what he imagined to be a great leap up the final three iron steps towards Horridge's throat.
Horridge didn't move at all until Frank's head was on a level with the top of the stairs, at which stage a foot went almost idly back. And then - momentarily - on top of mellow aroma of malt, the sour stench of vomit and the sweet-rancid essence of rotting flesh, Frank experienced the absurdly pure tang of boot-polish as Shaw's shoe smashed through his teeth and was wedged for a second in his gullet.
Choked, retching, he threw up his arms to grab the foot, but the foot was ... receding, just like the rest of Shaw Horridge.
Young Frank realized he was flying slowly and almost blissfully backwards.
It seemed a long time until he thought he heard a metallic ching as his head connected with something solid (metal everywhere in a brewery) and a dull, fractured crump somewhere inside his brains, wherever they might be splattered.
CHAPTER V
There was a rustling over the tumbling water noise; this was what awoke her (how could she have slept, how could she?) And half a second later there was a light in her eyes and people moving behind it.
Two of them.
Moira reared up, back to the tree, a spitting cat. 'Come on. Come on, then ...'
Hands curling into claws. Pray that one is Stanage.
Because she would die before they'd take her back. She'd die raking his face.
One of them gasped.
The other said, 'By 'eck.'
He'd heard it before, so it was no big surprise. The hackneyed country and western, with chorus.
Leave your sorrow
Come and join us
Shed those sins,
Fold the joy within …
One time, Macbeth had directed this made-for-TV picture about the crooked evangelist Boyd C. Beresford the Fourth. Spent a whole ten days cruising the Bible Belt, stuff like this churning out of the car-radio, out of hotel-room TV sets, out of mission halls and marquees - until even arid atheism began to look like a safe haven.
So he was not impressed. Not even when they started singing in tongues, because he knew how easy this stuff was to fake, even while you were convincing yourself you weren't faking it. And all the healing that lasted just long enough for the relatives to throw in a two hundred dollar donation. You feeling better, sister? Or maybe your faith isn't yet strong enough for you to be healed?
'Go away. Begone, heathen!'
This real big Born Again Christian on the church door. Stained jeans and a grungy parka. Tattoos on both wrists, one involving what looked like it used to be a swastika on fire before it got reprocessed into a bulky crucifix. Fascist punk finds God. It happened. Classic demonstration of what Cathy had said earlier about one extreme igniting another.
'Listen, I don't plan to cause any trouble,' Macbeth said wis
ely. 'All I want is to talk to Joel Beard. I would like for you to bring him out here. That too much of a problem?'
Cathy had said, 'Mungo, you have an open, honest face. You've got to get to Jowl, talk some sense into him. Long as you go easy on the casual blasphemy, he has to listen to you - you're not from Bridelow and you're not a woman. Tell him what you like, but get him to evacuate that place. They think they're safe in there … they're just so naïve, they're children …'
The big guy with the ex swastika said, 'You got five seconds to get them filthy heathen feet the other side of this sacred threshold.'
Beat up on a pagan for the Lord. Jesus.
'Listen,' Macbeth said urgently. 'Go tell Joel that Pastor Mungo Macbeth of the, uh, East Side Evangelical Mission, would like to speak to him.'
'You're lying,' Swastika said, but with audibly less conviction than a moment ago.
'God will forgive you for that,' Macbeth said. 'Maybe.'
'He's not there,' Swastika blurted out.
'He is everywhere,' said Macbeth.
'No, Joel. I mean Joel. When we got here we couldn't find him. He's vanished.'
'What do you mean, vanished?'
'He's just gone.'
'Well, where'd he go, for Chr … Where might Reverend Beard have gone?'
Flash of fear in the guy's small eyes. 'Why d'you think we're praying so hard?'
'So your friends have returned.'
John stood, bathed in blue light.
The blue was in the old glass around the enormous lantern. Round panes, set in the four exterior walls, were frosted white.
