Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  The lesson had three words: you are alone.

  chapter nine

  jaws wide open

  The experience of having the lies stripped away was like nothing else. Gray had thought he’d had the last of his delusions sandblasted by the death of his wife and daughter. He’d been wrong. He knew that, now. There was an infinite abyss of things he did not know, but he could see his old, comfortable ignorance for what it was.

  He was sitting on the floor, curled against the northwest corner of the crypt. He’d been here since he woke, half an hour ago. He couldn’t remember the night before, but he could feel its effects in the scoured, purged hollow of his psyche. He shivered, the stone cold against his back. He was sore. He was drained. He was frightened. He was angry. The night was a dividing line, his existence sliced by it into before and after, and he raged against the knowledge that, in a way he couldn’t understand because he couldn’t remember what had happened in the blackness, the event was bigger than the burning death of his family. The truth was so wrong, he began to weep.

  The morning light was indifferent, cool. It turned the crypt grey. The vault leaned over Gray, brooding, keeping what it knew to itself. He wiped his eyes and climbed to his feet. He wobbled. His circulation was sluggish, his joints older and colder than the stone. He stuck close to the north wall of the crypt, away from the keystones, as he stumbled out. The grey stuck to his eyes, filming the world with limbo-ooze, reducing everything to something less than reality. Plato’s shadows were revealed at last for what they were: magic lantern lies for the frightened and the childish. He moved through a global anaesthetic until he was standing in the courtyard.

  The day was bright enough to blind saints. Gray blinked and squinted. His eyes took forever to adjust. When he could see, he took in the constricting embrace of the walls. He sensed their force when he took a few steps toward the exit. The Hall didn’t want him to leave. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want to go. He should want to. There had been plenty of times in Africa when he had been afraid for his life, but this was the first time he had ever felt sweetwater-pure terror. But the need to stay was just as strong as it had been yesterday. He thought perhaps he knew why. Something had taken the lies away, but they hadn’t yet been replaced with anything. He had to understand. If there was a truth that huge and terrible here, he had to know what it was. He hadn’t fled Africa when he’d been frightened. He’d been there to do something, something important and meaningful. Absolute rubbish, he realized, but the belief had sustained him. Belief wouldn’t hold him up here. But its lack might.

  He kept walking. The walls let him pass, but with reluctance. Come back soon, they whispered. I will, he answered. He didn’t bother with his car. The exercise was working heat back into his bones. He went up the drive, and the welcoming party was at the gate, as expected. There were more of them today. He wasn’t surprised. He’d put on good entertainment yesterday morning. The clamour began as he reached the gate. He raised his voice, and the distinguished press quieted enough to listen. “Ladies,” he said, nodding to the few he saw and thinking, Whores. He opened the gate. “Gentlemen,” nodding again, thinking, Bastards. “I imagine you have the same questions as before, with a few new ones for good measure.” He was smiling, and he could tell that was throwing the pack off its stride. His good humour didn’t compute. “I must apologize for my bad temper yesterday. I hadn’t slept well.” The lie sounded odd when he spoke it, as if it were really the truth. “I promise you much greater satisfaction today.”

  The shouts began at once, but he held his hands up and said nothing until there was calm again. “I would like to beg a few hours of your patience, however.” He checked his watch. “I have a few necessary preparations to make and some people to speak with. If you would grant me the time and the privacy,” he gave his chuckle a knowing, hail-fellow edge, thinking, You unmitigated shite, “to get this done, I will meet you back here at six o’clock. I, not to mention several other parties, will be more than happy to answer all your questions then.” They began asking them now. He lifted a hand again. “And,” he said, “and, I think you’ll really like the answers if you do me this service. Thank you for your understanding.” You miserable bags of vomit, I hope you choke on your own balls.

