The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Monsignor Templeton stood up and started to walk slowly around the room. He held his hands before him, laid one over the other, palm upwards. That, presumably, eased the pain of the arthritis. He stopped at the other side of the table and stood looking through the window.

  ‘So, you’ve decided he was possessed, have you?’

  ‘The business that night in Twickenham. The writing on his flesh. The prediction of the future. The speaking in voices belonging to another person. The unaccountable fall in the room’s temperature. What else can it all mean?’

  ‘What else can it all mean?’ he echoed, and I realised how very tired he was. ‘Well now, let me see. Signs on bodies are a curious business, you know. Let’s start with the saints, not the sinners. The stigmatic is in some ways rather like certain types of demoniac – both of them are said to have their bodies written on by preternatural powers, the one divine, the other demonic. The Church is extremely circumspect about stigmatics, did you know that? The reason? The phenomena could be produced by means other than the pressure of the divine. A sufficient degree of psychological identification with Christ in his passion might inscribe the wounds on hands and feet, sometimes on the breast. This in itself might well be a form of saintliness, but does not necessarily imply divine intervention. And the same is true the other way about, with the apparently possessed, or obsessed: the devil is too often no more than another word for repression. You could say that he is, in that sense, the primal force of the hidden, the unacknowledged, all that is unconfessed and unshriven. The force of your man’s mind might have become so darkened and intensified by his trials and turmoils that it could write distorted messages upon his body. Such spectacular feats are not unknown in India, practised by the conscious mind in meditation. Why should it not be possible also for the unconscious mind under the constraint of hysteria? Anyway, with hundreds of years separating us from his life and death, how could we ever possibly know?’

  ‘But what about the other manifestations?’

  ‘The other manifestations can all be answered for quite straightforwardly, and if anything can be answered for without the need of preternatural intervention, then so it must be. That is the teaching of the Church. Your man predicted the death of Lady Chilford in childbirth. What were the statistics for death in childbirth in the mid-eighteenth century?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Then might I suggest you go and find out? I think you’ll find that this particular prediction has about it as much of the preternatural as my statement that it will probably rain for three days next week. From one of those letters you read me it is quite evident that Pelham was sexually besotted with Chilford’s wife. When the conscious controls of his mind crumbled, that obsession was made manifest.

  ‘So he spoke in Jacob’s voice, spoke words Josephine thought were known only to herself and her husband. He had been almost alone in that place with the two of them. One presumes that unless there was some impediment, they would have consummated their vows with reasonable vigour when given the opportunity. So Pelham heard them. You’ve already remarked on his astuteness of observation in those reports you read, so the same astuteness led him to internalise not merely the vocabulary employed, but the inflections and intonations too. Mimicry is native to human beings. We don’t have to introduce the inhabitants of hell to explain it.’

  We stared at each other over the table for a moment in silence.

  ‘You seem to be agreeing with Lord Chilford,’ I said finally and with obvious disappointment.

  ‘I probably am,’ he said. ‘The man was evidently a Deist on the way to atheism, but it sounds to me as though he behaved in a most exemplary fashion, despite all that. There is no problem at all with reason, you know, except that it sometimes oversteps its bounds. It is usually preferable to superstition. I wish I could look forward to ending my days with the kind of care that Lord Chilford provided for your poet. His asylum by the river sounds really very tempting. What is the purpose of your study, Mr Bayliss?’ I thought about this for a moment before answering. But I didn’t really know the answer.

  ‘I’m not sure any more,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to work something out, that’s all.’

  ‘For your benefit or the benefit of Richard Pelham’s memory?’

  ‘Could it be both?’

  ‘We can’t very well exorcise his demon for him, can we, even assuming he had one? The fact that he himself could identify it suggests, by the way, that he was not possessed. His imagination might well have been in the grip of an entity he had come across in his studies, but that is far from being the same thing. What’s left for either of us then, except speculation and remembrance?

  ‘Whatever can be known with any certitude does not belong in the realm of demonology, that is the only certainty I can offer you in regard to it. Everything there has at least two meanings, which are always contradictory and self-cancelling. Like the business with waves and particles: it can’t simultaneously be both, but nor can it be separated solely into either. Do you know that de Tonquedec, the official exorcist for the archdiocese of Paris for over forty years, said that not a single case had ever been placed before him, not one in all those years, which he could, with absolute certainty, diagnose as a genuine case of possession? And they were living cases, not ones from two centuries ago. The best human response to the world of the demonic is simply to leave it alone, avoid it entirely, and tread the path of love and faith instead. And now you really must forgive me, but I’m very tired. I’ve not been well lately, and I need my rest. Thank you for coming to see me. I hope it’s been some help.’

  When I arrived back at the shop I put the manuscripts into the safe, and wondered if I’d ever take them out again. What, after all, was the point? Maybe it was better to let the matter rest in peace. Was that what Fordie had decided? I set off walking to Richmond Park. But the weather was relentless, it thrashed and skewed the trees. And that night as I lay in bed I sensed the mist edging towards me like a cautious animal, blinding the windows one by one with its smear.

