by Kim Newman
‘This doesn’t sound very Victorian.’
‘It wasn’t all hard work, happy families and muscular morals. The age of consent was twelve or thirteen. Old newspapers are full of pieces like that. The mystery is why the man who put the scrapbook together thought it was worth clipping this particular one.’
Jenny looked back at the date in the front of the book. ‘1924. Mary Elizabeth would have been grown up. Perhaps he married her.’
‘Oh no. Edwin Winthrop was otherwise engaged.’
The tenor of the items in the scrapbook changed. The headlines became unusual by the standards of any age. ‘Miraculous Apparitions’, ‘Psychical Researchers Investigate’, ‘Poltergeist Phenomena on Haunted Hillside’.
‘What’s this?’ Jenny asked.
‘Ghost stories, I think. The man who lived here in the 1920s was interested in psychic phenomena. He wrote books about ghost hunting and local folklore.’
“‘Burning Man Sighted in Somerset”? Sounds like the Sunday Sport.’
All this had been in the library, undisturbed, long before the founding of the Agapemone; long before, even, the birth of Anthony Jago. Susan shivered like the damn fool in a ghost story who, poring over manuscripts recounting obscure and bygone atrocities, feels the lengthy, many-jointed fingers of the unquiet dead reaching out for her rapidly beating heart.
‘Alder is a very haunted village, Jenny. Whatever is happening here has been happening for over a hundred years.’
Jenny chewed her knuckle and turned a creaking page. A newspaper article, folded in on itself because it was too large to fit the book, flopped open.
‘And something is happening, isn’t it?’
Susan nodded.
‘Beloved knows, doesn’t He?’
Careful, Susan. Whatever else this girl is, she’s also a Sister of the Agapemone. Jago, or Brother Mick, could have Taine break your neck.
‘Beloved will tell what He knows in time, Sister. I’m just clearing the way for His revelation.’
Deep in the house, something vast stirred. Susan tried to blot it out of her consciousness by concentrating, visualizing the newsprint of the clipping Jenny was looking at. The article was a long interview, dated ‘13-11-87’, with a Dr Joseph Skilton who, in a faded photograph, was displaying a bandage-mittened hand like a rabbit paw. The thing still moved. She felt the ripples. A swallow of cold tea did not help. Fear stabbed her. This could be an attack. She held her breath, shut her eyes, pressed her knees tightly together, and laid her hands on the table. Inside her head, she put up shutters, trying to conquer the fear. She was a minute creature of the deeps, caught up in the current as an unimaginably huge whale swims by, blind but full of purpose. With relief, she gathered it wasn’t hostile specifically to her. But that didn’t make it any less dangerous.
Then, the giant was gone.
‘Are you all right, Susan?’
‘Just more headache, I’m afraid.’
‘You should get that seen to. Mum gets migraines. She says they’re crippling. Who did you say collected these?’
‘Edwin Winthrop. The son of the man who hanged his mistress’s husband. He wrote books too, mostly in collaboration with his wife, Catriona Kaye. Well, actually, I think they weren’t married. That would have been unconventional then.’
Susan wondered again about Edwin, who had apparently trod the same scholarly path back in the 1920s. He had come out of the First World War with some funny ideas and an even funnier set of associates. She hoped to find more of his books in the still-unopened Winthrop trunks upstairs. They were her link to the past.
‘Here, this is him.’ Susan stood, and turned the pages of the scrapbook. In the photograph, Edwin, dapper and Gatsbyish in evening dress, was accompanied by two women. A veiled beauty with black feathers and what had then been an unfashionably deep décolleté, and a smiling girl in a light dress with bobbed hair and a tiny hat.
‘The dark woman is Irena Dubrovna. Her real name was probably Irene Dobson. She was a medium. I imagine she was a con artist and what they called “an adventuress”. But she had something, a Talent. She was good at what she did. Very theatrical. She knew Arthur Conan Doyle.’
‘The Sherlock Holmes man?’
‘Yes, he was interested in spiritualism. He had a row with Winthrop, actually. Edwin called him a “credulous fool” for believing in fairies.’
