Mean Spirit

by Rickman, Phil

  Morgan used to operate out of her front parlour in Queens until not too long after Grayle’s column broke the story about her psychic contact with the spirit Beatle. Which – whatever the likes of Lyndon McAffrey said – had seemed genuine enough to Grayle at the time. And, even if it wasn’t, where was the harm? Morgan was a wise, good-natured person who helped people find their true selves. Just that she used to help poor people and now she helped mostly rich people, and had a way of making Grayle feel good about what she did.

  See, Grayle, to people all across the nation – distressed, grief-laden people and those who’re just looking for some kind of celestial light in a gloomy world – you’ve become very essential. You are a crucial conduit in a data flow which begins in the unseen world, passes to people like me and reaches the material world through your column. What you’re doing transcends mere journalism.

  Grayle nodding weakly, figuring Lyndon McAffrey might see it from a different perspective, regarding her column as a useful conduit through which large amounts of money were siphoned into the bank accounts of people like Morgan Schuster.

  And then … So Lucas, the art dealer, is no longer close to the centre of your world, Morgan had said.

  I tell you that?

  You didn’t have to. Morgan looking up, through half-closed eyes.

  There you go. Just when you start putting them down as phoney, up pops a winning number.

  ‘Grayle.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Are you with us, lovely?’ Cindy said.

  ‘Sorry, just … a little nervous. Trying to ground myself.’

  ‘Grayle, I would like you and Marcus to sit on either side of Persephone. But, remember, don’t touch her!’

  Like she was gonna be live with electricity or something? Grayle looked at the dark, sombre Callard and compared her with the flitting, Caspar the friendly ghost figure of Morgan Schuster. She thought, I set this whole thing up. What am I, crazy? Am I sick?

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘And try not to move, whatever happens.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Cindy lit the wick of a tin oil lamp with a match, lowered the glass and placed the lamp on the low window ledge behind Bobby. Next he lit the candle in the bowl on the table. When he put out the lights, shadows leapt and the room shed centuries.

  Grayle heard the normally stoical Malcolm whimpering from the study.

  An explosion of glass in Marcus’s head. Young girls’ trilling screams in the dormitory, then the baying of the headmaster, scared even more witless than usual. What the hell are you doing, Bacton? How dare you let her out? The long, dull-panelled corridor, meagrely lit by economy night lamps. Marcus proceeding slowly along it, as though edging down a railway carriage, to where the child was crouching like a small, wild animal … Don’t move … It wasn’t your fault … Do you understand? … Don’t move … Half expecting her to leap up at him with claws out, like a half-grown, feral kitten.

  ‘Ah, Marcus, my sweet…’

  Lewis’s limp paw on Marcus’s shoulder. He jerked back, as though stung, his fists tightening. The whole situation slipping away from him and into the hands of a madman.

  ‘Try to relax, Marcus,’ Lewis soothed. Like the smarmy, phoney hospital consultant the night his little daughter, Sally, lay dying. ‘Was I not sent here by cunning circumstance?’

  Marcus gripped the seat of his chair. ‘Don’t fuck this up, that’s all.’

  And then, somewhere on the creature’s person, an electronic ululation began. The fool had brought his mobile phone in here.

  Cindy walked quickly out of the room, snatching the phone from his pocket. Forgotten about the thing, he had. Taken it up to High Knoll with him in case there should be a further need to reassure young Jo.

  He moved to the end of the stone passage.

  ‘Lewis here!’

  ‘Cindy, Christ …’

  ‘Jo, I must call you back.’

  ‘Cindy, listen to me … this is like a sick joke … this is the sickest joke you ever heard.’

  ‘Give me two hours, lovely – two hours.’

  ‘No, you listen!’ Jo shrilled like a raging child pulling at its father’s knees. ‘Listen, listen, listen … the Sherwins of Banbury. You remember the Sherwins? Started the whole BMW thing when they bought one each, even the old granny? The Sherwins, Cindy – all the news programmes are asking for the tapes of the Sherwins with their BMWs and their top-of-the-range Barrett home. Oh, God almighty, I can’t believe any of this.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Happened around lunchtime today. The Sherwins had been out to dinner last night with loads of guests and freeloaders and hangers on, as usual, and they didn’t get back until late and so they all slept in, in a big way, and it’s thought one of them got up, still half-pissed, wandered into the kitchen for a snack, left something on the posh built-in cooker hob, or the built-in bloody spit …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they’re all dead, the stupid irresponsible bastards! The Barrett home’s a smoking ruin, the BMWs are reduced to blackened shells in the quadruple garage. You do remember the Sherwins, Cindy? You remember Kelvyn Kite cackling on your arm. It’ll all end in tears, mark my words, it’ll all end in tears!’

