Jago

by Kim Newman

  ‘For once, it’s not Terry’s fault,’ James said.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Susan, nodding sharply towards the Manor House.

  ‘Jago,’ Teddy said.

  Susan gave him a thumbs-up sign and ticked in the air. ‘Right.’

  ‘You have a problem,’ James said. ‘You were there with me, so you know what happened. Imagine how your parents, your friends, would react if you told them. Gary Chilcot would have them laughing at you for years.’

  He was right. This morning, Teddy hadn’t told his parents anything. They’d been talking about the fire at the Pottery, and Old Man Maskell laying Dad off, and Terry staying out all night doing Lord knows what. There had been no way to tell them anything.

  ‘This isn’t your problem, Teddy,’ said Susan.

  ‘She’s right. We have to stay. It’s our duty, and we’re stupid about things like that. But you’ve got a choice.’

  ‘What you talkin’ ’bout?’

  He saw seriousness in their faces. James was usually confident, in command. Now he was confused. His hair was awry, and Teddy saw he had a tiny bald seam through his scalp. The woman was calmer, but she was still gripping her mug with both hands to stop shaking, the tea almost invisibly wobbling.

  ‘Leave,’ said James. ‘Just walk away from it. Go to Bridgwater or Taunton, get on a train, go on holiday. You’ll know when it’s safe to come back. It’ll be on the news. Go to relatives, friends. Get a job in Butlin’s, beg in the streets, anything. You want money? Here…’ James went through his wallet, and dug up four or five fifties and some lesser notes and change. He slapped the money on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Take it,’ James said.

  ‘Get Out of Jail Free,’ said Susan.

  ‘But…’

  James was briefly angry. ‘Teddy, get out now!’

  ‘Yes,’ Teddy said, ‘thank you, goodbye…’

  He scooped up the money and jammed it into his jeans pocket.

  ‘Don’t go home. Walk away with what you’re wearing. It’s safer.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, James.’

  He backed out of the Gate House, letting the door swing shut in his face. The Manor House stood on its hill, silently humming. Even more than last night, Teddy was scared. James and Susan had been scared, and they knew what to be afraid of. That was enough to be terrifying.

  There were a lot of people around, for the festival. From a field, Derek waved to him. He was directing customers towards car parks and camping sites.

  Teddy shoved his hand into his pocket, burying James’s money deeper. It was hot as yesterday, but his bare arms pricked with goose pimples. He walked away from the Agapemone trying not to run, an escaped prisoner strolling past a police station, determined not to give himself away with a panicky dash. He made his way steadily down the hill, against the tide of cars and hikers. He was getting out before the fun started, whatever the fun was. He was leaving James and Susan, leaving his parents, leaving Terry, leaving everyone. Whatever was happening, he wouldn’t be around for the rest of it. He shot a sneaky backwards look at the Agapemone, wondering if Jenny were still inside. He was leaving her, too. It was silly to think more about her than his family, but he did.

  A pair of the London kids were sitting by the roadside. One was Pam, wearing a midriff-baring halter and micro-shorts, along with black tights and several black scarves. But the other was Mike Toad, whose blue jumpsuit was dusty and stained after a few nights in his tent. His formerly clean jawline was stubbled, and he looked a lot less happy than the girl.

  ‘Yo, Teddy,’ Pam shouted at him, ‘where’re you going?’

  He stopped, but did not know what to tell them. He shrugged.

  ‘You seen a blue 2CV?’ Mike Toad asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You’ll never find them in all this,’ Mike told the girl.

  ‘They’ll turn up.’

  Standing still, Teddy felt panic rising. Frightened sweat crept from his hair, slipping down his spine. Every moment he wasn’t running away, he was less likely to make it. He imagined invisible spiderwebs shooting out of the Agapemone, coming straight from Jago’s brain, descending all around in a sticky tent, pulling people in, not letting them out…

  ‘We’re waiting for Jazzbeaux,’ Pam said, ‘my sister. You’ll like her. She’s dead glam. Like me, but taller.’

  ‘Juicy,’ Mike Toad said.

  ‘Dickbrain here has had his tongue out ever since he heard Jazz was due. He’s smitten, in love with a dream. Bound to be disappointed when he meets her. She can be a right cow when she wants to. See this…’

  Pam traced a faint scar that interrupted her red lipstick.

