by Peter James
‘And if that doesn’t work?’
He looked at her as if she was mad. The skin around his mouth tightened in determination, ‘We are going armed with the authority of the Church. The authority of God. That is stronger than anything belonging to Satan. You do understand that, don’t you?’
She could feel the hairs rising on her body and the goose-pimples creeping across her flesh. She had hoped that in coming to the clergyman she would somehow find comfort. Instead she had found even greater fear.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Frannie walked with Benedict Spode across London Bridge, her mackintosh pocket weighted with the torch he had lent her. The clergyman carried a small vinyl holdall which he swung at his side in a deliberately carefree manner that did not reflect the anxiety in his face.
They waited for a stream of traffic to pass, then crossed into King William Street and walked down towards Bank. Over to their right, brightly lit against the night sky when Frannie looked down one of the side streets, was the Winston Churchill Tower. But she had to look away again.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘this could be the reason why Oliver and I met? That it was all manipulated, contrived – by – the – this –?’ She stopped, uncertain of the word she was searching for. Spirit? Force?
‘I believe that there is order in disorder,’ Benedict Spode said tersely.
She remembered Oliver had said the same thing. ‘How do you mean?’
He did not reply until they had stopped to wait for the traffic lights at the end of the street. ‘I mean that there are patterns even in apparent chaos. Sometimes one is too close to them to see them.’
‘I’m not sure I understand; I –’
The lights changed and they crossed into Poultry. The air in her lungs felt heavier by the second. Ahead, up to the left, she could see the lights of the hoarding. She slowed her pace and the clergyman slowed his also.
‘I just want to say something before we –’ she said, and she saw the soft, baby-like skin of the clergyman’s cheek in the glare of a street light as he half turned towards her. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For all the grief I’ve brought to everyone. For being so bloody stupid.’
Benedict Spode turned further to face her full on. The anxiety had not left his face but his voice was calm. ‘Seven of you made the decision to play the Ouija, Frannie,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s not for you to take the blame alone. God will be the judge of that.’
A sharp blast of wind seized her hair and her clothes. The clergyman’s cassock billowed beneath his raincoat and his holdall swayed in his hand. The hoarding rocked; even from a hundred yards away Frannie could hear the loose boards banging and tarpaulins cracking like sails, metal chinking.
She looked back at Benedict Spode. ‘Can I ask you something really naïve? If people can do this – attract evil spirits – on their own, why does it need a priest to stop it? Couldn’t anyone stop it with prayers?’
‘Priests have no magic,’ he said. ‘Good is stronger than evil; but when evil becomes out of control, those who have the authority of the Church are stronger in dealing with it than anyone else. The Church acts on God’s behalf, with His authority. And God is stronger than Satan. God defeated Satan.’
A bus rumbled past. The door of a pub across the road opened and two men came out. Behind them the interior looked cheery, and Frannie felt a pang of envy.
‘I still find it hard to believe – with all that’s gone on – that just saying a few prayers will end it.’
Her companion stopped, ‘Why?’
‘It seems too simple.’
He rounded on her with logic. ‘Is it any less simple than the way it started? Just a bunch of drunken friends with an upturned wine glass and some scraps of paper?’
She smiled weakly, but Benedict Spode did not smile back. She looked at her watch. A quarter past eight. It was much brighter lit here than she had expected. The pavement, the hoarding, the site; they were all bathed in a milky-orange haze. Conspicuous. But towards the tops of the buildings that towered around them, the artificial light faded. And far above, only hard white stars pricked the oily blackness of the sky.
The landscape was as Frannie had seen it earlier that day: the jib of a crane towering over the alley; the silhouette of a massive lead demolition ball suspended beneath it like something hanging from the beak of a giant bird of prey. But the building that had been there at lunchtime was no longer standing. Shock ripped through her guts. She raced across the road towards the hoarding and peered through a viewing slit but could see nothing. She ran on to the next slit, which looked straight on to the remains of the corner building at the start of Poulterers’ Alley. It had been almost completely demolished, its facade torn off, its innards opened to the elements. But, on either side of the alley behind it, the rest of the buildings were still standing.
