The Devil's Moon

by Peter Guttridge

  Brunswick looked at Travis. ‘Have you heard from your mother?’

  Travis shook her head. Brunswick nodded.

  ‘Nicola and Avril and I tormented the man who had tormented Lesley. We filmed it. I put him in the Wicker Man. I set it alight. And later tonight, we will set the rest of the world alight. Lesley will be reborn.’

  Brunswick dropped the cigarette and trod on it. ‘You were asking about the AA. I lied to you at Caspar’s house. I lied to him. My mentor did not disappear. My mentor died and willed to me the AA. Why me? Because I have His blood flowing through me.’

  Watts didn’t know who Brunswick meant by He. Brunswick was eager to tell him.

  ‘Aleister Crowley was my grandfather. He had a number of children – some he knew about, some he didn’t. The promiscuity during sex rituals made it difficult to keep track of paternity. His mistress, Ninette, bore my father and three other children.’ He puffed on his inhaler again. ‘I have created Crowley’s moonchild for a great mission.’

  Heap grabbed Henderson’s arm again but Henderson half-turned and, showing surprising strength, hurled Heap bodily out of the circle of candles.

  Heap fell almost at Gilchrist’s feet.

  ‘Get out of there,’ Gilchrist cried. ‘You’re going to be burned alive.’

  Gilchrist bent to help Heap up, her eyes on Henderson. Henderson took a step back as the other leg of the Wicker Man gave way and the whole fiery edifice started to topple. Avril cried out something Gilchrist couldn’t make out.

  Henderson raised his arms to the heavens and looked up to the moon, his face exalted in the flickering light from the flames. Then the Wicker Man engulfed him.

  ‘I thought Lesley beautiful the first time I set eyes on him and her,’ Brunswick said. ‘I didn’t want to change anything. The most perfect creation. We thought we had made him but couldn’t be certain. Avril was going through a troubled time.

  ‘Neither Avril nor I suffer from a hormonal imbalance so there was no natural reason for us to create someone so special. Unless it was meant to be. She was urged to assign gender but I encouraged her to wait. It seemed like dithering to Avril but I persuaded her.’

  ‘Mum wants to make Lesley a god now,’ Travis said. ‘That’s why I stole the John Dee things from the British Museum and the Key of Solomon from the library. The theft of the painting was a little more whimsical.’

  She stroked Watts’ face again. Was he imagining it or could he feel her fingers this time? Was the drug wearing off?

  Gilchrist and Heap watched in horror as the fire roared and surged around Lesley Henderson. Gilchrist started forward but Heap grabbed her arm.

  Henderson made no sound from within the fire but nor did he rise up, reborn. Avril sank to her knees and covered her face with her hands. Heap phoned the emergency services. Gilchrist’s own phone rang. It was Donaldson.

  ‘Sylvia has tracked down an address in Lewes for that phone and we’re on our way.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ Gilchrist said. She repeated it aloud for Heap’s benefit. ‘Who does it belong to?’ she said.

  ‘One Nicola Travis.’

  ‘Who is she?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘We’re trying to find out.’

  Gilchrist and Heap turned to Avril Pearson, kneeling at their feet.

  ‘Let’s go, Mrs Pearson,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Nick here was the only man who treated my mother kindly,’ Travis said. ‘The pill was meant to liberate women of my mother’s generation but it meant they weren’t allowed to say no to men. Free love and all that. And then all the other stuff followed. “Don’t be square, Avril. You’ve got to open yourself to all experiences, Avril. Just turn over, Avril.”’

  Travis spat full in Watts’ face. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing when you’re that age,’ she said. ‘What damage you’re doing to yourself. That men are doing to you.’

  Brunswick took her arm and moved her away. He squatted in front of Watts, examining his face. ‘What are we to do with you, mon semblable, mon frère?’

  Watts felt his left hand twitch.

  Brunswick stood, his knees creaking, and went into a huddle with Travis. Then they moved out of Watts’ vision and into the house. Watts tried to figure out how to make his limbs respond to his brain. What was it Pearson had said about perception being like a javelin?