  ‘That was Jazz playing with a razorblade when we were little. Proper sweetheart she was. Like your girlfriend, Allison.’

  ‘Allison’s not my girlfriend. She’s just—’

  ‘A good friend,’ Pam suggested, giggling.

  ‘No, not ’zactly…’

  ‘Good job too. Toad here fancies her, but she gives me the creeps. You have to mainline radioactive waste to get your eyes like that.’

  ‘You seen her around this morning?’ Teddy asked.

  ‘I think we passed her and your brother on our way here,’ the Toad said, ‘but I could be wrong. I’m still wrecked from last night.’

  Teddy worked out which route to take to avoid Allison and Terry. He didn’t want to run into them.

  ‘Hey, you like jokes, don’t you?’ the Toad said, grinning with unwashed teeth. ‘Why do women have legs?’

  Teddy didn’t know.

  ‘Have you seen the mess snails make?’

  Mike Toad laughed. Pam hit him.

  Teddy left them arguing, and headed for the main road. The invisible cobwebs stretched out, tugging his back and legs, trying to keep him in Alder. They were weak now. He still had a chance to break free. Goodbye, Jenny, he thought.

  14

  As Hazel kissed His hand, Jenny bowed. Sometimes, it was best not to look directly at Beloved. The Light could hurt your eyes. If you saw things only He was meant to see, your small soul couldn’t encompass the knowledge. With His free hand, Beloved caressed the girl’s hair. He smiled down on Hazel, quietly accepting her reverence as she knelt, suckling His wound. Jenny felt the Spirit strong in herself, and shared the girl’s epiphany. Hazel’s head bobbed as her tongue lapped at the hole in Beloved’s hand. She made cat sounds in the back of her mouth as she took her communion.

  A step below them all, Wendy tried desperately to share the delight. She had not purged herself entirely of the sin of jealousy. She wanted Beloved to herself, resenting the need to share His glory with the world. Jenny found it in herself to forgive the Sister. She’d been with the Agapemone from the first. Each new Sister-Love must seem to eclipse her in Beloved’s heart. But Beloved’s heart was big enough for all humanity.

  Beloved detached His hand from Hazel’s mouth and wiped His wet palm on His cardigan. He bent and kissed the girl, the new Sister, on the forehead. She sighed, entire body shaking. Jenny took one of the girl’s arms. Wendy, hesitant, did likewise. Hazel stood between them, eyes tight shut, so deep in prayer that her physical body would have to be guided.

  ‘This evening, there will be a Great Manifestation,’ Beloved said, ‘and our Sister Hazel will be honoured at the altar.’

  Jenny felt a sunburst of joy at the news. ‘Alleiluya,’ she breathed.

  ‘Alleiluya,’ Wendy joined in, mouth set in an ineradicable, involuntary pout.

  Beloved turned and ascended the stairs, leaving the new Sister to them. Jenny lowered her eyes so as not to follow Beloved’s departure with unseemly ardour. Wendy, her own eyes wet with ambiguous tears, didn’t follow her example. When Beloved had returned to His rooms, they had to help Hazel downstairs to prepare for her anointment. The new Sister moved like a sleepwalker, eyes twitching behind closed lids, cooperating but not participating.

  They steered Hazel through the chapel, into an antechamber where there
was a couch. Wendy let the girl go. She’d been gripping too tightly, leaving fingermarks on Hazel’s bare arms. Jenny manoeuvred the postulant into sitting on the divan, then lifted her feet and swung her around, gently bending her back until she was at rest. She arranged the new Sister’s hair out of her eyes, and tugged her ridden-up T-shirt down over her navel.

  ‘Comely girl, isn’t she?’ Jenny said.

  ‘All are beautiful to Beloved,’ Wendy agreed, grudgingly.

  Jenny remembered the Great Manifestation that had brought her into the Agapemone, the outpouring of Love before all the Brethren. It had been the most beautiful moment of her life, an intensely personal salvation and yet shared with the entire congregation. She had not been aware at the time, but now she wondered whether Wendy had been standing at the back of the chapel, reciting but not meaning the words, looking with jealousy upon her as she now did upon Hazel. Imagining this evening’s ceremony, she could understand Wendy’s lapses. Sharing Love was harder than accepting it.