Part of her wished they weren’t; wanted to. pretend that it was too late. The clergyman wouldn’t know. Then Seb Holland’s face came into her mind. Then Tristram’s. Meredith’s coffin on the catafalque. Frannie shuddered. She imagined never seeing Oliver again. Nor her family. Being crippled, or dead or disfigured. She nodded at Benedict Spode and pointed.
He looked up at the hoarding. ‘Let’s see if we can find a gap,’ he said decisively.
They stopped outside the main gates, which were chained shut. She tested them, but there was no play in them. A taxi drove by, the knocking rattle of its engine echoing in the quietness, the fumes of its exhaust staying in their nostrils after it had gone. She walked on, leading the way down to the end of the block, then turned left and the pavement became a covered boardwalk as they followed the hoarding along a street that was quiet and less well lit. Benedict Spode pressed a section of hoarding on the join with the scaffolding and it gave, reluctantly, then sprung sharply back. He glanced around, rather shiftily, pushed hard and held it for Frannie, then followed her through, releasing it behind him with a fierce bang.
They stood on an unstable mound of rubble; the sounds of flapping and loose metal were much louder now. Frannie switched the torch on, and the beam jumped hungrily into the shadows beyond the haze of light from the street lamps. It struck the caterpillar tracks of a bulldozer. Then the cabin of a crane. She played it along the partially demolished terrace that housed the site office. The air was full of the oddly sweet smell of rotten wood and damp, and the harder, drier smell of old plaster. The beam slid over a stepladder, a skip, then flared off the windows of a Portakabin. She stepped forward nervously, picking her way past a broken supermarket trolley, then walked across rotten plasterboard which broke beneath her feet and on to a track of churned mud.
Benedict Spode walked on tiptoe, his cassock hitched up like a skirt. As they passed a Portakabin with ‘Supplies’ stencilled on the door, a van drove fast down the road and halted outside the gates, its engine still running. Frannie snapped off the torch as footsteps and the crackle of a two-way radio were heard. Then a man’s voice.
‘City Fields. One nine five five. Site secure. Moving on to Docklands. Roger and out.’
A chain rattled and the vehicle sped away. Frannie switched on the torch, revealing the clergyman’s raised eyebrows. ‘Could have been a bit embarrassing,’ he said.
Frannie couldn’t raise a smile, and walked on until Poulterers’ Alley stretched out in front of them like a ghost town on a movie studio lot.
Fear had returned to the clergyman’s face and she felt it infecting her, flowing into her. Had to keep going now; to somehow be brave. Had to keep going. Had to. She imagined two eyes watching them from behind the boarded windows. A small boy’s eyes. She felt her heart bang like a shuttle inside her chest, weaving a tapestry from the raw yarn of her nerves.
She almost walked right past it. What had once seemed such a very big place now looked so small. She swung the torch up above the door as if she needed to make sure: SANDW CH S LUIGI CAFE.
The windows were boarded like all the others, but the door still had its glass
panels. She took her key-ring from her bag, separated the old Banham and pushed it into the lock. It slid in almost too easily, and allowed herself and Canon Spode to gain entry to the premises she’d known for most of her life.
Inside, the floor was a mess. Part of the ceiling had come down, leaving exposed beams. Frannie trod slowly, waited for Benedict Spode, and played the torchlight around, scooping the darkness out. A flesh-white rectangle indicated where the counter had stood. The old poster of Naples had fallen and lay on the floor. The other, of Amalfi, was still on the back wall. And it was this one on which the clergyman had fixed his gaze, eyes widening. Frannie followed his stare.
The poster was moving, the top left-hand corner tearing as if an invisible hand were pulling it. The other corner was already free. She felt her own flesh tearing in sympathy, parting. The whole place felt as if it was charged with electricity as the poster carried on moving from the top downwards until it dropped to the floor, curled over on itself and lay still.