  A barrel-chested man appeared in front of him. He glanced at Watts and walked out of his line of vision.

  DS Donaldson sat hunched on a straight-back chair in the corner of Watts’ cramped, low-ceilinged cottage beside the sorting office. Gilchrist, Heap and Kate Simpson were all crammed in there too.

  ‘Crikey, Bob, how do you function in here?’ Gilchrist said.

  He shrugged. ‘Badly.’

  ‘Is your daughter joining us, sir?’ Heap said.

  Watts shook his head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘So what’s happening?’ Donaldson said, to no one in particular. ‘Case concluded, isn’t it?’

  Donaldson had been accompanied by half-a-dozen beefy policemen when he’d arrived at Travis’s house. The arrests had been boringly anticlimactic. An ambulance had collected Watts. He still felt a bit spaced out but, a day later, at least he was more or less functioning normally.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Everybody and his dog seemed to be trying to find a way to fulfil his or her potential.’

  ‘Maybe not the dog,’ Kate said. Then: ‘What did Avril Pearson have to say about killing her husband?’

  ‘She said: “Because he killed me”,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Her colon cancer is well-advanced.’

  ‘It’s the same thing that killed Farrah Fawcett,’ Kate remarked.

  After a moment Watts said: ‘The one loose end is what the secret of Saddlescombe is or was,’ Watts said. ‘It didn’t seem to figure in what Avril and her family were up to.’

  Gilchrist gestured to Heap. ‘Bellamy’s your man. He knows everything.’

  ‘I do know that Travis misled you, sir,’ Heap said to Watts. ‘With regard to the zombie thing. Although datura did paralyse you, in Haiti the agent used is actually tetrodotoxin. It doesn’t come from a plant but from the pufferfish.’ Heap flushed as he saw all eyes on him. ‘Just saying.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Donaldson,’ Watts said, ‘I’m not saying you’re a Freemason but if you were to be you might be able to shed light on what the Templars might have guarded at Saddlescombe.’

  ‘How so?’ Donaldson said. ‘If I were a Mason.’

  ‘I went through all the things that might have been there and came up with nothing.’

  ‘There is the Ring of Aandaleeb.’

  ‘Sounds like something from a computer game for teenage boys,’ Donaldson said scornfully. ‘Wizards and Sorcerers?’

  ‘The ring is also known as the Seal of Solomon,’ Heap said. ‘It has magical powers.’

  ‘We are back to a teenage computer game,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘No, no,’ Heap said. ‘It’s what the Templars took from Solomon’s tomb in the Temple. Except there’s little proof of Solomon’s existence and less of the Temple’s.’

  ‘Tell that to the Freemasons,’ Donaldson said. He spread his hands. ‘Not that I can help you with this ring.’

  ‘I think all this is rubbish,’ Gilchrist said. ‘There was no secret at Saddlescombe, just a lot of coincidences.’

  ‘It’s not necessarily rubbish just because it’s weird,’ Watts said. ‘A fish fell on your head, didn’t it?’

  Gilchrist laughed.

  ‘Didn’t it?’

  ‘Conger eel,’ she said.

  ‘That’s still a fish.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Gilchrist said.

  Watts shrugged. ‘No point really. I guess we’re fated never to know the true story about Saddlescombe.’ He looked around. ‘It’s only in fiction that it all has to make sense at the end.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘It’s someone for you, Dad,’ fifteen-year-old Bobby Watts s
aid, coming into the garden from the family house.

  Victor Tempest glanced at his wife and heaved himself out of his chair. She carried on reading her book. He looked up at the woman’s face at the window of the sitting room. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said, patting his son on the shoulder as he walked past him.

  She was still standing by the window when Tempest came into the sitting room.

  ‘Avril – I’m surprised to see you here.’ He offered his open hand. ‘Come out of the sunlight so I can see you.’

  Avril Henderson walked over to where he was standing in the middle of the room. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. He looked beyond her into the garden. Bobby was looking up at the window; Tempest’s wife was fiercely intent on her book.