  Jenny touched Hazel’s soft face and tried to extinguish the small flame of envy rising in her heart. She Loved the new Sister, knowing the Great Manifestation would be shared among all at the Agapemone, and eventually all in the world. Tonight Hazel would be visited by God in the flesh, and the world would be nearer redemption by one soul. Jenny thrilled to the remembrance of the touch of Beloved, the touch of God. Joy was in the flesh. Love was in the flesh. Purity was in the flesh.

  INTERLUDE FIVE

  They didn’t talk. Between Shepherd’s Bush and Chelsea, darkness came. Roger tried to pay the taxi driver, but the BBC had covered the fare. Knowing they wouldn’t run to a tip, Susan gave him a fifty-pence piece. It was too much, but she didn’t have smaller change. Irrelevantly, she realized it was years—two?—since she’d seen a ten-shilling note. They’d been phased out. She resented the hours of her childhood wasted on learning pounds, shillings and pence. A useless lump of her memory was filled with old money.

  While she fumbled with her wonky purse clasp, Roger stamped upstairs to the flat. He had a right to be murderously angry. Whatever happened, she’d have to go through at least the next hour with him. Having made confession, she’d now have to do penance. It was a long time since she’d been in a church. Did she think she might be unable to step on consecrated ground?

  She stood at the kerb for two or three minutes after the taxi had gone. It was January, and cold. Roger had insisted she wear a summer dress to show off her long, now goose-pimpled legs. The yellow-orange dark of a streetlit night made the city look hostile, like the lunar landscapes she’d seen on television during the Apollo missions. It’d be darker later. The flat was above a newsagent’s. Most of the daily papers were gone from the racks, but the two evening ones were out. She saw headlines about OPEC and the oil crisis, Edward Heath and the Three-Day Week. A few years ago, man had stepped on the moon; now, the world was falling apart.

  * * *

  At infants’ school, they called her Spike. Squashed and lumpy, she was supposed to look like the vicious dog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Things changed when she passed the eleven-plus. She was the only one from her old school at the girls’ grammar. Not squashed and lumpy any more, she was tall enough to make buying the uniform a problem. At the new school, everyone pretended to be grown up. Pupils in the upper years got into trouble for wearing make-up. Susan put most of her dolls in her bottom drawer and asked for a chess set for her birthday. Able to beat girls two or three years above her, she joined the chess club and stayed after school two days a week, playing. Funnily, she wasn’t really good. She just had a knack for guessing correctly what her opponents planned.

  At first, teachers called her Rodway and friends called her Susan. A few girls acquired nicknames. Jayne Weald became Jinx when she broke her ankle the third time, playing netball. Colette Vaizey started being called Coal-Hole for no particular reason. And she turned into Witch Susan. One day Miss Robartes, their science teacher, divided them into pairs to take a test. She handed out special packs of cards. Each card had a symbol: a circle, a square, a star, a cross, a triangle, wavy lines. One girl would pick a card, and the other would guess which symbol she was looking at. The test was supposed to gauge ESP. She knew from her brother’s American comics that ESP was seeing through things, like Superman with his X-ray vision. Susan was partnered with her best friend of three months’ standing, Annette Post. When Susan was guessing, their team scored better than anyone else in the class. Most times she just knew what was on the card in Annette’s hand.

  Afterwards, they started calling her Witch Susan and asking her to read their palms. Everyone wanted to know who their husbands would be. She didn’t mind. It was better than being Spike. Miss Robartes brought a friend into school to see her. David, who reminded her of Iliya Kuryakin, was a scientist from a university in London, glamorously distinguished and grownup. Susan was let off a maths lesson to do tests with him. After the now familiar cards (he called them Rhine cards) David gave her small things—coins, a comb, a watch—and asked her to guess what their owners were like. Sometimes she could make up stories easily. She imagined the comb belonged to a grownup who lived with David. She kept goldfish and got sunburned easily. Sometimes nothing came into her head. David wrote things down, but never said whether he liked her stories or not. At the end of the afternoon, he gave her a card with his address and phone number on it and told her to get in touch if anything strange happened to her. It struck her then as an odd thing to say to someone.

