by Nick Brown
He looked at Giles for a reaction. Got none. Giles was lost in some interior daze. The events of the night were proving too much for him. He mumbled, as much to himself as to Davenport:
“A crow spoke to me, a crow; it spoke to me, what’s go…”
The front doorbell rang and in the quiet of the night it sounded strangely strident. As if summoned by bells, the figure on the bed opened its eyes and spoke.
“I have been anointed.”
Chapter 29: The Beguiling
Maybe Viv should have thought more carefully about how the message had found its way on to her personal cell phone before accepting the invitation. Only a handful of people had that number, people she loved and trusted. She certainly hadn’t given it to anyone outside that close circle.
It was only when she was halfway to Skendleby that she began to think at all: before that it was like a type of autopilot had governed her actions. When the intellect kicked back in it commenced with raising the obvious questions. The first was prompted by the traffic reports on the local radio. According to the giggly reporter, the region was afflicted by snowstorms of an apocalyptical severity. These rendered road use at best extremely hazardous and at worst impossible.
So why was she making such good progress? She’d been aware of the snow when she set out and could see it hovering around her but, here she was, driving comfortably at the maximum speed allowed. Now she was almost there, the ‘there’ being a country bistro across the road from the Hanging Man. As she turned left opposite the pub she saw that its car park was snow shrouded and empty.
The bistro car park wasn’t, it had a light sprinkling and a couple of parked cars, and yet she could see snow gusting in the orange glare of the streetlamp. It was as if the weather itself had opened a passage through the snow for her to follow. If she could have isolated and analysed the impulse that catapulted her out into the winter night towards this strange encounter then she might have put it down to instinct and the lack of any other leads. But…
But that wasn’t what it was down to. She’d gone because she’d felt compelled. She was a woman of sharp intellect but she’d driven off into a blizzard to meet someone she feared in a remote setting. Even as a plot device in the most tawdry of soaps she’d have hooted in derision. In real life she’d lived it.
She opened the car door and the cold hit her, bringing her to her senses. She could be snowed up here while her officers needed her. A couple of miles down the twisting lanes behind the bistro lay the Skendleby mound. It was the unbidden and unwelcome image of this prehistoric burial mound, lying forbidding and bleak beyond the woods that sent her scurrying across the frozen surface of the car park towards the comforting light that poured out through the bistro windows.
Inside, in the cosy subdued lighting, it was warm and comforting. A Christmas tree twinkling near a log fire at the far end contrasted oddly with the two olive trees growing from huge terracotta pots just inside, flanking the entrance. A smiling woman appeared from behind the bar and took her coat, saying:
“Your friend’s over there in the alcove, she’s ordered you a drink.”
Before she could protest she sensed someone approaching her, and heard a trilling voice.
“Oh, look at you, honey! You must be frozen.”
It was like a dream. But there was nothing dreamlike about the two cold hands that were placed in a proprietarily presumptuous manner on her cheeks, or the deep red lips that brushed hers.
“Come over here to our table and have a drink; what a night we’re going to have, just us two.”
Viv had no choice, one of the cold hands now had hold of hers and was leading her towards the softly lit alcove.
“You’ll love it here, honey, the food’s really good.”
Then, wondering how it had all happened so quickly, Viv was sitting down facing her interlocutor, facing Claire; facing her and knowing why she feared her.
“What’s the matter, honey? You’ve come all the way out here to meet me and now you look like you’ve seen a ghost and want to run off home.”
She paused to pass Viv a glass of white wine before continuing.
“Not that you’ll find it as easy getting back as it was coming.”
Looking out of the window at the swirling snow, Viv realised what she meant but hadn’t time to think on it as Claire said:
“Come on, have a sip of the wine, with that sour look on your face you’re beginning to remind me of a sulky girl I met on Samos. She didn’t want to play either.”
Viv took the glass and gulped at the wine, it was stronger than she’d expected and despite being chilled she could feel it warming her as it travelled down to her stomach.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it? Take another sip.”
She did as she was told, the wine relaxed her, but she wasn’t sure if this was a good thing.
“I’ve already ordered, so we’re not going to be bothered by the staff: at last we can get to know each other properly.”
Viv sat like a rabbit in the headlights and her mind swerved into questioning why she’d chosen to wear a slinky black dress. Knowing she ought to make some attempt at speech she blurted out:
“Will Dr Glover be joining us?”
Claire squealed with laughter.
“Oh, with lines like that you could make a fortune doing ‘stand up’. No, of course he won’t be, think about it: he’d cramp our style.”
Then a waitress appeared, putting a plate of fish mousse with oysters arranged in a circle around it in front of both of them, before swiftly withdrawing. Claire said:
“Come on, eat up; you know what effect oysters have, don’t you?”
Claire refilled the glass that Viv couldn’t remember emptying. She picked it up and drank, then started to eat. The food was delicious, although eating the oysters, which she normally hated, left the salty juice running down her chin. It was like a dream where you can’t control yourself. But she knew she wasn’t dreaming and could see that Claire wasn’t eating.
