by Kim Newman
There wasn’t a gate proper, but there was a gap in the hedge with the slatted top of a packing case wired into it. She undid the wire and pushed the wooden square aside, then refastened it behind her.
The day before Paul was back, she had started to bleed. For the only time in her life, she was jubilant to get her period. No baby. However, it had still been a reprieve rather than a not-guilty verdict. She’d seen the future, a future, and not liked it.
Paul saw her. She waved again. He stood, and waited for her to come down. The slope was steep and the basket heavy, so she had to be careful.
‘Plums,’ she said to him, tilting the basket to show off the fleshy yellow fruit. ‘It’s a good year for plums.’
Paul looked nervy, a little annoyed. She would have missed lunch. Paul was as keen on routine as her ex-Navy dad, and always wanted things on time or not at all.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked, speaking evenly, ready for the debriefing. ‘You didn’t say when you left.’
‘It was just a walk.’
‘What about your work?’
‘I was up all night. And I’ll be unpacking the kiln after teatime. I deserve a morning off. I’ve more than made up the time. Have a plum.’
She picked one out, and took a bite. Juice squirted through her fingers. She giggled, chewing the sweet meat, and put the basket on his desk. He took a plum too, and bit it. He spat out a mouthful on the ground. The half-plum in his hand was mostly brown.
‘This is rotten.’
‘There’s always one. You should look before you eat.’ He tried to lick the taste off his teeth. She finished her plum, and dropped the stone into a used cup on his desk.
‘Tea?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just had some, thanks.’
Hazel noticed the jam-jar wasp trap she had put on the low stone wall of the verandah earlier in the week was full. Yellow-black corpses clogged the inch of greasy water in the bottom. There was a nest nearby. The killing jar wasn’t making much of a dent in the local insect population, but there still ought to be a queue at the doorway to Wasp Heaven. Paul had made a joke about insect angels sharing cloud space with California surfies, Bible-thumping bigots and US presidents, and suggested they should dedicate a special Hazel Chapelet wing. His jokes were all like that, long and complicated and hardly worth the effort.
‘Tell me about your walk,’ he said, obviously digging.
She wasn’t stopped. ‘Later, Paul. I want to wash. I’m all sticky.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some tea. Do you want any lunch? I can nuke the rest of the spaghetti in the microwave.’
‘I’ve eaten, thanks,’ she said, walking towards the house, cutting short further questioning.
He followed her into the house, and took a detour into the kitchen while she went upstairs to the bathroom. She ran the cold tap on to a flannel and wiped her face. Then she did her arms and legs. Some of her bites were inflamed, but the stinging was going away. She must have developed immunity. She had a pee, and took a brush to her tangled hair. It was getting long. Back in Brighton, she might have it styled shorter, like Patch’s, but in the meantime, she’d better wear a headband. It kept falling into her work while she was throwing. She changed her shorts and shirt for a fresh-smelling loose dress.
She went out to the verandah, feeling cleaner, and Paul brought a teapot and some mugs. The teapot was Mike Bleach’s, but the mugs were hers. They’d been using them all week, but Paul hadn’t noticed. She decided to have a cup of tea after all. Paul made it too weak as usual, but she didn’t complain. He kissed her. He was good at that. He didn’t kiss like anyone else she’d gone out with (the list was into double figures by now) and she was always surprised at the variety he brought to basic tongue-wrestling. They sat in basket chairs, shaded from the sun. She drank her tea.
‘Well?’ he said after a while.
‘Well what?’
‘Your walk. Where did you go?’
She smiled and leaned back. ‘A long way. Out over the moors, up through the woods. It’s lovely up on the hill. You can see for ages. There are kids camped up there, a bit beyond our boundary, in a clearing.’
‘I know. Someone told me. Were they the people who gave you lunch?’
‘No. There was someone asleep in a van, but no one else about. They’ve got tents set up, and there was an ashy campfire place.’
‘Silly buggers. They’re warning about forest fires on the radio.’ He couldn’t hold out any longer. ‘Where did you eat?’