‘And the other woman?’
‘That’s Catriona. Catriona Kaye.’
‘She was pretty.’
‘She probably still is. Jago—Beloved—bought this place from her. She inherited it from Edwin. I’ve not heard of her dying, so I assume she’s still about, revising her old books or whatever. She wrote these.’ Susan indicated a pile: Where Women Go Wrong, Ghost Stories of the West Country, and, famously, An Introduction to Free Love. They had strange enthusiasms, Edwin and Catriona.’
The Winthrop-Kaye book collection was much more arcane than the psychedelia and charlatanism favoured by the current occupants of their house. They had Crowley in the original editions, also Harry Price, Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, Madame Helena Blavatsky. A glance at The House of the Hidden Light, which she had never heard of, by Machen and Waite, revealed a personal dedication from Machen, ‘To Edwin and Catriona, for Shedding Much Light’.
Really, Susan ought to feel at home. After all these years of anonymity, she could be Witch Susan again.
‘Why are you looking all this old stuff out?’
Susan rehearsed her excuse. ‘Beloved chose Alder as the site of His community. It wasn’t a random decision. This is a place of power. He wants to make us all aware of that. Brother Mick has asked me to prepare a dossier on local hauntings, psychic phenomena, spiritual things…’
‘But what have ghosts got to do with Beloved?’
‘Look again at the burning-man pages, Jenny.’
The girl flipped back.
‘It’s a local story. Most of these clippings are from the 1880s, but Winthrop found other records, going back earlier. Alder has its ghosts. But the burning-man isn’t usually classed as one.’
Jenny found a line drawing, an artist’s impression based on Dr Skilton’s testimony. A beautiful man in a loincloth stood in flame, a circle of fire around his head, crudely sketched wings spreading behind him.
‘He was supposed to be an Angel.’
For a moment, Susan thought she sensed a trace of recognition in the girl’s mind.
‘Not just any ghost, Jenny. A Holy Ghost.’
5
He had typed ‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction by Paul Forrestier’ at the top of too many sheets of A4. He used to put ‘fin-de-siècle’ rather than ‘turn-of-the-century’, but now rejected that as a frenchified frill. Five variant opening paragraphs and more than forty complete or incomplete first sentences on folded pages were now in use as bookmarks. Large chunks of the thesis were written, waiting to be cannibalized from the last three years’ worth of essays. He just needed to join them up and smooth over the cracks. But there were always ways of putting off real work: books to be read and reread and annotated; the shop to be looked after when Hazel was too busy; telephone calls to be made to parents and friends; the desk to be kept tidy and usable; Hazel to be lived with, however remotely…
The sun ground down, making the blank page in the IBM painfully bright even through shades. Hazel had started a tan in Brighton, and sunbathed in her lunch break and after work. He traced her bikini marks in bed. He hadn’t brought sunglasses, and the only pair he could find in the house were antique mirror goggles that made him look like the Man with X-Ray Eyes. Hazel said they were creepy, but he got used to them. He thought she thought he used them to hide what he was thinking.
Yesterday, he had done real work. Vaulting over his sticky opening, he whipped the conclusion into shape. Discussing Arthur Machen’s The Terror and Haggard’s When the World Shook in the light of the religious revival that came during the Great War, he poin
ted out that post-1914 fictions return the responsibility for the end of the world to supernatural forces. His central argument was that after Darwinism, writers of scientific romances saw the apocalypse as a result of evolutionary decay (The Time Machine), virulent diseases (Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, London’s The Scarlet Plague), high-tech weaponry and global war (War in the Air, Shiel’s The Yellow Danger), passing comets or cosmic phenomena (Flammarion’s La Fin du Monde, Doyle’s The Poison Belt), invading Martians, or other natural or man-made forces. But while the Age of Doubt was going at full sceptical blast, there were still plenty of religious maniacs running about between 1875 and 1900 proclaiming the End of All Things. It always happens as centuries close. He could guarantee that before 2001 there would be a lot of Armageddon nuts about. If, as it sometimes seemed, he got The Secular Apocalypse out around the end of the century, he would be able to cash in on the furore.