  My dreams were riddled with these images of writing on bodies. Christ and his five wounds, and St Francis reproducing them on his flesh, so that it had itself become a ceaseless act of devotion, a prayer. Queequeg’s tattoos, and blue numbers on ceaseless processions of white flesh; Kafka’s story, where the master of the machine submits himself to be the page the needles need to write upon. And then Pelham himself: was he no more than writing paper, the age’s submerged hysteria encrypted with its signs, or had the age’s science placed him in a realm that science itself could neither understand nor even credit with existence? I woke at dawn in the freezing cold, since the heating had ceased a week before – I hadn’t paid the gas bill. I went downstairs and opened up the safe. I took out the papers and read them over and over again.

  Why had I simply taken Lord Chilford’s word for it? It was true that the letters appeared to form Pelham’s name on his chest, with one oddity, namely, as Chilford pointed out, the fact that the H was not properly formed and looked more like an I. I had read this now at least four times and had wondered before, Cannot those demons, with their preternatural powers, even spell? Or might it simply have been that Pelham in his dementia had lost the faculty of stringing letters together sufficiently even to form his own name? What I had never done was simply stare straight ahead at the information before me. I took out a piece of paper and wrote out what Chilford had set down, and what it said was: Pell I am. I took down the N–Poy volume of Fordie’s OED. Pell: substantive. (1) A skin or hide. (2) A skin or parchment. Quickly, I hunted back through The Instruments of the Passion to the lines I remembered:

  See how the flesh of Marsyas

  Provides Apollo with foul papers

  Nothing was misspelt then. Whether it was some force beyond him inscribing him with its own infernal torments, or whether it was merely the skin of his mind that was peeling off, and the mental disintegration had started to manifest outside his mind, the words o
n Pelham’s body meant precisely what they had always said: his own skin had been turned into parchment. He was not writing now, but being written upon.

  I went back to bed and slept soundly for the first time since I could remember. I was only woken by the knocking at the door. It was Charles Redmond. I made him coffee, for I had some of that, but without milk, for I had none.

  ‘God, it’s cold in here,’ he said.

  ‘Gas has been cut off.’

  ‘Ah. Bill went astray?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘the bill’s over there. It’s the money to pay it went astray.’ He looked at me dubiously.

  ‘Do you have any of Shadwell’s signed copies?’

  ‘I have two fake Durrells and one bona fide Shadwell, each one signed, for all the good it’ll do me.’

  ‘Would you like to sell them?’

  ‘How much were you thinking of offering?’

  ‘I’ll give you what you paid for them.’

  ‘Done,’ I said and went to fetch them.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Just out of interest.’ I was handing over the books as he handed over the money.

  ‘I think they’re turning into collector’s pieces already,’ he said. ‘There’s a story attached. Shadwell’s about to become a sort of icon. Prison was a good move. Warmer there than here as well, Christopher.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I went to visit him yesterday. He’d like to think he caused no one too much inconvenience.’ I started to laugh.

  ‘While you’re here, give me a quick valuation on the stock, would you?’

  ‘What all of it?’

  ‘Yes. I might need to sell quickly.’

  Charles wandered about for half an hour, pulling down books and putting them back. When he had finished, he came over to the table.

  ‘On sight, maybe seven thousand pounds.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘There are some very distinguished titles here, but not many distinguished volumes you know.’

  ‘Not many distinguished prices, you mean?’

  ‘Same thing. Some of the things I sold you are much more valuable than anything here.’

  ‘That’s all upstairs. My personal collection. Not for sale. I still need it.’

  ‘And what about the secrets in the back room?’

  ‘I don’t think there are as many of them as you might have imagined. Certainly not as many as I imagined.’

  ‘Ah, Fordie. How much did you pay him?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ I said sharply, then relented. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s say that I didn’t cut a very good deal here. Or anywhere else either.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t go higher than seven thousand from what I can see.’

  ‘And you would take it away?’

  ‘I would take it away.’

  * * *

  No eggs. No Chablis. No heating. It wouldn’t be too long before the lighting went too. The days of Tewk’s Bookshop were numbered. I had been down to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. They hadn’t extended much hope in regard to the terms of the lease. A sufficiently draconian rent-review, on the other hand, might make a local campaign possible. Though the fact that I hadn’t bothered opening up the place to the local residents except for a couple of hours a week might stand against me. Now if Fordie had still been alive … I could always claim the rights of a sitting tenant for the rooms above apparently. Or alternatively, I could do what I was thinking of doing, namely sell up and clear off with the bills unpaid, preferably to a place sufficiently remote for Hamgate to find it very difficult to locate me, and finally to give up trying.

  There was a knock on the door. I was sitting at Fordie’s table absorbing the electricity from my TENS, one of the very few pleasures I could still afford. I had no intention of answering. But Alice managed to crouch down far enough to be able to see me from under one of the blinds. Her face was unmistakable, even out there in the dark. I went to the door and opened it. I was still unfastening the blinking TENS attached to my neck.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘My electricity machine.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘Eases the pain in my muscles. Helps me to move around again. It’s nice to see you, Alice.’