There wasn't much to it; Joel had expected more, perhaps the remains of a clock mechanism, but there was no sign of there ever having been one.
'I knew they would,' Joel said. 'I knew it was impossible for them to forsake their God for very long.'
John smiled, his teeth shining blue.
'Still,' Joel said. 'I won't say I'm not relieved. Shall I go down? Tell them what we are going to do?' He moved towards the top of the stone steps.
'Lord, no.' John's face grew solemn. 'They've fled once.'
'Yes,' Joel said. 'I'm sorry.'
The room was about nine feet square. In any other church it would be the belfry; here it was the lamphouse. The lantern hung from the pinnacle of the roof. It was perhaps five feet in diameter.
There was lead around the rims of the glass circles in the walls, but no remains of numerals; it had clearly never been a clock.
Inside the bluish milky glass set into an old iron frame, he could make out the incandescent shapes of three big electric bulbs.
John said, 'Used to be an oil lamp, you can tell. Big candles before that, probably. A lure for the spirits of the Moss.'
Joel remembered his nightmare in the cellar room, imagining the lantern laying an ice-blue beam over still water.
Channels of rain glistened like icicles on the glass. The light was quite ghastly, dehumanizing. John, with his pale, flat face, looked almost demonic. Joel glanced sharply away, afraid of the illusions this evil light could evoke. Though they'd been up here over half an hour, he became aware for the first time of a small door in the shadows to his left.
'What's in there, do you know?'
'Let's see, shall we?' John moved lightly across the boarded floor, pushed and twisted at a handle. 'No ... 'fraid it's locked.'
Joel closed his eyes and listened to the singing. The hymn was trailing into a drone of tongues, male and female voices flowing into a bright river of praise. He tried to let it flow into him.
On all sides of them, up here in the tower, the night sky was roaring with rain.
'How long?'
'Little under ten minutes. Impatient, are we, Joel? Excited?'
'Why can't we just switch it off and go?'
'You see a switch anywhere, m' boy? Be on a circuit. Time switch. Anyway, what good would that do? No. Have to smash it. Violence, I'm afraid. Strength. What you're about, isn't it Joel? Strength. Might. No room for namby-pamby, nancy-boy clerics on the Front Line, mmmm?'
'Yes,' Joel said. 'You're right. I'm ready for that. Midnight, then.'
Back at the Rectory, Macbeth said, 'What could happen to those people? Spell this thing out.'
Reaching the front door, he'd heard Cathy, on the hall phone extension, saying, 'I don't know, I'll call you back ' Putting down the phone to let him in.
Now, in the study, sitting on the edge of the piano stool, she said, 'How can I say what could happen? You're nowhere in this game until you accept that nobody can ever say for certain what's going to happen and anyone who thinks he can, or that he can manipulate it, is due for a hell of a shock one day.'
Macbeth said, 'What game?'
'Game?'
'You just said "in this game".'
Cathy shrugged. 'Life, I suppose.'
But he wasn't aiming to back off. 'OK, so what's the bottom line? What's the worst thing could happen? Before you answer, bear in mind what I saw in Scotland and that Moira is dead and that I don't believe I have a great deal I care about left to lose.'
Cathy said calmly, 'I've lived in Bridelow all my life. I've acquired knowledge of certain things, OK? And most of today I've been talking very seriously to my father who's had to deal with things most clergymen don't even read about.'
'Sure,' Macbeth said impatiently. 'What's your point?'
'Put it this way, if it was Pop in there, I'd be less worried.'
'So what you're saying is, in the great metaphysical ballpark, these guys are strictly little-league.'
'Let's say they're hardly ready for what they're up against. They create their own universe, you see, these people. In this little universe everything is down to the Will of God and all evil can be defeated fast as a prayer. When real evil shows its hand, it can be so traumatic they'll ...'
'Flip?'
'Flip is right,' Cathy said. 'Flip is the least of it.'
'Real evil?'
