The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Yes. I’m running away,’ said Moira, matching bluntness with bluntness, and waited for shock or disapproval.

  The girl said, ‘Are you indeed? I ran away myself when I was about your age. D’you want some tea? You can have coffee if you like but I always think it’s too much of a stimulant at this time of night.’

  ‘Did it work?’ This was an incredibly unreal conversation to be having in the middle of the night with someone you had only just met.

  ‘What?’ The girl had been setting a small kettle to boil and reaching down two pottery mugs.

  ‘Running away,’ said Moira. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Yes, of course it worked. I made it work. I suppose you’re running away because of a man.’

  ‘Well, it—Yes,’ said Moira with resolution. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘It’s what most of us do.’ She studied Moira for a moment. ‘You’re very young. How old are you? Seventeen?’

  ‘Nineteen,’ said Moira indignantly. ‘Almost twenty.’

  ‘You don’t look it. You know, you can’t go roaming around the countryside in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Why? I mean why should you bother about me?’

  ‘Let’s say I’ve got a soft spot for waifs. I was one myself once and somebody helped me. I’m passing on the favour. By the way, my name’s Kate Kendal. You don’t need to tell me your name if you don’t want to, but it would make it easier to have something to call you. You can make up a name if you like. I shan’t mind. I probably shan’t know.’

  Moira toyed with the idea of giving herself an exotic new name for her startling new life which appeared to be already beginning. Margot de Medici? Camellia Dumas? Roberta Barratt Browning? Don’t be silly. Also, there was her birth certificate, carefully folded into the zipped section of her bag. You could not conjure up a new identity for yourself out of mid-air these days. She said, ‘I’m Moira Mahoney. The man I’m running away from is my father.’

  ‘Why?’ said Kate and again Moira found herself answering truthfully.

  ‘He came to my bedroom. I woke up and he was—His hands were all over me and there was—He had—’

  ‘I see,’ said Kate, and Moira had the feeling she really did see. ‘Very nasty indeed. The bastard. Unzipped and nicely aroused, I suppose? Yes, I thought that was what you meant. We’ll hope it withers and drops off. Did you get away in time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good for you. Would you like something to eat?’

  This rather off-beat sympathy was the last reaction Moira had expected and the offer of food threw her completely. She stared, and Kate said, ‘When I ran away from home I was eighteen and I was so keyed up that I hadn’t eaten for two days. When I got clear – to London – I passed out with hunger on Waterloo Station. There’s some of tonight’s supper left if you want it. Chilli con came. I made it myself and it was very good. It’ll only take five minutes to heat.’

  ‘I—’ Moira stopped and remembered the steamed fish. She said, ‘Do you know, you’re right. I’m absolutely starving.’

  The chilli was very good indeed. Moira had never had anything like it – she could hear Father saying, ‘Foreign rubbish,’ – but she thought it was delicious and she ate a huge bowlful. There was a wedge of French bread to go with it.

  ‘Could I wash up?’ she asked tentatively, unsure of the codes obtaining here, but Kate said,

  ‘Sure. Go ahead,’ and curled up on one of the beds drinking her tea while Moira washed everything up carefully in the tiny sink.

  ‘I think you’d better stay here tonight,’ she said as Moira put the plates away. ‘You can get on a train or something in the morning if you want. Did you bring a toothbrush?’

  ‘No, it—’

  ‘Would have meant making too much noise,’ finished Kate. ‘It’s what everyone thinks when they run away. I think there’s an unused toothbrush somewhere, however. Underclothes? Night things?’

  ‘Yes, I did manage those,’ said Moira, and added firmly, ‘also some money.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Kate regarded her, and then said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose I’d better tell you what I was doing out there.’

  ‘Grave-robbing.’

  Kate smiled unexpectedly. ‘Have you ever heard of a piece of music called the Black Chant?’ she said. ‘Or of a cult called Serse’s People?’

  ‘I – no. I don’t think so. What is it?’

  ‘The Black Chant is an ancient piece of music that I’ve been trying to track down for three years.