  ‘I wanted to have a look at your bookshop.’

  ‘Take a good look now, then,’ I said, ‘because it won’t be mine for much longer.’ She walked around for a moment looking at the rows of titles. I couldn’t help noticing the briskness of her manner. Alice had changed. This was Alice #2.

  ‘Like father like son,’ she said at last.

  ‘How’s that?

  ‘Both book-keepers. You promised white wine and eggs.’ She was no longer dressed in construction boots and jeans, but in a battered brown tweed suit with a long skirt, and what looked like school sandals. Polished though, and her hair had been evenly cut.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I seem to have run out of both of those. How about a coffee with no milk?’ In the way people have when they can’t think of what to say, I started to talk and talk. I explained quickly about the accident; the bizarre circumstances of my buying into the business; how I had only subsequently discovered the state of the building and the status of the repairing lease. How one by one the utilities were declining to provide their services, hence the cold. And the last thing I explained was that I didn’t have any money left. I decided to spare her the value of the stock.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to buy some books, would you?’

  ‘No,’ she said evenly, ‘but I’m going to take you out and buy you dinner instead.’ So it was that when we walked down the road to the Italian restaurant, it was Alice’s treat. As we ate our pizzas and sipped our wine she told me about the house where she lived up in Whitby. There was one other painter apart from herself, a carpenter, a dressmaker and a car mechanic who doubled as a hairdresser. I felt immediately jealous of all of these unknown people, and wondered if any of them had made love to her.

  ‘I saw a painting of yours in a shop in Twickenham,’ I said, ‘that’s how I got your address.’

  ‘I’ve had a few exhibitions up north,’ she said offhandedly, trying not to sound boastful. ‘I’ve come down to supervise the next one over in Whitechapel. That’s why I’m here. What are you going to do, Chris? Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can sell off the books to start with, that’ll give me some money, but not too much, it seems. Fordie wasn’t exactly straight with me about it all. I don’t know how much he deliberately misled me, or how much he just didn’t want to think about it – the lease, the actual value of the stock, how badly he needed the money so that he could provide for his stepdaughter. Anyway, it seems that all he really left me were the Chilford papers, which are probably not all that valuable on the open market anyway. But they’re the only work I have. The only trouble is, I don’t know now that I’ll ever get to finish it. I keep stopping, anyway, because so much of it is tied up with things I thought I’d finally escaped from. And now I have another problem. I might not have anywhere to live where I can do it.’ And then I realised, as I stared across at Alice’s shadowed face, that I was begging.

  ‘You once took me in,’ she said, ‘don’t think I’ve forgotten.’ I looked down at my wineglass and tried to remember. It all seemed like a different life, with different people in it.

  ‘I took you in because I wanted you.’

  ‘You still took me in.’ I was staring over the glass at her hands now. I had forgotten how her veins twisted and knotted over the backs of those small, quick hands of hers. She had painted her fingernails the colour of wild blackberry. However much I had changed, she had changed to the same degree or more. I looked up at the lines across her forehead announcing, I suppose, that there was death inside her too, death and calculation, however white her body. And my white hair probably made me look twenty years older than I had the last time she’d seen me.

  ‘Are you saying I could co
me to Whitby?’ I asked as quietly as I could. ‘Be careful what you offer. You’re talking to a desperate man. I’ll almost certainly take you up on anything.’

  ‘It wouldn’t just be up to me, you know.’

  ‘I suppose I’d have to be interviewed,’ I said and laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but without laughing. ‘Everybody has to agree. I suppose they might take you, but you’d have to explain what you can do.’ Alice had become brisk and efficient. She had obviously decided at some point that she couldn’t do all her communicating with a brush.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can cook eggs, clean paint off carpets…’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she snapped, and then regretted the snapping and spoke more gently. ‘I didn’t say what you can do for us, did I, Chris? That’s not what I said.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What you can do. What you would be doing with your days. We only once had someone in with us who didn’t have something to do, and it became too exhausting for everyone.’ I thought for a moment.

  ‘I can write a book,’ I said uneasily, ‘about an eighteenth-century poet, who was thought to be mad.’

  ‘Was he mad?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Never thought I’d hear you use that phrase. Well, I can ask them. You can write the book, can you?’

  I watched how carefully she made out the cheque and filled in the details on her stub. Once I had done all of that, but with more of a flourish, as though it really didn’t matter at all.

  Back in the shop, I made her another coffee as she wandered about. Out in the back she found the stack of canvases. They were all Serena’s. She pulled them out one by one and leaned them against the wall.

  ‘You know what these are?’

  ‘Fordie’s wife’s paintings,’ I said. ‘I think they’re pretty good myself.’

  ‘You always did have taste, Chris. That’s how we met, I seem to recall. These are Serena Tallises.’

  ‘That’s right. That was her name.’

  ‘They’re not worth a fortune, but they are worth something. One was sold at auction a while back for a few thousand. There’s more than ten of them here. Maybe your old friend Stamford Tewk left you a little more than you think.’