‘At most, terrestrial man fancied there might be other men on Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves, and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise,’ Paul read again, consulting his much pencilled-in War of the Worlds paperback, with the album-cover artwork. ‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’ Wells was the key, and no matter how many intriguingly obscure and unread contemporaries—Garrett P. Serviss, Grant Allen, Matthew Phipps Shiel—he exhumed, he still found himself drawn back to Herbert George. His short-sleeved shirt sweated through, he could not help but think he was living in the days of the comet.
Hazel was struggling with the clay, more often than not mashing her finished work back into a lump and starting all over again. The board on the lawn was barely half-covered with drying bottles. She had been briefly enthused by the visit of the couple from the Agapemone, but now she was closed like a flower that shows itself only to the noonday sun.
They had met on Easter Sunday, at the Brian-Alex-Eugene party, for which they’d coopted a large garden from a lecturer. The first weekend of the big heat. Sally and her new boyfriend had made an entrance, dressed like Betty Boop and Tin-Tin. Paul remembered people not much older than him, even a few of his university contemporaries, were being dragged around by small children, murderously intent on ferreting out hidden chocolate eggs. Vaguely fed up, he noticed Hazel, with a crying little girl who hadn’t found a single egg, and rescued her by pointing to a foil-wrapped sweetie lodged in a cracked plant pot. The child belonged to one of her tutors, and she’d been given charge of her. Hazel was doing ceramics part-time at the polytechnic. She wore a lavenderish dress that left her legs bare, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. They talked, or were together, for most of the rest of the afternoon. Of course, he noticed she was a pretty girl. She was also, apart from little Amanda, unattached. They kissed goodbye twice. The first time was politely passionless, at about six thirty. Then they found themselves not parting after all. A parent claimed Amanda, but suggested Hazel stay on for the slimmed-down evening version of the party. Brian found a piano and started being Hoagy Carmichael, while Eugene impersonated the Battle of Britain with vocal sound effects and Alex sang cricket statistics to hymn tunes. Hazel didn’t stay long—her parents lived in Hove, she was expected for a meal—but a difference was made. They exchanged telephone numbers. The second kiss was different, with a hint of moving tongue. She left him something to think about.
Under a fortress of books, the remote phone buzzed. Paul sorted through the desk until he found the receiver.
‘Station Six Sahara,’ he answered, a giggle at the other end identifying the caller. ‘Hi, Patch.’
‘Yo, Paul.’
‘Haze,’ he shouted, ‘it’s your sister.’
Hazel, having just let another bottle pass inspection, straightened up from the board and said, ‘I’ll just wash my hands.’
Paul told Patch—Patricia—Hazel was on her way, and they chatted. Patch was the only other human being in the large Chapelet family. In the bad moments, he even wondered whether he had picked the right sister. Younger than Hazel by a year, she’d gone straight from school into a junior admin post at the Arts Centre, and gained a power base as their head of publicity and promotions. Since the AC was on campus, she sometimes joined Paul for lunch in term-time. He wondered if Hazel were jealous of her sister. In her position he thought he might be, but the girls seemed to have a good relationship.
‘Work going well?’ Patch asked.
‘Pass.’
‘How’s married life?’
‘Um,’ he thought aloud, ‘here’s Hazel now.’
He heard Patch laugh as he handed over the mobile phone. Patch was sharp.
Hazel wandered off into a corner of the garden, by the kiln shed, and talked quietly into the phone. Patch would not have called in the daytime, interrupting work, unless there was some problem.
The week after the party, he had nearly phoned Hazel several times but couldn’t think of a casual enough excuse for getting in touch. In the end, she had called him, inviting him to a private view at the crafts shop where she worked half the week. There, he had been introduced to her elderly parents. Her father took an instant dislike to him which had since grown. Hazel only had three small pots among the new work on display, but he bought one.