  ‘And Serse’s People are its acolytes.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Four years ago,’ said Kate, ‘my husband started gathering material for a book. He was an anthropologist, and he’d just been awarded a research fellowship. The book was to be about music worshipping. I mean, literally, music worshipping: ancient fertility dances and rain dances. Mating rituals compared with present day cults: New Age Travellers and the Notting Hill Carnival and Woodstock. You wouldn’t remember Woodstock,’ Kate added. ‘I can only just remember it myself. But it was a pop festival in America in the late Sixties.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a legend, isn’t it?’ said Moira. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘The idea was a good one,’ said Kate. ‘It wasn’t wildly original, but Richard would have made it seem original. He’d have unearthed new material and he would have made it interesting and different.’ She stopped. It was extraordinary how much it still hurt to think what Richard had been like. It was even more extraordinary to find herself talking so easily about him to this unknown waif.

  ‘It sounds fascinating,’ said Moira, who thought it did. ‘Did you—were you working with him?’

  ‘What?’ Kate appeared to have relapsed into the past. ‘God, no,’ she answered. ‘I haven’t the intelligence. Or the application. I’m just a middle-man. Middle-woman. An agent. My partner and I have a small PR company, for musical promotions. Publicity for events – orchestral concerts and festivals. Sometimes finding publishers or record companies for new composers. Undertaking PR for orchestral seasons.’ She grinned suddenly. ‘Not modern music, or not very often. The pop boys have their own network.’

  ‘Good music,’ said Moira, nodding. ‘Real music.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kate smiled properly for the first time. ‘We never managed to get as far as Covent Garden or the Royal Festival Hall, but we did well enough. We’d discovered a couple of string quartets who were becoming fairly well known – we’d got them on to the Stately Homes concert circuit. And we set up some stuff with Classic FM – that’s a commercial radio station in the UK, solely for classical music.’

  ‘Yes. I know about it.’ Father would have said this was no job for a woman and talked about parasites on society and layabout musicians who never did an honest day’s work, but Moira thought it sounded interesting. She could imagine Kate being good at it.

  ‘Quite early on in the research, Richard became fascinated by the ancient legends about Pan and the Pied Piper and Orpheus,’ said Kate. ‘He didn’t become obsessional, but he began to talk about a piece of music – something very ancient indeed – that he said had existed in the world for thousands of years, and that was lost for most of the time, but occasionally surfaced. Later I found it referred to as the Black Chant, but at the time Richard called it “The Beckoning”.’ Kate paused, drinking her tea, cupping her hands around the mug as if for warmth. ‘He was tracing it further and further back,’ she said. ‘I remember he said there was an oblique mention of it in the Old Testament, and that it even went as far back as Solomon and the Temple Scribes ten centuries before Christ. He said the Magi who attended Christ’s birth had known about it as well.’

  ‘Magi’s a kind of short-form for high divine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Thank God for someone with an unblinkered mind,’ said Kate unexpectedly. ‘It sounds a bit far-fetched, telling it cold like this, and of course Richard didn’t find it out all in one go. It took months of research and piecing together of odd frag
ments.’

  She stopped again and Moira said, ‘Please go on.’

  ‘Just over three years ago he decided to attend a kind of rock concert to study the followers,’ said Kate. ‘Part of the general field research. He called them disciples, but he wasn’t being patronising. He genuinely saw them as followers of a modern-day cult, exactly as he saw the Mayas or the Incas or the Bush tribesmen following a cult. I decided to go with him,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be interesting, and we planned that I would help him – circulate a bit and record a few interviews on my own account. That way we’d get double the material.’ Her eyes were inward looking. ‘We took portable recorders and cameras,’ she said. ‘And I remember buying new clothes to blend in. A long Indian cotton skirt and string sandals and a loose top. Richard just wore jeans and a shirt, of course.’

  Moira said, ‘Where was the concert?’

  ‘Hampstead Heath. That’s a huge open area on the north side of London,’ Kate explained. ‘A public common.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. Highwaymen’s inns and gallows,’ said Moira. ‘Tyburn?’

