The Woman in Silk

by R. J. Gadney

  “Haven’t been there in years.”

  “Your mom used to have Ryker MacCullum drive her to Howlbeck. Right up to the end of her life she was begging him to take her there.”

  “Why?”

  “Show me your left wrist.”

  She drew back the sleeve of Hal’s coat above his wrist and glanced at the watch Sumiko had given him.

  “No white wristband? Your mother wore the white silk wristband. Hasn’t Teresa told you? She wears it too. And Francesca. This—” She showed him the band of white silk thread around her left wrist from which a small ornament dangled.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Our protection. Deliverance from Evil.”

  “Have you been talking to Francesca?”

  She laughed. “What d’you mean—‘Have you been talking to Francesca?’ Course I have. We’ve no secrets from each other.”

  He wondered what she’d make of Francesca’s latest secret.

  “This evil you’re talking about. To do with The Towers, I suppose?”

  “Wherever it finds you, Hal. The abyss. ‘And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death flees from them. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the abyss.’ It is written.”

  “What’s any of this to do with my mother’s visits to the quarries?”

  “She’d seen Howlbeck in a séance. She wanted to see it with her own eyes. Like face to face. She wanted to see the wrecked steel crane in the biggest Howlbeck opening. Beyond it there’s the entrance to the tunnel with several chambers leading down to interconnected tunnels …”

  She raised her wrist parallel to the Formica surface and allowed the ornament to dangle freely.

  “Interconnected. Others are underwater. Abandoned. We had three divers drown there a few years back. Your mother said she spoke to them. She wanted to get as close as she could to the corpses.”

  “Are the bodies still down there?”

  “Only one. The next of kin said he should be left there where he’d been happiest, doing what he loved best—diving below Earth’s surface. Underwater in the dark. In the end, well, there we are, it did for him, didn’t it? Drowning’s a terrible way to go. I’ve seen it too bloody often. Haunts my dreams. Lad lying in the water, mouth open, hyperventilating. No focus. Glassy eyes. You know … it’s fast. And asphyxiating victims don’t shout for help because they bloody can’t. That poor bloke at Howlbeck. Imagine what it must have been like for him.”

  “They should’ve got his body out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the humane thing to do.”

  “There was closure.”

  “Closure?” Hal said.

  “Closure—knowing he lives.”

  “But he doesn’t live,” he said. “The man’s dead.”

  “There was closure.”

  “Listen, closure is New Age shit. You accept death; you find ways of living with death. Closure is Death, Death is Death. The big N as in nada nil zero zippo Nothin’ = N = big 0e0. Nothing.”

  “Death is Life.”

  “Look, my friend—”

  “—Dee. Do you mind?” she said, adding very slowly, “I have a name, right? Do you mind not talking to me like I’m a man? Call me Dee.”

  “Dee—I hate to have to disagree with you. You close doors in rooms or wardrobes, a fridge or lavatory, Dee. You don’t close doors on loved ones.”

  “You don’t believe this, d’you?” she said. “You don’t think there’s an atom of truth in all this? Truth is painful.”

  “Not as painful as lies.”

  “Tell me—what d’you believe? Tell. What does Hal believe in?”

  He looked at her in silence.

  “God?” she said. “You do seem to be a man possessed of deep thoughts. What man isn’t, eh? I can see it in your eyes. You can see depth. Most good-looking men don’t, do they?”

  “I wouldn’t know. What makes you think I have deep thoughts?”

  “Because it’s what you think that matters. Whether you listen. Men hear; they less often listen unless it’s to the sound of their own voices.”

  “Is that what the Sri Sathya thing tells you?”

  “Haven’t seen him yet, have I? You weren’t listening to me. Look. Here—” She leaned her face to his. “Look into my eyes, Hal. What d’you see?”

  “Myself.”

  “No. You’re looking but you’re not seeing. You see into my soul.”

  “I see my reflection, Dee.”

  “The eyes are the gateway to the soul. You know who’s supposed to have said that?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Herman Melville. And you know what he came up with? Moby Dick. And I think this idea of there being ghosts at The Towers is bullshit. If I were you, I’d stay out of it.”

  “And you—I think, I think you’re frightened of what you don’t understand. There’s fear in your eyes. I can see it, Hal. And I have to tell you. You must accept it. Like Death. And don’t you be angry with me. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Listen, Dee. I’m frightened of what I do understand. I am not frightened of death. I am frightened of dying. I am frightened of a lonely incapacitated old age. I am shit-scared of losing my mind like my mother did and that happened too bloody long before her allotted time ran out.”

  “But you are not going to die, Hal.”

  “Oh, come off it. Listen. I’ve stared death in the face. Have you?”

  “I’ve told you. I’ve been as near death as I am to you here and now.”

  “Then we have that in common, don’t we? I’ve disabled bombs to prevent more death. Disabled IEDs. Have you heard about IEDs?”

  “Is that what you did in Afghanistan?”