'Stanage is the man no one here ever talks about. Stanage is evil beyond what ordinary people care to envisage.'
'OK,' Macbeth said. 'First thing, you can't stay here alone, in case these people come back with some even more screwball ideas than they had when they left.'
She looked kind of suspicious. 'What's the alternative?'
'I reserved a room at the inn. You take that. I'll stay here.'
'Oh,' said Cathy. 'I see. The big macho bit. Mungo, how can I say this? You're the one who shouldn't be here on his own.'
'What you want me to do, drive outa here? Things didn't work out with Moira, let's draw a line under all of this? OK, we'll both stay here. I'll take the sofa. I'll call Mrs Castle.'
'Mungo, I'm not going to stay here. I'm going to Milly's. We have things to discuss and it's women only, I'm afraid. My advice is, take your room at The Man, get some sleep. You look all-in. If there's anything you can do, we'll ring you.'
'Oh,' Macbeth said.
'I promise.'
'Sure.'
This was Moira all over again. Macbeth, just go away, huh?
'I dint recognize you.' Willie was almost in tears. 'God help me, I didn't know who you were.'
'I think there was a similar problem,' Mr Dawber said drily, 'in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Third Day.'
Willie could tell Mr Dawber was almost as pleased as he was, but there was a shadow across it.
Mr Dawber said, 'Seeing somebody you thought was dead, there's bound to be an element of shock. Take her home, Willie. Take her to Millicent.'
'Cathy,' Moira said, unsteadily on her feet, Willie's donkey jacket around her shoulders. Willie reckoned she also was in shock. 'Whatever you like,' he said. 'I can't believe this. I just can't believe it. It's a miracle. It were on t'news. They found your car, bottom of a bank.'
'I'll tell you about it,' Moira said.
'It was your car?'
'Oh, aye.'
Willie said, his voice rising, 'There were a body in it. Police found a woman's body!' He st
ared hard at her in the torchlight.
He wondered if she knew where she was. He wondered if she knew what had happened to her beautiful hair.
He was glad that when he'd touched her, putting his jacket around her, she'd been stone-cold and damp, but solid.
Mr Dawber was silent. If he had any curiosity about the body in the BMW he was keeping it to himself.
'Let's not hang about,' Willie said. 'Mr Dawber?'
'You go,' the old man said quietly. 'I'll carry on.'
'You're never going up there on your own, Mr Dawber, no way.'
'I'll go if I want to,' Mr Dawber said, and there was a distance in his voice. 'Nobody tells the headmaster what to do. Remember?'
'Aye, and if I arrive back there without you, Milly'll kill me, you know that much, Mr Headmaster, sir.'
Mr Dawber said mildly, 'This lass'll be catching her death if you don't be on your way.'
'Please, Mr Dawber.'
'Dic' Moira's body pulsed. 'Either of you seen Dic Castle?'
'Not since the funeral,' Willie said. 'Gone off teaching, Lottie said, in Stockport or somewhere. You seen him, Mr Dawber?'
There was no reply. Willie swung his torch round.
'Mr Dawber!'
Mr Dawber had gone.
Roger Hall asked, 'Is he mad?' The effects were wearing off; he didn't feel so elated, he did feel quite relaxed. He did not feel there was anything bizarre about this, why on earth should he?
Therese arched an eyebrow. She was not beautiful, but she was compelling. He wouldn't kick her out of bed.
'Well, of course he's mad,' she said. 'Didn't that occur to you?'
'He knows so much. How can you know so much, be so learned, and be insane?'
The candles around the circle were half burned down. The other people squatting cross-legged - the people Therese was 'helping', the people who did what they were told - gazed dull-eyed into the candle flames and never spoke.
'Look at it this way, Roger,' Therese said. 'You're quite a learned man yourself. Would you say you were insane?'
Matt Castle slumped in his chair. He wore a white T-shirt and was quite obviously and horribly dead, but he didn't offend Roger Hall any more.