  Avril stepped back. ‘You wrote to Colin about that ritual you did with Aleister Crowley, Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley in Saddlescombe,’ she said.

  ‘Load of nonsense,’ Tempest said.

  ‘You say,’ Avril said. ‘Your letter left a lot unexplained.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Why there?’

  Tempest took a couple of steps and looked out of the window at his family in the garden. ‘The Templars,’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They had a powerful secret.’

  ‘I don’t know much about the Templars.’

  ‘They found a ring.’

  ‘A Lord of the Rings type ring?’

  Tempest laughed. ‘Probably the same ring. At least, it’s where Tolkien got the idea for his ring. From Crowley, actually, in a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child over more than a few brandies.’

  ‘What was this ring?’

  ‘Solomon’s ring. The Templars found it in Solomon’s tomb and they brought it to Saddlescombe.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tempest laughed again. His son was still staring up at the window. He looked at Avril and smiled. He could see why his pubescent son was staring. In her thirties – and, therefore, ancient as far as his son was concerned – Avril was a very sexy woman.

  ‘I don’t know. But it got here via a circuitous route through Provence. It came with the kings and reached Sussex with Simon de Montfort in hot pursuit.’

  ‘But why Saddlescombe?’

  ‘It’s true that London or Paris were the obvious places. But maybe a small place – a quiet place – made more sense. Kings, princes and prelates all came down. Some believed in its power and hoped to share it. Some didn’t. The De Montforts, father and son, were tenacious in trying to find it. The younger Simon, the one who won the Battle of Lewes in 1264, then dismissed it as nonsense. The king – Henry III – had stayed with the ring the night before and it did him no good. Then the king’s son, Edward Longshanks, defeated Simon de Montfort at Evesham, so who was laughing then?’

  ‘What? You mean Edward had this ring?’

  Tempest shrugged. ‘Or the power of the ring. The ring never left Saddlescombe – theoretically, its power is still there.’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Colin?’

  Avril nodded. ‘But is the ring still there?’ she said.

  Tempest looked down at his hands and smiled. ‘At Saddlescombe? Maybe.’

  She shook her head vehemently. ‘I don’t want to know that unless I know where.’

  ‘Finding a ring on a farm sounds a bit like a needle in a haystack scenario. And I can’t believe for a minute it has any power.’

  ‘Why but for this do you think we’re living in a freezing house in the middle of nowhere?’

  He shook his head. ‘I think you’re probably searching in vain. I was at Crowley’s funeral in 1947. The service at the crematorium.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A lot of his stuff was burned with him.’

  ‘This ring of power?’

  Tempest shrugged.

  ‘But such a ring would survive a fire, surely?’

  ‘If it has the power that is claimed for it.’ Watts put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It’s all nonsense, Avril.’

  She pulled sharply away from him. ‘No. I won’t believe that.’ She thrust her face towards him. ‘You know why they cremated Crowley?’

  ‘Of course. So his grave could not become a shrine or place of pilgrimage.’

  ‘That – and to be sure he couldn’t return. Fire destroys any chance of return. They didn’t want Crowley to be a died and reborn god.’

  ‘He wasn’t a god, Avril. When I knew him he was a drunken, drug-addicted old man wearing rouge and a wig that looked like it belonged on a mop.’

  ‘He had the power.’

  ‘He was self-deluding. The cremation ceremony included his own Hymn to Pan so one local rag described it as a black mass. It wasn’t.’

  ‘They say you could see his spirit rising out of the crematorium’s chimney in the smoke.’

  ‘You couldn’t.’

  She turned away.

  ‘Why did you come, Avril?’ he said, remarkably softly for him.

  ‘I’m on a long journey,’ she said.

  ‘I hope it’s leading somewhere,’ he said. ‘Excuse me a minute.’

  He walked back into the garden. ‘I’m just going to give our guest a lift,’ he called. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  Tempest had recently purchased one of the first Saab convertibles.

  ‘You OK with the roof down?’ he said as he closed Avril’s passenger door.