It was on the desk now, pens and pencils in it. She had since told him that her tutor helped with the glaze, but he still thought it one of her best pieces. At the end of the evening, before she went off with her family, they kissed seriously…
‘Come on, Patch,’ Hazel said, louder than her normal level, ‘you know what Dad’s like!’
…and eventually, after meals and movies and weekend afternoons, they were in bed in his flat with nothing else to do but make love. It was rather tentative at first, but became more rewarding as spring faded into summer and the flowers dried up and died. Apart from a brief getting-it-out-of-the-way talk about contraception, they had not discussed their sex life much. Recently, it hadn’t been much to talk about.
Hazel was laughing now, and had come out of her corner.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking at the sickly garden, ‘it’s lovely here.’
When they had finished talking, Hazel gave him back the phone, compressing the aerial with a deft push.
‘Well?’
Hazel bit her lip. ‘It’s Dad again, you know…’
‘The same thing?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I don’t see what the fuss is. Patch left home years ago.’
‘Patch is Patch, I’m not. She says Dad says Mum’s having angina twinges.’
‘And you’re to rush to the bedside?’
Hazel shrugged. ‘Patch didn’t say Dad said that.’
‘Of course not.’
‘You shouldn’t take against Dad, Paul. He’s only concerned.’
Hazel walked back to the studio, and Paul looked up the hill at the trees beyond the property. Sunlight reflected on something, and he half imagined an enemy, spying.
6
As soon as his brother said, ‘I’d shag her if she had a paper bag over her head’, Teddy knew he was going to get bashed. As certain as night follows day and flies swarm on cowshit. There was nothing he could do about it. Whenever Terry said something stupid, a clever answer popped into Teddy’s head and he had to let it out. If he had to be thumped a certain number of times in his life, this was as good a way as any to use them up.
‘I reckon,’ Teddy began, pausing to catch his brother’s attention, ‘I reckon youm’d have more luck with girls if youm wore the paper bag.’
There was a pause as it sank in. Terry always took a few seconds more than a normal person to get the funny. Teddy listened to flies buzz, and waited for the thump. Terry looked at him, nearly cross-eyed, and, quick as a snake once he had worked it out, leaned over to get him. Teddy took the casual but knuckly backhander on the ear. It hurt, but it could have been worse. If they wer
e out with Terry’s mates and Teddy showed him up, his brother used closed fists. After sixteen years of sharing a room, Teddy was an expert on what his brother would do if provoked. It had taken him a long time to realize not everybody acted like a caveman.
‘You’m stupid!’
Whenever Teddy proved he was cleverer than his brother, Terry said he was stupid. Teddy sometimes reckoned he was stupid; for not keeping his mouth shut. But it was a waste not to use a funny when one came along.
Her name was Hazel, and Teddy couldn’t see anything wrong with her face. Especially not from three hundred yards away, using a pair of binoculars that didn’t really work. Terry wanted women to look like the glossy tarts in the magazines under his bed.
They had been watching her from the top of Gosmore Farm orchard for over a week now. Neither she nor her boyfriend had climbed that far up the hill, so they hadn’t been found out. So far. They would be in the end. If Terry was in it, they always got caught. That was another of the laws of nature. When they were seven and ten, Terry had masterminded the theft of three giantsized bottles of Coca-Cola from the garage shop. Jenny Steyning’s dad had caught them, and their own dad had taken their shorts and underpants down in front of everyone at the garage (in front of Jenny, Teddy remembered with a flush of embarrassment even after ten years) and taken his belt to their backsides. Since then, Terry had been caught for almost everything: bunking off school, knocking off records from the market in Bridgwater, snogging superhag Sharon Coram, smashing windows at the back of the village hall.
They were supposed to be out after rabbits, but even trigger-happy Terry hadn’t fired a shot in days. Hunting was bad this year, like everything to do with the land. It was the heat. The undergrowth was yellow and rotting. The rabbits must all have had their brains fried, or tunnelled to Iceland. At first, the summer had been great: being outside, getting a tan, earning an extra tenner picking plums. Now, it was a pain. Teddy’s back itched where his sunburn peeled. There was nothing to do. At least, not until the festival.