  Anna Pertwee watched Gray talk to the press. Her chest was constricting with guilt. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to read the morning editions. The shots of Gray striking back had actually made two front pages. She’d walked into the newsagent’s on Wake, two blocks from the Nelson, seen what was on display, and fled in shame. But she made herself come here, halfway down from the Stag, to see what she had wrought. A coward’s guilt would have been even worse than what she was feeling. She’d left Corderman back at the hotel. She didn’t want anyone else added to the list of those passing judgment on her.

  She’d been here since just after eight. The discomfort in her chest kept her from being bored. After an hour, Gray had appeared. She’d braced herself for escalation. She’d been terrified about what form that would take. She didn’t expect the calm that broke out. She couldn’t hear what Gray was saying, but his voice wasn’t raised. The reporters were listening. Some photographers were snapping, but the efforts seemed perfunctory. Then the impossible happened. The Red Sea parted, and Gray walked up the road. Alone. Pertwee’s jaw sagged. She was so stunned she didn’t think to retreat as Gray drew close. He spotted her, and she snapped out of her daze.

  Gray didn’t look angry. He was smiling. His expression struck her as a bit off. There was a sardonic intensity to it, as if his mind were endlessly repeating the same bitter joke. “Good morning,” he said, his tone not at all hostile. “Ms. ... Pertwee, I believe it was?” When she nodded, he went on. “I guess we have to start again. The fates have spoken. I suppose the fact that you’re still here, despite my threat of calling the police, means that you haven’t given up on the idea of investigating my home.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry; I don’t enjoy being a pest.”

  Gray’s laugh was sour and short. “Yet here you are. Well, I’m glad. I was just going to go looking for you, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh?” To serve me a writ? she wondered.

  “Yes. I’ve reconsidered. You’re welcome to the Hall.” He didn’t sound reluctant.

  She was having trouble keeping up with the surprises. “I ... really?”

  “I insist upon it. If you hadn’t come to me yesterday, I would probably be trying to find you or someone else in your field today.”

  She had all the evidence she needed for the Hall’s spiritual agency right in his conversion. If only he didn’t look like he knew so much more than she did, like he was setting up a lethal practical joke. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “We can be there right away.”

  “Give me until six. There are a few other people I have to contact.”

  “Others?”

  “You’re not going to be the only team there.” Pertwee knew her face fell, and Gray’s smile became fierce. “You wanted the investigation. It’s going to be thorough,” he said, and when she flinched, he walked away.

  Meacham had been about to put the wheels in motion when Gray knocked on her door at the Nelson. “I thought I was going to have to fight a lot harder than this,” she said after he told her why he was there. “What changed your mind?”

  “Let’s say I was visited by three spirits.” He gave her a speculative look. “How hard were you going to press me?”

  “You have no idea.” Meacham smiled, but she kept her expression grim. She wanted him to know life could have been hell. “If I had to, I would have brought the hammer down hard. I would have hated doing it.”

  “But not enough to hold back.”

  She shook her head. An empathetic ember flared up. Gray’s face was pale, stretched with tension. The man looked as if he’d been through a week of zero sleep and waking nightmares. She decided to confide in him, at least far enough that he would know he’d made the right decision. “You know
how it is with wounded animals,” she said. “They’ll fight tooth and claw for survival, and you’re stupid to block their way.”

  “You’re one of these animals?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, but I value my survival over yours.”

  “I appreciate your honesty.” He sounded genuinely amused, and his tone was the warmest Meacham had heard it yet.

  “I appreciate your flexibility,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll regret this. I wasn’t lying when I said a debunking will help you out, too.”

  “You sound very sure about the results.”

  She cocked her head. “Aren’t you?” She studied his face more closely. There was an odd shine in his eyes. She couldn’t decide if she was seeing fear or excitement.

  “I want your scientist to be rigorous.”

  “He will be. I’m debunking your house whether he does or not. That’s what I have to do for my survival. But you’ll get the straight goods, with no massaging.”

  “Where’s your man?”