  She nodded but said nothing, looking straight ahead. Tempest intended to have sex with her somewhere but no layby seemed appropriate. He drove into Richmond Park.

  There was certainly tension in the car. He couldn’t work out whether it was the right tension. He pulled into the car park.

  When he put the roof up she seemed to know what was expected of her.

  They were having sex when the first blackbird hit the canvas roof. He didn’t know it was a blackbird. He thought it was some pervert who’d sneaked out of the bushes. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The last thing he wanted to do was make her pregnant but, startled, he lost control.

  A couple of moments later he glanced up and saw hundreds of black objects plummeting from the sky.

  A blackbird came through the passenger window and landed beside Avril’s head. Her eyes were closed but she turned her head to see this bright orange beak and dead eye beside her. She started to make guttural noises that were not screams but weren’t to do with the sex.

  Blackbirds rained down on the car. Two more came through the open window and landed in the driver’s seat. It took them a minute or so to disentangle then another minute for him to close the windows. A bird struck Tempest a glancing blow on the side of his head.

  Birds were splattered on the windscreen and on the hood. As birds thudded against the canvas above their heads and continued to rattle on the bonnet and boot Tempest was trying to remember his schoolboy physics.

  Galileo had figured out that all free-falling objects fall at the same rate of acceleration. Didn’t he drop a couple of cannon balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Tempest couldn’t recall if anyone had been standing underneath.

  Anyway, a beach ball, an aircraft or a bloody blackbird starting from the same point would all hit his car at the same time. Or was that only in a vacuum?

  And what happened about the weight? Couldn’t a peanut crush your skull if it had fallen far enough before impact? He knew it was something to do with Newton’s second law of motion and the object’s terminal velocity.

  He heard a rip – the very reason his mind was racing around these questions. In practical terms, what chance did a stiffened canvas roof have of withstanding the direct impact of a blackbird that, at the point of contact could, for all Tempest knew, weigh half a ton?

  Then again, the blood dripping into his eyes reminded him, his skull had survived the impact of a blackbird. Perhaps they weren’t falling very far? He grimaced when he realized he was wondering how far they were falling without as
king the more fundamental question: why were they falling at all?

  Another ripping noise, directly above his head. A yellow beak poked through. He immediately thought of the Hitchcock film The Birds. Was this a scene from that? If not, it should have been. He looked at the mound of birds in the driving seat and the back seat, realized several others were crowded round his ankles and one – ugh – lay by his head, a glistening black eye staring up at him. He pushed it to the floor with the back of his hand.

  The difference between what he was experiencing and the film was probably that all these blackbirds were dead. Didn’t seem to help his Tippi Hedron though: Avril had gone into a rigid state of shock.

  Tempest remained protectively hunched over her as the bombardment continued. He didn’t know how long it actually went on – he hadn’t looked at his watch when it started – but by the time it slowed down the roof was pretty much shredded and his windscreen was splintered in a dozen places.

  He and Avril sat in the car a good five minutes after it seemed to have ceased, squashed together in the passenger seat. He could see in the vanity mirror that he had a deep laceration down the side of his head and a bloody gouge in his scalp.

  When the sky was clear of flying objects he opened the car door and stepped out, squelching birds as he did so. The car park was littered with broken-winged, broken-backed birds. It was a dizzy collage of colours – the black of the birds, the yellow of their beaks and the crimson of their blood. Most of them had burst open on impact with the tarmac.

  He helped Avril out and put the back of the passenger seat up. He helped her sit in it. For as far as he could see in the park there were smudges of black. Halfway along the road, a car, dented and buckled, had its windscreen wipers sluggishly smearing the smashed remains of the screen with blood and feathers. A dazed-looking driver stood beside the vehicle, his head tilted back to look up at the sky.

  Tempest glanced at the Saab. A dozen broken birds lay on the remains of the car roof; a dozen more were piled on the buckled bonnet. He looked up. Fluffy white clouds drifted in a turquoise sky. The sun was big and bright.