The effect was petrifying. Just the draught from opening the door, Frannie tried to convince herself, pushing her way through the darkness to the hoop of the trapdoor which she could see glinting dully. She laid the torch down, knelt and signalled to Spode to do the same.
The cold metal bit into her fingers like ice as she pulled. The bogeyman was down there beneath the hatch, waiting for her in his dark, silent lair. He lived in the cellar. The bogeyman who pricked every bone in her body now with sharp needles of terror. The second Marquess – Francis Edward Alwynne Halkin.
The hatch lifted a few inches and dropped back down. She had forgotten how heavy it was. She resisted the clergyman’s attempts to help and, bracing herself, lifted harder; it came away, pulling a stringy cobweb with it. A draught of air poured out, as cold as if she had opened the door of a freezer.
She pulled the hatch right back until it was resting against its hinges then shone the torch down the wooden steps into the darkness. Dark as a lift shaft. Frannie was shaking uncontrollably by now, as if she had convulsions. She rocked on her knees, staring down as darkness coiled like smoke around her.
The clergyman offered, ‘Shall I go first?’
‘I’ll go,’ she heard herself say, ‘and you can pass your bag down.’
Slowly she eased herself over, and grabbed the torch with one hand. She felt as if she were descending into a bottomless pit. But eventually her feet touched the hard flagstones. They felt unsteady, then she realized that it was herself, swaying in her fear.
‘OK,’ she called out, shining the torch back up. The word echoed back at her. OK … OK … OK.
Benedict Spode’s foot clumsily struck the top step. ‘Careful!’ she shouted out into the blackness. CAREFUL … FUUULLLL.
The cold of the flagstones seeped through her shoes. Her skin prickled and she felt the downy hairs on her arms, her legs, on the small of her back rising and her skin erupting into goose-pimples. She could hear the steady metallic drip … ping … ping … ping and remembered it from the last time she had been down here.
She raked the steps with the torch, too afraid to look around her, stretching for the bag which Spode was holding down to her.
The clergyman reached the bottom but stayed holding on to the rails with both hands, collecting his breath. ‘My bag,’ he said anxiously, as if he was frightened to be separated from it.
She handed it back to him to the accompaniment of a low, rumbling echo that came out of the darkness, growing deeper and louder, like a hundred boulders rolling towards them. She had heard the sound thousands of times but it always scared her. It began to fade as rapidly as it had started, becoming a distant hum, and then died completely. ‘Tube train,’ she said. ‘Central Line.’
Spode released his grip on the rail and walked a few steps away from her as if drawn across the room. She watched him open his bag; he removed a small torch of his own then went over to one of several upright barrels, and using it as a table began to unpack. In the extra light of the second torch, she saw a packing-case with a candle stuck on the top, a pool of wax around the base. Scraps of paper lay on it. It was the packing-crate they had used as a table for the Ouija.
Memories washed over her. She walked over, afraid to go too close. The letters of the alphabet lay in random order, the words Yes and No in their midst, mottled now with black spots of mildew.
The clergyman had pulled a phial of holy water and a silver salt cellar from his bag and set them on the barrel. Then two silver candlesticks, into which he pushed candles, which he lit. A chalice, a silver tray and a silver stoup were also produced. Mouthing a silent prayer, he poured some water into the stoup and added some salt. Working in the flickering candlelight, he was slow, tidy, methodical, as if he had all the time in the world.
He raised the stoup, ‘Protect us, O Lord, we beseech you.’ He said the words firmly, but without raising his voice. Then he pulled what looked like a silver ball and chain from his bag. The ball had tiny holes, like a sugar shaker. An aspergillum, Frannie realized.
He carefully immersed the head in holy water, before raising the aspergillum by its chain so that it swung gently. Then he raised it higher as if making sure that whoever or whatever was present could see it. He began to swing it on its chain, slowly at first, then faster, until flecks of water sprinkled the wall. At the same time the clergyman began to move around the cellar, repeating the words and procedure over and over.