  “Never mind what I did in Afghanistan.”

  “It’s a bloody silly war.”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “If you say so. I know what happens when people die. To pretend, like you people do, that we wander about after death like white phantoms is finally a waste of time—in your case, a waste of police time. Tell it to the Marines. And, you know what, Dee? To try and convince people of the existence of evil spirits, daemons, poltergeists, rampant disembodied perverts and all the rest is finally cruel, abusive, vicious—call it what you like. You’re preying on troubled minds like bent priests, highfalutin intellectuals—and I don’t like it. You understand? In fact, I despise and loathe it. If you believe in that ‘closure’ balls then close the door on it. Close it. In fact, slam the bloody thing.”

  She smiled, impervious to his outburst, and went on smiling.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “You look as if you’re about to issue a warning to me.”

  “You could be right. You’re talking to a police officer.”

  “You don’t say? Are you going to arrest me?”

  She rested her hand on his. “I might. If you don’t hand in that shotgun of yours I can bang you to rights. It’s up at The Towers. In the Gun Room, right? Along with a whole lot more guns from the Boer War?”

  “How would you know?”

  “It’s my bloody job to know. Section 2 Firearms under the 1968 Act as amended. Unless you want to keep it. But, between these four walls, Hal—bearing in mind what Dr. Mackle has to say about you—and Teresa and Francesca—remember this: ‘persons applying for licenses with recent, serious mental health issues will be refused a certificate. The penalty for possession of a prohibited firearm without a certificate is a maximum of ten years in prison and an uncapped fine. Unauthorized possession of firearms attracts a mandatory minimum of five years.’”

  “Then you can take the bloody thing.”

  “Know what? I think I might.” She got to her feet. “I have to go. I’ll pay. Remember what I’ve told you.”

  “Think I’ll forget it?”

  “No, Hal. Somehow—No. I don’t. A
nd you won’t forget all the rest I’ve said to you. Be a good boy now … go do your shopping.” She peered out of the windows. “See? It’s cold and dark outside. You watch out for the snow tonight. There’s going to be another blizzard. A bloody Christmas white-out.” She raised a finger to her lips. “You heard it here first. In Vernons Tea Rooms.”

  “And you remember that those people raising the spirits of the dead are evil. Criminal. Maybe even homicidal.”

  “You remember that you commit an offense if you make me falsely think there’s a real danger to the safety of a person or a property. You also commit an offense if you pretend you have relevant information in relation to a police inquiry. It’s governed by section 5 of the Criminal Law Act.”

  “Do me a favor, Dee. Take a look at abuse and harassment at The Towers. Prosecute the Living Dead.”

  “It’s takes a brave man to laugh at the Living Dead.”

  “Don’t you worry. My job’s with the Living.”

  “Same as mine—with a little difference. Happy Christmas.”

  “Same to you.”

  35

  It was in the bitter wind outside Vernons Tea Rooms, as he was unlocking the Range Rover, that he saw the warning light.

  He was still cursing Francesca for having confided in the police—presumably, he reasoned, she was the person who’d told MacQuillan about the shotgun—and he felt sickened by the thought that Francesca might soon boast to the police officer, even unintentionally, about what had happened between her sheets.

  But the warning originated from the glare of a truck’s powerful headlights. The truck was a nondescript moving van and its dazzle overpowered him so that for a few moments he stood, blinded and part paralyzed, like a rabbit hoping against hope that if he remained motionless he might be as invisible as the predator behind the vicious beam.

  In spite of the warmth afforded by his Ski Wear Store overcoat, he shivered uncontrollably: possessed by the powerful reality that he was remembering the future; places, events and faces, familiar and unfamiliar, that he had seen, but not yet.

  He stretched his gloved hands out, his arms apart, leaned against the Range Rover. Still, his irregular breaths collected on the air like a shroud.

  He heard his own voice as though from a gradually increasing distance: Buy cell phone. Collect Velamorphine as per the prescription from VJK Pharmacy.

  Where am I?

  I am standing here.

  True, he was standing there. But what he perceived did not originate from within him.

  His senses were constructing another realm with great rapidity. It was a sort of dream in which half-familiar people and places emerged illogically, yet with far greater vividness and indeed much more slowly than any he encountered in nocturnal dreaming.

  His sense of Time felt utterly perverse. For this was the future. He was, with strange certainty, remembering the future. His mind was telling him: this is not present time; this is not the past; it isn’t even the future.

  The sensation was extraordinarily powerful. I AM REMEMBERING THE FUTURE.

  —and there was another voice, his father’s: a whisper:

  Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle—

  Two beautiful women’s faces peered at him through veils of bloodied mist.

  *

  Sumiko was standing there in her white silk kimono. The other woman was also wearing white silk, not a kimono but a silken robe. Then the bloodied mist parted and another woman appeared.