‘I went round to see Wendy and ask some more about the festival.’
‘You went to the Agapemone?’
‘It’s a beautiful old house, Paul. Like something from an Agatha Christie book, and—’
‘Hazel,’ he said, ‘you should be careful with those people. You know, they’re not…’
He was reacting just as she’d known he would. She had a spark of anger. ‘Come on, Paul, they’re really nice.’
‘It’s not that.’
The whine was creeping into his voice, the I’m-cleverer-than-you-so-why-don’t-you-listen? whine. On the verge of one of their almost-rows, Hazel didn’t want to go further. But there was no avoiding it.
‘What is it then, clever-clogs?’
‘You know what these cults are like. The Moonies…’
‘You think I’ve been brainwashed, then?’
‘No, but… but you shouldn’t get too involved. They’re very clever at what they do. They’ve got all kinds of techniques. Some of their methods are sophisticated, very nasty.’
‘I’m not about to join up or anything. I’m not religious. I hardly think they’re going to slip me the Queen’s shilling in a basket of plums’
‘I don’t think they want to go to the bother of kidnapping you—’
‘Thank you very much, I’m sure!’
‘That’s not what they want, Hazel. It’s this festival.’
She was angry now. ‘That’s got nothing to do with the churchy stuff.’
‘Hasn’t it? Some people get very rich being the new Messiah. It’s big business, like TV evangelists in America. God doesn’t have anything to do with it. But the festival isn’t just there to raise cash. It’s supposed to make you forget what the Agapemone is really about. It’s to make Jago respectable. And by associating yourself with it, you’re associating yourself with him.’
As he was talking, she saw another wasp going headfirst to its doom in her trap. It landed on the tracing paper fixed to the jam jar with a rubber band, and poked its head at one of the holes she’d made with a pencil. The head went through, and the wings, and the whole body.
‘So you think I shouldn’t have a table at the festival.’
‘You ought to be bloody careful.’
‘It’s not like you think, Paul. There aren’t any hooded devil monks or slaves in chains. They’re just people who live together in an old house. They’re no different from your friends in the Montpelier squat.’
‘Yeah, well, I never said Brian, Alex and Eugene were normal, Haze.’ Inside the jar, the wasp had caught on and was buzzing furiously against the smeared glass. ‘So, what was it like, then?’ He couldn’t help being curious, she noticed. ‘Did you see Jago?’
‘No. He stays in his room, apparently. He’s very busy. I helped pick plums, and they let me keep a basket—’
‘The rotten ones.’
‘…to bring home. Wendy and Derek were there, and some others. Young people, mostly. And just ordinary. They didn’t talk about religion all the time. They told jokes. Paul, they were happy. There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘Yeah, well, happiness can’t buy you money.’
‘I’ll bet you got that from a film.’ A lot of things he said he did. ‘There was a girl called Marie-Laure. She was a bit funny, looked at the ground all the time. And there’s Mick, who used to be a rich poet.’
‘Until he gave it all away to the rev, I suppose?’
‘He didn’t say, but he
did say he was happier now, sharing with others. That doesn’t sound sinister, does it?’
‘Well… I suppose they all smiled a lot.’
‘What’s wrong with smiling?’
‘You have to do it with your eyes as well as your lips. You have to mean it. You have to have the choice not to, or it doesn’t count.’
‘You’re just being nasty because I’m interested.’
‘Okay, Haze, you know what you’re doing. But be careful. Never trust anyone who claims to be on speaking terms with God, especially if they’ve got collecting tins. I love you, you know that, and I’m not just saying this to whip up an argument. I hate pointless arguments, you know that too. Just be careful.’
She knew what he would say next, felt ground crumbling under her, and had to be ready to put up a defence. ‘The money? You’re not giving them anything from your sales at the festival?’
She looked down at her tea, reading her fortune in the dregs. ‘No, I pay a flat fee for the table.’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty pounds a day.’
‘That’s a hundred pounds for the whole week!’
‘There’s a reduction.’