Then she felt the cold hand through her tights on the inside of her thigh. She hadn’t noticed when Claire had started to touch her and, for reasons she didn’t understand, couldn’t move the hand away.
“You see things, don’t you, honey? Things that other people don’t see, things that you try to pretend aren’t there. But they are there. What do you see when you look at me?”
Viv stared back at her, and what she saw made her forget the hand creeping up the inside of her thigh.
“I’m not sure, sometimes a beautiful woman, but sometimes something else, something I don’t want to…”
Claire cut her off.
“Now you’re talking, that’s better; better for you anyway, so now maybe we can have an enjoyable evening without the nasty stuff being necessary.”
Viv was wondering what Claire meant by the nasty stuff when she became aware that the sharp fingernails were gently tickling the inside of her thigh, near her groin. She felt herself becoming aroused; how could this be happening? Claire’s other hand picked up Viv’s wine glass.
“Drink some more of this, you’ll need it.”
Viv took the glass and emptied it; she was beginning to feel excited in a frighteningly strange way.
“Now you’re going to answer a few questions. If you don’t I’ll take my hand away, and if you give the answers I want then little by little I’ll move it further up. You want that, don’t you, want it badly? You’re excited and terrified, just like I want you to be and believe me, once you’re in that state you’re lost and the only way you can be found again is through doing what I want.”
She was right. Viv’s mind recoiled from the sharp-toothed face whose features were constantly sliding into different shapes and whose dead eyes flickered through all the colours of the spectrum like Christmas lights experiencing a power surge. But her groin was trying to push itself towards the gently teasing fingers. The restaurant seemed to have disappeared. She felt as if her mind was opening up to Clair
e’s to receive something, something she recognised as having been lost, something familiar. She heard Claire say:
“So, answer and perhaps I’ll let you back into your world and you can run off back to London, that’d be a relief, wouldn’t it? Answer well and perhaps if you’re lucky I’ll give you the other relief you need.
“But before you go getting too excited I want you to tell me something about that funny little Greek detective of yours.”
Then, as if from a great height, Viv found herself looking down through a fringe of winter trees at Theodrakis. He was out in the snow, outside an old stone building, she recognised it: the Davenport chapel. What was he doing out there on a night like this? Then she knew, knew what he was after, and the moment she knew she heard Claire’s voice, strained and insistent.
“Yes, yes, nearly there, follow him in, tell me what he sees; do this and I’ll finish it for you.”
But she didn’t and Viv didn’t follow: a voice cut through to them.
“Hiyaa, fancy meeting you here on a night like this?”
The spell was broken. Viv watched Claire jerk backwards into her seat, spitting like a cat at the newcomer who stood smiling at her. Not quite smiling, her eyes weren’t smiling, they were locked onto Claire’s. Then she slipped into the seat across from Claire, the melting flakes of snow on her tight fitting jogging suit dripping on to the cushioned seats. Neither of them spoke. Viv watched, the restaurant staff may as well have been in a different dimension. Time was suspended.
Claire moved her hand forward reaching for Viv, but before it made contact Suzzie Jade’s hand got between them; she held her palm up against Claire’s. There was power passing between these hands, a power transcending anything Viv knew. It was like a display of mime, the hands dancing with each other without touching. Claire’s expression of amused control vanished to be replaced by an expression that suggested bafflement, or maybe just surprise. Then it was over and Claire was walking towards the door in the reconstituted reality of the restaurant.
Suzzie-Jade looked shaken. She said:
“Lucky for you I got here when I did, another moment and it would have been too late and you’d have joined all the others who’ve been used then tossed away.”
There was no trace of wag-speak now. Viv hoped she was dreaming, wanted to wake up, but instead asked:
“What’s happening? What’s happening to me? What are you?”
Suzzie-Jade replied.
“I don’t know, I thought I’d grown out of this when I was little. I don’t know why I’m here, I just know things, they are beginning to come into my mind bit by bit.”
She must have read from Viv’s face that this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. She stopped and started again.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like it’s not real, the purpose is, but that’s beyond anything you’d understand. You only see what’s here, which is a tiny bit of the purpose, just a bit of audit. None of what you see in your consciousness matters at all. The bits you see are no more than steam escaping from a kettle. What’s in the kettle is important but the kettle’s somewhere you couldn’t even imagine. What’s happening here to you isn’t even real. I can’t explain better, it keeps slipping in and out of focus.”
Viv couldn’t take any more of this, she needed to get out. More than anything else she wanted the normality of police HQ. She rose shakily to her feet and traced Claire’s footsteps towards the door. Behind her Suzzie-Jade called:
“You won’t get anywhere tonight and anyway, you’ve been drinking too much.”
Viv ignored her and pulled the door open, only to be hit by a blast of snow carried on freezing air. Screwing her eyes together she blinked into the night. The car park was snowbound, the road closed; beyond the church she could just spot the lights of a council snow plough vainly attempting to extricate itself from a drift. Suzzie-Jade had joined her at the door. She said:
“Don’t worry, they’ll put you up here, it’s all arranged. Oh, and one more thing that has just come to me, you need to listen to that little Greek, you can trust him. I think he knows more about this than any of us.”