  One of the women was struggling to take his pulse; someone else was trying to get a cannula into him to deliver an intravenous drip of saline fluid. He was telling them in a matter-of-fact way: “If I am about to die the odds are on my doing so within the next thirty to forty minutes.”

  The reality was that painted fingernails were drawing out his eyes, literally pulling them out, tugging at his irises, the smooth muscles of his pupils capable of contraction were being stretched from his face like elastic bands.

  It was a warning, an admonition, the alien pulling and yanking and tugging at his contorted face; malignancy invading his soul, sucking out his bloodstream, numbing nerve ends, making contact through his eyes with a supernatural and evil electricity: a mysterium tremendum, pumping into his heart, the very seat of conscience, the heart of fear: “you stiffened your neck, and hardened your heart from turning unto the Lord God …”

  He had heard this, without a shred of doubt; he’d heard it, not before, but in the future:

  And I have seen faces forming in flakes of snow and glittering on the mist in front of my eyes: I have seen this shroud of death.

  I have felt the claw of squirming fingers at my bleeding eyelids; then moist lips pressing against my ear and I hear its morbid whisper:

  “And behold, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stands a Lamb as it has been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying: Come. Come. Come and see.”

  Whose voice … other than—?

  Sada Abe’s

  —lost in the tumult of The Towers’ bell booming with neither rhyme nor reason.

  Sa-da-Sa-da-Sa-da: the booming thundered from The Towers across the desolation of the moorland—

  “And from far off, above the moors, at the place called Howlbeck, I heard an angel scream—”

  “We are come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, the place of the skull—They give me vinegar to drink mingled with gall—And when I taste thereof, I will not drink. I am drowning. My eyes will not, cannot focus.”

  For a moment Sumiko stood there, at his side, whispering beneath the booming of The Tower’s bell: “I believe in the unexpected … fear of fear is devouring us.”

  They said together: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

  RUN!

  The frantic urge overtook him.

  RUN—to find the shotgun—to plead with Sumiko to run for dear life—

  I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

  … Sumiko please—be very careful— the center isn’t holding … Chaos engulfs the world—He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  … The ceremony of innocence is burned …

  He descended to the dead—

  And rose again—

  —with the eyes in the Vernon Tea Rooms on him. The eyes of the cashier, the pair of cooks, the washer-up and two elderly women: one clutching a green-eyed cat to her breasts; the other saying: “He’s isn’t dead.”

  He ascended into Heaven,

  and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

  He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

  —eyes of ordinary folk who’d seen a man stumble from the car park and collapse head first in the doorway, jamming open the swing doors, letting in the rush of cold, freezing them with unseasonal dread.

  It’s me, not them, who has sure and certain reason to dread the twisted future.

  I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

  “Since we departed Nahr-e Saraj you’ve bloody died twice.” I don’t think so. I mean, we’d been nowhere near Nahr-e Saraj. “We won’t let you die a third time.”

  And for the third time you rose from the dead—

  They lifted him onto a plastic chair and he sat protesting that he was all right. “It’s okay. I’m dehydrated. Thank you for the water. I’m much better.”

  “We’ve called an ambulance,” the cashier said.

  “Please ring them and cancel it.”

  “Should you be driving in your condition
?” someone asked. “There’s more snow coming. The ice is terrible.”

  “I know,” he said, getting up from the chair and straightening his clothes. “I’m used to it.”

  They looked at him pityingly and gave a sort of collective shrug of bafflement. “You should be careful,” said the woman, trying to kiss the cat on the mouth. “You never know when something nasty’s going to overtake you, Puss-Puss, do you—do you, Puss-Puss?” Puss-Puss dived for the floor.

  “You’re very right. Thank you for the advice. And thank all of you for helping. Yes. Happy Christmas. Just a dizzy spell.”

  “Happy Christmas,” they said unhappily.

  He left the tea rooms shutting his ears to Robbie Williams’s “Misunderstood.”

  36

  He bought the replacement cell phone, loaded the Range Rover with groceries, wines and spirits; then set off to the alleyway where VJK Pharmacy had its small premises.

  Here he would collect the Velamorphine Teresa had ordered on his behalf. Dr. Mackle had provided a repeat prescription and Dr. Mackle was a VJK Pharmacy regular so it was simply a matter of collecting his drugs and leaving. Easy.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Khan are very appreciative of Sister Vale’s custom,” said the pharmacist’s assistant. “There’s a Christmas bag here for her. A gift for Sister Vale and her daughter.”

  She lifted a VJK Pharmacy carrier bag tied with Christmas ribbon across the counter. “Sister Vale and her daughter like Lancôme’s Miracle, don’t they? Miracle. Scent for the sophisticated modern woman,” she read from the carton. “A mix of freesia, lychee, magnolia and jasmine. And there’s a little something Sister Vale asked Mr. Khan to obtain.”

  Hal looked inside the carrier bag.

  The “little something” was in a padded envelope sent AANGETEKEND (registered mail) from Amsterdam.

  “This is very kind of you.”