  Kate grinned. ‘Well done, waif,’ she said. ‘Yes, loads of ancient inns and ghosts and public hangings and masses of history. Now people just walk dogs there or make love in the bushes and leave used condoms and hamburger wrappings everywhere.’ She set down the empty mug. ‘So we went to Hampstead for the concert,’ she said.

  It was as vivid as if it had been yesterday. Kate could remember the warmth of the weekend – it had been the end of June and blazingly hot.

  ‘Midsummer’s Day,’ she had said. ‘There’ll be latter-day Druids and reincarnations of King Arthur six deep.’

  But Richard had laughed and said that at Midsummer the Druids flocked to Glastonbury but in fact he’d enjoy meeting a few modern Druids to compare them with the original lot. It was twentieth century music worshippers he was after today.

  ‘A part of the Heath had been cordoned off for parking,’ said Kate, curled on to the bunk, her eyes staring back into the past. ‘Although most of it was free for the concert. There were no formal sleeping arrangements, of course. Probably not knowing whose sleeping bag you’d share that night was part of it for a lot of them. It started off by being rather fun.’

  The journey had not been fun: there had been the usual flow of people leaving the city and Kate, who always got impatient in traffic jams, had begun to get angry but Richard had said, ‘Think of them as pilgrims. Like the Canterbury Tales.’ He had started to make up Chaucerian limericks, trying to find a rhyme for the Hampstead Monk who became very drunk, and an unbawdy last line for the Pardoner from Wapping who went wife-swapping. Kate had joined in until finally they had both been laughing so much that they had not noticed the traffic starting to move again, and all the drivers behind had hooted and made rude gestures.

  There would probably be a number of impromptu performances during the two-day concert, but there were six groups who would be playing from lunchtime each day until whatever hour of the night everyone wanted. By the time Kate and Richard arrived, people were already setting up little circles of territory. Beer and cider and wine was being consumed.

  ‘And there were drugs,’ Kate said. ‘I have to admit that there were drugs. Mostly marijuana and cannabis, but I suspect that there were heroin pushers in the crowd and Ecstasy dealers, because there usually are, although I didn’t see anyone dealing and I didn’t see anyone actually shooting up either.’ She paused. ‘Richard never took anything stronger than an aspirin in his life,’ she said. ‘That’s something else I should make clear. He didn’t need anything to make him high. He was one of those people who think life is so good and so absorbing that artificial stimulants simply never occurred to him.’

  One of the hardest of the memories was how much Richard had enjoyed life, how he had found humour in everything, how he had found interest in everyone. People never bored him; he liked to listen to them and he found them endlessly absorbing. Kate had sometimes thought he would have made a good psychiatrist or even a Catholic priest. ‘And do without sex?’ he had said in horrified amusement.

  ‘No, maybe not. Unless you could have been a wicked cardinal in Henry VIII’s day, or a Borgia pope.’

  ‘Decadent and dissolute,’ Richard replied, pleased with the small fantasy.

  He had approached the pop festival with optimistic anticipation and had fallen into discussion with several people almost straight away. By then it was two o’clock and most people had eaten their lunch and had a few drinks. Anybody who had been smoking anything a bit questionable had finished it and put it out of sight. The concert was kicking into life.

  Kate lost sight of Richard midway through the afternoon, but they had expected this. They were going to meet outside their car at six anyway, and decide what to do about an evening meal. There would probably be a few of Richard’s students around and there might be people Kate knew as well: journalists and feature writers and people from the music world. Somebody might ask them to supper, or they might decide to walk across to the ‘Spaniards’, where you could get very good fresh trout. Anyway, the plan was to circulate and soak up local colour and talk to as many people as possible and find out their motives and their motivations.