  “In London, waiting for the word.”

  “He should be able to make it here by six, then.”

  “I’m not sure. I think he’s more likely to arrive tomorrow. He has a fair bit of equipment to haul down.”

  “No,” Gray was emphatic. “The equipment can follow along later. I want him here at six. That’s one of the conditions of access.”

  “I hate to point it out, but you’re not in a position to set conditions. I’m still holding a hammer.”

  “Humour me. Why make life hard on yourself?”

  “Fine. What happens at six?”

  Shark grin. He was thinking of something big-time hilarious. “How do you like the media?”

  “I steer clear. Nature of the job. Why?”

  “At six, we present ourselves to the ladies and gentlemen of the press.”

  Gray spoke to Hudson, then strolled up Wake. He was killing time now. He wasn’t sure why he was playing up the theatre. Petty vengeance, yes, there was that. At least as far as Pertwee was concerned. There was more, though, and he couldn’t give it a name. There was simply the necessity for an event. The press conference would be a ritual. It might be marking a beginning. He suspected that was how Pertwee would see it: the moment that the way to the redemption of Gethsemane Hall opened to her. It might be the beginning of something for him, too. He wanted the knowledge the investigations would give him. He wanted to know what the truth was that had scraped him so raw last night. There was something else he wanted, though he didn’t know what it was. It linked up to the truth, and to the conflicting truths Hudson, Meacham, and Pertwee were throwing at him. It was an action, but he couldn’t see if he was its subject or object.

  Houdini had begun his massive campaign of debunking spiritualists because he had been disappointed by their charlatanism when he first turned to them to try to contact his dead wife. The example was famous. If someone pointed out the parallels to his case, Gray wouldn’t be surprised. Have you been speaking with your dead wife? the reporter had asked. No, he hadn’t. He asked the next question: Would you, if you could? He wondered if he were walking that road, another of the bereaved looking for comforting platitudes from the beyond, Hallmark greetings from the lost. Having a wonderful time, dear. Wish you were here. The thought of hearing Lillian’s voice again spread ice through his gut. The idea entangled itself with the after-effects of the night’s truth and became toxic. He tried to avoid the next thought, but it came anyway: his daughter’s whisper from the darkness. Terrified nausea swept over him. He stumbled, broke into a short run, trying to escape implications he couldn’t even articulate.

  This evening was not going to mark a beginning. Not, at least, of the sort that Hudson and his other friends would wish for him. There were no fresh starts about to dawn over the horizon. What rose might not even be the sun.

  Endings, then. Oh, there were endings as saccharine and false as new beginnings. They were called closure. With such endings, he was supposed to turn the page, close the chapter, move on. Those endings were among the biggest lies in the Book of Wishful Thinking. He didn’t feel one of those coming on. He sensed something far more worthy of the name.

  He stopped in front of St. Rose’s just as he understood the nature of the day. He realized he was looking at the town, at the world around him, as if he would not be seeing these things again. After he had spoken with Hudson, he had thought, with relief and satisfaction, that once the press conference was out of the way, he wouldn’t have to leave the Hall again. Now he wondered if he was ever leaving. The cold spread though his body once more. Don’t be silly, he tried to tell himself. He didn’t listen. He was frightened. And still the need rose to be back at the Hall. The tug scared him even more, but remained undiluted by the fear.

  St. Rose’s stood on a small green that was elevated a man’s height above the level of Wake, turning it into the summit of Roseminster. Gray climbed the steps to the green. Straight ahead was the stone column of the war memorial. Beyond it, where the square formed a point and Wake rose to its level, was a squatter, shorter pillar enclosing a fountain, a golden jubilee tribute to Victoria. The thirteenth-century tower of the church was square, stolid, crenelated at the top. It looked ready to fend off all besiegers. It didn’t hold off Gray as he walked to the front door and went inside.