‘Still…’
‘It’s reasonable, Paul. I might sell out.’
‘Watch out. I don’t want you taken advantage of.’
‘By anyone else, you mean.’
‘That’s not fair.’
The wasp gave in and died. Hazel could chalk up another victim. She left her cup on the freezer and walked away from the verandah, back to the pottery. In the trap, nothing moved.
9
Alone in the kitchen, Susan filled a kettle and set it on the cooker. She turned on the gas and pressed the ignition. The ring hissed, but no flame appeared. She tried again. Nothing. The device always was untrustworthy. Rather than root through drawers for matches, she lifted the kettle and held her right forefinger a few inches from the escaping gas. She thought, and a spark danced from her fingernail. The gas caught with a rush, and she pulled back her hand swiftly. Setting the kettle on the ring, she felt a tiny satisfaction. Using her Talent in small, useful ways made her feel harmless and empowered.
There was enough earth and stone between her and Jago to damp the interference. Susan knew she was only here, probably only alive, because Sir Kenneth Smart, the minister with responsibility, saw ‘defence applications’. During the two minutes of the Gulf War, he had asked David to run a scenario whereby a Talent could be used invisibly to stop the heart of an unnamed subject whose physical profile happened to match exactly that of Saddam Hussein. David dithered until the crisis passed, his file presumably picking up a black asterisk. At the time, Alastair Garnett, the minister’s liaison with IPSIT, was around the complex more often, assessing the project’s ten-year performance. David, she knew, was worried almost as much by all this as he was by knowing Jago was still out there.
She had been introduced to Sir Kenneth at various functions, but the constantly updated file on her relayed to him through Garnett was watered down, making her seem little more than a human toy, a barometer that sometimes produced results. Finally, she’d been given this position almost as much as a way of keeping her out of Smart’s clutches—David thought he wanted to slap a uniform on her and train her to dismantle missiles in midair—as of getting near Jago.
Inside IPSIT, Jago was a legend, file restricted to all but the Big Three. Susan heard rumours from the other Talents that Anthony Jago was gifted to such a degree that he couldn’t even be classed as human. The man, she’d been given to understand, was something between a god and a monster. The snakes had Lytton with the Agapemone almost from the first, and pored over his reports. From Sir Kenneth’s point of view, Jago was like the chemical weapons Britain had stockpiled. There was no point in making even tentative steps towards deploying him until he could be controlled; in the meantime he was watched but generally left alone.
It was David who decided Susan should be assigned to Jago. He turned her over to the snakes for a few months of training. They had taken her past, with its gaps and aimless drifts, and woven a close-fitting snake-skin, characterizing her as a restless neurotic, given to alternative religions. She was disturbed at how little they had to make up to make her convincing as a potential Sister of the Agapemone. Now, she often measured herself against Wendy Aitken or Jenny Steyning, asking herself how she was different from them, and how she was the same.
She found loose tea in a tin and snagged a teapot with a mentacle, pulling it down from a shelf she couldn’t reach with her hands without using a stepladder.
In the early days, Jago made a few conversions that did not completely take. Most of those would-be disciples were institutionalized or dead, but one or two had been deprogrammed and were staggering towards normality. Susan took part in debriefings, and learned what to expect within the walls of the Agapemone. She wasn’t shocked, although the Great Manifestation sounded like a service she wouldn’t be keen on participating in. With due consideration, the snakes tailored her skin to characterize her as a joiner and a loner, hoping she could get into the community but remain isolated within it, free to report back, safe from the more obvious dangers.
Finally, she’d been allowed to examine the Jago file. David talked her through it. ‘Born London, 1942. Not a very comfortable place and time. Both parents dead when he was an infant; raised by his grandmother, an elderly, superstitious woman. Schools, university, church activities, various unspectacular livings. A few odd little scandals. Likes the ladies, I suspect. A pretty standard ecclesiastical CV, I’m told.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she’d blurted, finding the newspaper clippings.
‘Quite,’ said David. ‘Twenty-eight people dead. A few “accidents”, four murders, the rest suicide. The incidents took place between March and April 1975, within an area of no more than a few square miles.’