  For weeks she went around expecting something strange to happen, but it never did. Once, at break, some older girls made her play the Rhine game with an ordinary pack of cards. As good with fifty-two choices as with four, she was pleased with herself. But some of her friends didn’t want to be with her as much as they used to. As a joke, Annette said she must have put a curse on Jinx Weald, and Jinx dropped out of the chess club. One or two in her class were actually scared of her. She started thinking Witch Susan wasn’t such a good name. She stopped playing the games and admitted she didn’t really know how to read palms. She put David’s card in her bottom drawer, along with the dolls and books she’d grown out of, and forgot about it. For a while.

  * * *

  The light in the flat came on. Snowflakes fell like wet ants on her cheeks. She went up and faced Roger in the living room. He pulled off his purple paisley tie, stretching it like a thuggee strangling cord. Gold rings glinted as he flexed his right hand. Her arm and leg muscles were tense. She sucked in a double lungful of air. Her exhalation was loud, her breath frosting in the air like a phantom megaphone. The central heating hadn’t come on, its timer shot by the last power cut.

  He didn’t hit her until she turned on the television. As the Six O’Clock News appeared, she rolled with his first blow and fell on to the settee. She held a yellow square cushion over her face, tasting tobacco and dust. She tried to form a foetal ball, elbows protecting her breasts, knees up over her stomach. He pounded the backs of her hands. She clutched the cushion, willing the pain away. His rings gouged her skin. Her wounds stung like bites. He was too furious to think, or else he might have found a way to cripple her. As it was, he could only hurt her, and she could put up with that.

  Neither of them said anything. She couldn’t get through with words. He had to tire himself out. Each time his knuckles connected, he grunted in the back of his throat. She was nastily reminded of the wordless sounds he’d made the nine times they’d made love. She wished she could have that part of her life back and wash it. He hit her back and head and arms and shins, but couldn’t reach anything soft. She looked over the cushion at him, at the way his arms waved while he kicked. She noticed for the first time that one of his Elvis sideburns was longer than the other. He hit her again, aiming for her exposed forehead and eyes. His fist came down above her hairline and skimmed off the top of her head. She buried her face again and leaned forward, pushing him back. He grabbed a fistful of hair. This was really going to hurt.


  He stopped and let her go. After a while, even though he didn’t call a truce, she lowered the cushion to her lap. They were on television. Roger was at the other end of the settee, cold air between them. His hands bleeding, he tugged at the sticky, red-smeared rings. When one came off, he ouched and plopped it in an ashtray. Droplets of blood rolled like mercury on the matted-in ash. He knitted his mashed fingers, trying to squeeze out the pain.

  * * *

  Four or five years after the card games, they still called her Witch Susan, but didn’t remember why. There was no first time. Rather, if there was she didn’t notice it. Things around the house started to break. She had a transistor radio in her room that worked most of the time, but got nothing but static two or three days a month. It wasn’t until Nett Post joked about the thing having cramps she realized the radio’s static patches coincided exactly with her periods. Her stepfather spent too much time on the roof adjusting the television aerial, and they never got as good reception as the next-door neighbours. None of the clocks kept correct time more than a few days, even the electric one in her mother’s Teasmade. Long before anything really happened, Susan was sure it was her fault.

  At a party in Nett’s garden, spoons started bending. It was funny at first, and most of the others thought it a joke. Susan suspected Nett was deliberately giving her bent cutlery until Colette, now in the science stream, suggested they repeat the experiment under laboratory conditions. Nett fetched down an old dinner service and laid out knives, forks and spoons on the garden table. Susan picked a knife and held the neck of the blade between two fingers. Nothing happened. ‘Too thick,’ concluded Colette. ‘Too right,’ replied Nett, and they all laughed again. Feeling stupid, Susan picked up a fork. She had a pain in her temples, and the fork bent into a right angle. Susan passed it round. It looked as if it had melted in the sun but it wasn’t even warm. Nett gave her a spoon, and the same thing happened. They stopped chattering, and just looked at the bent bits of metal. Nobody thought it a joke any more.