Suzzie-Jade blinked her eyes like someone trying to wake up, then she squeezed past Viv and out into the night, immediately disappearing into the snow as her last words were blown back by the wind towards the restaurant.
“See yu laitaa.”
Chapter 30: Within You, Without You
It took Claire some time to recognise it. Recognise her own front door. It took her even longer to figure out what she was doing standing in front of it and where she’d been. In fact, she never made it to the second discovery, her mind being fogged in a mist of amnesia. But she found her key, turned the lock and went in.
It was like seeing the place for the first time. She shrugged off her coat, wondering why it still felt dry despite the snowstorm outside, and draped it over the newel post on the banister. Wandering into the living room, she saw Giles sprawled out on the couch, asleep in front of the wood fire. Poor love, he must have been waiting up for her. She felt a rush of emotion, a surge of love. How long had he been there? She checked her watch; it was after midnight. Where had she been?
Then she noticed on the table by the sofa a wine bottle and two glasses. She picked the bottle up, saw it was Amarone, the wine he’d brought for their first date. It was a romantic gesture he’d obviously intended to reprise tonight, and she saw that he hadn’t finished the bottle; he’d left some for her.
Feeling a wave of sympathy for him she picked the bottle up and poured some into the unused glass. Maybe she should wake him, tell him how much she loved him despite the fact that they seemed to be drifting apart. First, she sniffed the wine in the glass, and the rich scent triggered precious memories.
Then everything began to change; it was like someone had shifted the dial on an old-fashioned radio. All clarity disappeared and she began to feel woozy, like she used to during her episodes. She knew what was going to happen next and the thought filled her with terror.
She was losing herself again, becoming something else, becoming part of something greater, something wild, savage, sensual and evil, but worse than that was the strange warping of her eyesight. She could see other things, other places. Just a few at first but then, like someone had flicked a switch, they were myriad.
Her eyes were seeing multiple images, like a fly’s. But a fly with infinite optical lenses, with each lens accompanied by its own thought process. This legion of minds occupied myriad spaces in myriad dimensions; her grip on the room slackened.
Each individual thought process was subservient to something more powerful and within milliseconds of realising this, her own mind, will and feelings were reduced to an imperceptible fragment of the collective.
A collective memory of a range of creatures, some of which had been human once, whilst others were biologically different in every way. Then, way down in the deepest depths of consciousness, there were things little more than thinking aspects of strange landscapes, strange rocks on dark pyroclastic worlds long since dead or yet to be born.
Amongst these millions of fragments the real Claire shrunk to an imperceptible ripple of which only flickering images survived. This composite in Claire’s form looked down at Giles on the sofa and saw him as weak and contemptible, something that had almost outlived its use and would soon be discarded.
The parasite was controlling her, diminishing her perception as it was all the others it had subsumed across the millennia. So within her form, its latest temporary home, there were myriad visions but one controlling purpose, to which the will of Claire and all the others the parasite had infested were subject.
Now the will was flexing itself, focusing on a single image from Claire’s individual memory bank. An old woman with grey hair, wearing a man’s dark suit and Doc Marten boots. A ridiculous kind-hearted creature and the beloved saviour of Claire’s youth.
As she watched, the old woman, Gwen, picked up her house phone and began to speak. S
he was worried, worried by the disappearance of Marcus Fox, she was fretting that something evil she had thought was vanquished was in fact stirring. Her actions were driven by a growing terror she had trouble keeping in check.
She was speaking to Davenport, the old man who should have died. She was meddling, trying to arrange a meeting of the same fools who had interfered with the resurrection at Skendleby the previous Christmas.
She wouldn’t be allowed to meddle this time. Not now that the coven was gathered, now that the final bone necessary for the rising messiah was almost ready to be cultivated and harvested.
The parasite raised the Amarone bottle to her lips, bit clean through the glass neck and allowed the mix of fragmenting glass and wine to flow down Claire’s throat. Having gargled the last mouthful of wine and glass, she spat it out, laced with blood, over the recumbent form of Giles. Then, pausing only to throw back her head and crow with laughter, Claire passed straight through the wall and out into the wild night.
*******
Suzzie-Jade couldn’t find her keys; in fact, she couldn’t remember having left the house. She was cold so hammered at the door which eventually was opened by the Neanderthal form of Si’s latest minder. He seemed surprised to see her.
“Didn’t know you was out, Mrs C.”
That makes two of us she thought as she pushed past him and into the house. Her memory had been playing her tricks lately, which she ascribed to taking too many of the magic pills that Si brought back from his clubs. She could hear Si talking to himself in the games room as he played on one of his violent killer games. She didn’t want to see more of him than was absolutely necessary so walked up the stairs towards her bedroom. Once inside she sloughed off the lycra running suit and headed naked for the shower.
But the strong flow of hot water failed to calm her the way it usually did. She wasn’t an imaginative women, she focused on what was in front of her and how to put it to best use. She could handle Si, in fact, she’d handled worse than him in the past in her line of business. So what was going wrong?