‘Inner-city decay?’ she ventured.
‘This was a prosperous suburb. They all went to his church. They were his parishioners. And they died. They weren’t manic-depressive pensioners on the dole, they were middle-class, mostly middle-aged, mostly secure. The man who strangled his sister-in-law was an alderman and on the board of Leeds United. No history of mental problems or violence. He killed her because they were waiting for his wife to come home and she wanted to watch the gardening on BBC2 while he was in the middle of Morecambe and Wise on BBC1. They were all like that: one minute, Mr or Mrs Boring, the next Jack the Ripper, Molly the Maniac. Until we came across them, the deaths were down as a blip on the statistics. “Something in the water” was the local scuttlebutt.’
‘You think it was projection?’
‘Right, Susan. Consider the report from his parish council. It’s obvious that from March through April 1975, he was going through a crisis of faith, I suppose you’d call it. The only way he could cope was to spread the load, dissipate some of his agony through the pulpit. The text of one of his sermons is in the file. It’s pretty cracked. The earth breaking open to disgorge clouds of wasps. Another man might have reached for paracetamol, but he had options not open to another man. If you want some light reading, there’s a sheaf of suicide notes in there. Mostly God-told-me-tos, but some are peculiarly elaborate. It’s not just Goodbye, cruel world. There’s visionary stuff. It compares interestingly with the sermons. We’ve always known a Talent like this could come along.’
She’d been impressed, and suddenly understood why David went along with Garnett’s D-notices and cover stories. Jago could bring bad publicity for the field. The last thing they needed were fearless vampire killers hunting out Talents.
‘We first turned him up as we turned you up, random applications of Rhine tests to students. He was told he was a Talent, but that’s not the interpretation he’s chosen. He has followers. Disciples. It’s well within his power to perform what might easily be classed as miracles. What do you think he thinks he is?’
The kettle whistled, and she poured boiling water into the
teapot. She was shaking, remembering the cold seriousness David had radiated.
From somewhere, Garnett found Janet Speke, a fellow traveller with the Agapemone who was, after a traumatic childhood and a nightmare marriage, gradually jumping through the hoops that would turn her into Sister Janet. She was living in Achelzoy, attending services at the Agapemone, her petition for initiation obviously under consideration. Garnett arranged for her to be Janet’s upstairs neighbour and Susan did the rest. It was guilt-makingly easy to get close to the woman, and, through her, to pick up a crash course in the beliefs of Anthony William Jago. She was introduced to Mick Barlowe, who acted like Jago’s appointed representative on Earth, and attended some of Jago’s services, feeling power welling as he spoke. She’d met other Talents, but Jago was giant, a monster.
Janet was guaranteed a place at the Agapemone by virtue of her sincere belief in the Beloved Presence. Susan could only counterfeit so much, and Garnett thought it best she not appear too fanatical. To get even with her Sister, Susan had to have something else to bulk out her obviously shadowy faith. That was simple. Susan slipped to Janet, who most certainly revealed to Mick, that she’d recently realized a substantial sum through the sale of her dead parents’ house. The Agapemone practised sharing of communal property, so her savings were even more welcome than she was.
Sister Janet was selected by Beloved for a Great Manifestation, and Susan wondered gratefully why the honour had passed her by. How far could Beloved see through her? He must be able to read her to some extent, although he always gave the impression he was so close to Heaven that earthly matters were miles beneath him. Jago never took an interest in Susan, not in the way he took an interest in some of the other Sisters. Of course she was relieved, but at some level his inattention peeved her. What did the others have that she did not? She liked to believe the factor the Sister-Loves shared was a lack, not a quality. Jago towered above his devotees, but of all the Brethren only Susan could measure herself against him. He saw her, if at all, as furniture or an ornament, never speaking directly to her. Her dilettante researches into the house’s store of books and papers were tolerated so blithely that Susan assumed word must have come down from on high to let her get on with it. Despite everything, she knew Jago was watching her.