  Kate had begun to enjoy herself by this time; they had shared a half bottle of wine over lunch, and the opening group had started off with some Sixties stuff so that everyone was feeling happily nostalgic, even those who had not been born in the Sixties, which applied to almost everyone there. Most people were flattered to be approached for a brief interview, and nobody minded enlarging on why they were there or what their beliefs were. Quite a few had simply come to find somebody new to sleep with, of course, and as many again were there to get drunk or high on drugs. Kate tried to avoid these. But a good number were there because they liked the music. It had meaning for them and they felt as if they were belonging to a great club, didn’t Kate feel that? And wasn’t the music terrific? Kate taped discussions to a pounding background of the Beatles and Buddy Holly and Elvis, and made copious notes to the soul music of Tina Turner.

  There was some jazz which was shouted down – nobody wanted jazz by then – and people were drinking coke or beer from cans. Here and there they were brewing tea within their defined little areas. Kate was offered a cup by a group from Bexleyheath who all wore Greenpeace and Save the Whales badges. The tea turned out to be pale green and flavoured with camomile but it was unexpectedly refreshing and Kate had two cups. They exchanged thoughts on pacifism and animal rights and Kate was cordially invited to share a vegan meal later, which she managed to get out of by saying that her husband had already made arrangements.

  She recognised one or two people from the music world who might be useful and spent some time talking to them. All grist to the mill. You never knew who you might need to ring up next week or next month or next year.

  The sun was beginning to slip behind the horizon in a blaze of fiery splendour, and Kate was just thinking that she should start to make her way back to the car to meet Richard, when music that was totally and utterly different to anything played so far began to trickle out of the speakers. Kate turned back, and saw for the first time the group standing just below the stage, watching the audience.

  The radiance from the sunset lit them to eerie life and the sight affected Kate as unpleasantly as if someone had dealt her a blow or as if she had fallen into a cold, greasy pond. She stood very still, studying them, trying to see what was so sinister. Just a group of youngsters enjoying the music, surely?

  There were easily fifty or sixty of them; the youngest ones probably no more than sixteen, the oldest mid-twenties at the most. They were standing close to the wooden stage, and they were dressed like everyone else in jeans and T-shirts, flowing cotton or cheesecloth skirts and skimpy tops. One or two wore black leather bomber jackets, and some of the girls had Twenties-style velour hats crammed over flowing, Pre-Raphaelite hair. They should have been no different to anyone else at the
concert but they were very different indeed. Kate thought it was not just that they were watching the audience so intently, although that was peculiar in itself; she thought there was a look about them, as if they had been stamped with something that set them apart, and as if they were very aware of it. A smugness, was it? Yes, they looked smug and secretive, as if they belonged to an exclusive club or as if they knew something everyone else did not. Kate had sometimes seen the same look on the spoiled children of the very rich and found it intensely irritating. We’re better than you, we live on a higher plane.

  Unlike most of the others they remained closely together. Kate edged nearer, trying to see more, noticing now that they all wore a silver chain with a heavy medallion on it, carved into the shape of some kind of ikon. It was like nothing she had ever come across before, although it was vaguely reminiscent of several things: the Celtic and Pictish crosses; even the Aryan swastika – or was it the Nazi one? Which way did the arms bend for the Aryans and which way for the Nazis? Encircling the ikon were engraved words which she could not read from this distance.

  The music poured out in earnest then, and Kate stopped and turned to stare at the long wooden stage with the acoustic speakers and the trailing leads and microphones. This was music she knew, surely. Or was it? Recognition wavered.

  The group playing it looked ordinary enough. They were dressed in the uniform of most pop groups these days: black vests and leather trousers and satin waistcoats. Two of the men had shaven hair with skull and crossbones tattooed on their scalps and two had long hair which could have had a Restoration appearance if it had been cleaner. One of the girls was determinedly butch and the other was a Madonna-lookalike. To Kate’s eyes they were no different from any other group of today.

  But the music was very different indeed. The music was haunting and compelling and it was worlds and light years from the normal pounding beat you heard at rock concerts. It cascaded from the speakers and poured out in a torrent. Frightening, Kate thought, caught between fascination and repulsion. And it’s alive, slithering across the grass, I can almost feel it lapping around my ankles. For a minute this grisly image was so strong that she looked down at the ground.