‘Protect us, O Lord, we beseech you.’
*
Outside the lead demolition ball that hung from the jib of the crane, twenty feet above the rod, moved a fraction in a gust of wind. As the gust died away it continued to move, in a faint, barely discernible, rocking motion; the ball gradually began to swing faster, making wide, sweeping arcs until it was swinging too hard for the jib to contain it and the whole crane began to sway with it. The lead ball swung like the aspergillum in the clergyman’s hand. Like the lampshade in Frannie’s sitting-room. Harder and harder. Until it rose too high and the chain went slack. Then it fell with a dead-weight of five tons. Plummeted unchecked through the air as the slack of the chain paid out. Then tightened. Sharply. Too sharply.
The top of the jib’s superstructure sheared away and was yanked sharply downwards by the demolition ball as it plunged straight down through roof tiles and rotting timbers.
Below in the cellar, Benedict Spode made another swing with the aspergillum. Holy water spattered on the brickwork.
‘Protect us, O Lord, we beseech you.’
He took a step to the left and began the same performance. As he did so, Frannie heard a faint splitting sound like sticks of firewood being snapped. Then a deep rumble. A train, she thought at first, but it was different: deeper, more threatening. She saw jagged spidery cracks rip across the walls and ceiling. Dust and small stones showered down on them, striking her head, her hands.
‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘Get out!’
The whole cellar was shaking and dust was avalanching down through the open hatch. Frannie shouted again, then something slammed into her shoulder, sending her crashing to the floor. The noise had become deafening. She heard someone scream, but dust and plaster filled her own mouth and she choked, blinded by dust.
Then there was silence.
She felt wind on her face and tried to move. But she was pinioned, trapped. She spat out a mouthful of dust. ‘Mr Spode?’
A faint haze of light made its way through the mist that was stinging her eyes. Then the mist itself started to clear. Dust, settling. Above her was a strange orange glow and familiar pinpricks of white in an oily blackness beyond. Shadowy walls rising up. Then Frannie realized, confused, that she was looking straight up at the night outside.
There was a face. Someone staring down at her. A small man standing looking down through the crater in the floor above. He was smiling and she thought that was incongruous. Smiling, and there was a gleam in his eye. Then she saw with blind terror that it was not a man at all.
It was
Edward.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As Frannie watched, Edward disappeared.
She struggled to free herself from the dead-weight crushing her legs and her left shoulder, but panic snaked up and down inside her.
‘Mr Spode?’ she called out.
Silence. She felt like an insect trapped in a matchbox. Beetles are vermin, Daddy.
‘Mr Spode?’
She choked on dust and coughed again. She strained her eyes but could see nothing. Something sharp was digging into her wrist; she pulled, twisted, but it dug in further. She looked up again but could see nothing except the faint orange haze.
A shadow moved. She heard a scrape, like a dragging foot, and her muscles went into spasm. But still she couldn’t shift her legs; they felt set in cement.
She heard another scrape. Louder. Then again. Behind her. She could still move her head and now she spun it round frantically.
A silhouette standing; someone small. A torch came on and the beam blinded her. It moved away from her eyes and in the spill of light she could see that it was Edward.
He was motionless, concentrating on her.
‘Edward!’ she called out. Try to talk to him, get through to him, she thought desperately.
His lips moved but she could not hear what they said. The beam of his torch raked the cellar. It had caved in and she was in an enclosed pocket. Then the beam struck a face to her left.
It was Benedict Spode; his back and his legs crushed flat by the demolition ball. His tongue was sticking out and a trail of yellow bile dribbled from it, down into the pool of blood that was spreading slowly out across the floor and towards Frannie.
Bursts of a throttled scream gouted from her throat. Edward took a step towards her. Then another, his lips moving, talking, saying something she could not hear.
Her right arm was the only limb she could move and she slid it across the rubble without taking her eyes off him, then closed her fingers around a chunk of masonry, gripped it tightly and swung it back, demented enough to use it.