  The interior was simple, despite being an amalgam of modifications and renovations over eight hundred years. The walls were white and unadorned. The austerity was broken by the glowing violet of the stained glass window, and by a carpet from nearby Axminster, its intricacy faded now by wear. Scaffolding rose in both aisles, and Gray’s tongue caught the dry taste of fresh plaster dust. He sat down in a pew and looked across the expanse of the choir toward the altar and its small cross. The church wasn’t a big one, but the altar seemed to Gray an enormous distance away, aloof and useless in the indifferent daylight.

  His family had roots as deep as Roseminster’s. The Domesday Book placed his ancestors here. When it had been decided that a church would rise in honour of St. Rose, the Grays had financed a large part of the original construction, and they had been involved in its growth and transformations all the way down the line to him, the terminus. Somewhere in the dusty, unvisited attic of his finances, he knew, there was an endowment that had made the scaffolding he saw possible. He was the church’s lifeblood, but he felt disconnected enough to be its cancer. Where were You? he thought, eyes on the cross, so small and remote. I believed in You. I worked for You. I loved You. What did I do that needed punishment? What did my wife and daughter do? I sent them on an errand to facilitate Your work, so we could help the starving and the persecuted and the bereaved and others who, by Your great love, have been left screaming on the rack. For that, they should be smashed and burned? Is that more of Your love? It passeth all understanding, all right, it bloody well goddamn does.

  The questions felt pointless, stones thrown in a hollow echo chamber. They were silly gestures, meaningless as a genuflection. The crucifix was an abstract widget on a mount. Gray tried to reach back to his anger and resentment at the funeral. There was nothing to grasp. Even his rage from the day before, when he had lain on the floor in the Old Chapel, seemed, if not ludicrous, misdirected. Hello? he thought. Is there anybody there?

  No answer. He was on the verge of thinking that there never had been, that he had devoted a good chunk of his life and unintentionally sacrificed his family to Hudson’s imaginary friend, but he hesitated. That wasn’t right, either. Gethsemane Hall was a rebuke to rationalism. He had been brought low last night. He was being propelled down a road that did not lead to Damascus.

  He tried to open himself up to the church. He could remember when that was easy, though the memories were remote and unclear. Last chance, he thought. If You’re there, help me. He waited. The cold in his blood spread. He began to be afraid he might, after all, receive an answer. He stood up. There was nothing here. The place was empty. On his way out, he paused beside a table at the rear of
the pews. He ran his eyes over the church literature and yellowing postcards. He flipped through the parish magazine, scanning White Elephant announcements, vague but spiritually unobjectionable editorials, calendars of church events, and Biblical crossword puzzles. He felt angry again. The rage had a bit more focus, now. He could identify a target. It wasn’t a deity who was, at best, AWOL. It was faith itself, the belief in the benevolence of an absence or worse. He was pissed at blindness. He felt an almost evangelical need to make people see.

  He left the church, fit to shake its foundations.

  They caught the train to Roseminster at Waterloo. The trip would take the best part of three hours, and they were barely out of London when Kristine Sturghill fell asleep. James Crawford knew other people who responded to train travel like infants in cars, lulled to unconsciousness by the rhythm and motion within minutes. He used to be one of those, but that was years ago, when the trains still rattled and clanked and there was a pronounced, constant ka-chunk-ka-chunk, ka-chunk-ka-chunk lullaby. Over the last couple of decades, the trains had become too silent, the beat surfacing only every so often. If he tried to close his eyes, he would listen too hard, on the edge until the next iteration.

  He spent the time sorting notes, trying to organize his thoughts. He’d left instructions for the shipping of his equipment. He expected it to arrive at Roseminster in the morning. Not much left to do in the meantime, really. He had his investigation procedures down to a routine, and the only variables would be site-specific, adaptations mandated by the geography of the house. He wouldn’t know what those would be until he saw the location. He tried to find something productive to do, anyway. He was trying to keep his mind off the previous night.