  Cindy walked out into the treacherous night, through the uncaring wind, the spiteful rain. Crying to the elements.

  What was happening?

  He pushed his forehead into the cold, wet castle wall, sensing the blood and the flames of its history, the screams and roars of some small medieval massacre mingling with the screams of the burning Sherwins, the roar of the fire. Had they been screaming, trapped, or were they quietly suffocated in their beds, mother and father and daughter and son? And granny, owner of a silver-grey Series Seven BMW that she would never drive.

  Above the screams and the blood and the shrivelling, crackling flesh rose the shrieking of the Kite.

  End in tears, end in tears.

  End in the cardiac unit …

  Cindy pulled the mobile phone from his pocket and hurled it high over the smashed castle wall.

  Fly … fly like a kite …

  He thought could hear the tinny techno-treble of its call as it fell among the ancient ramparts.

  XXXIII

  DEBUSSY’S SIRENS CALL HIM BACK.

  Oh, he knows Debussy. Poor Claude – now there was a frustrated shaman. Called him an impressionist composer, they did; he hated that, although, yes, his music responded to light.

  The light below the surface.

  Cindy slides damply, uncomfortably, into the candlelit barn room, where no-one is speaking, the ethereal music wafting from a boom box on which the legend XtraBass is inscribed, silver on black.

  Marcus glances suspiciously up at him, twin candles in his glasses. But Marcus, for all his rage, must be calmer here than anywhere, for this is Mrs Willis’s room.

  Cindy prays silently for the essence of Mrs Willis to be here with them tonight. Mrs Willis and all her healing. For Cindy knows that the old woman was once Annie Davies, the child who met the Lady who stepped from the sun up on High Knoll on a midsummer morning. Up on the Knoll, Cindy called to Annie to join him on his meditative journey to gather in the last of the light. And then collected seventeen small stones in his case.

  The stones are now placed unobtrusively around the room, creating a second, larger circle around the chairs. Going to need all the light they can get tonight, for there’ll be none from Persephone Callard.

  Cindy approaches the boom box, turns down the volume until the level of the music is no higher than that of the wind, then seats himself in the chair nearest the door, next to the empty chair which, on his instruction, is directly opposite Persephone Callard’s. Cindy clears his throat.

  ‘We should have a few more minutes’ quiet, my friends. Then we shall begin. Calling on the Brightness to surround us as we summon, from another place, the presence clinging to Persephone. When we begin, try not to look at one another. Part
icularly, try not to look at Persephone.’

  Who sits, in all her sphinx-like beauty, with her hands upon her knees, so still – and yet he senses a great activity around her, like a cloud of moths around a garden lamp.

  Bobby Maiden gives her periodic sidelong glances.

  Oh dear.

  The poor boy. Afraid for her. And, of course, besotted, like many before him – Cindy’s view is that the men she’s been with over the years will have fallen generally into two types: the ones who are a little scared of her, who like being scared of her – some Gothic masochism thing – and the ones who want to get into her … sex being only the beginning of the supernaturally enhanced relationship they are going to have.

  Cindy, however, is feeling for common ground – yes, the shaman’s role is also to commune with spirits, but in a less claustrophobic sense than the medium. To channel unseen energies, to ride the green ray, to connect people with the spirit of their ancestors and of their place, in a healing way, a connecting way, thus overcoming the acute sense of alienation which so afflicts modern societies. All rather less, shall we say, domestic than the spiritualist. Less domestic and perhaps less – Cindy would never dare say this aloud – mean-spirited.

  Which is to say that the Celtic shaman would not normally consider it seemly to communicate with the essences of dead individuals.

  Tonight, however … Well, tonight Cindy’s role may be one of interception. If it comes through, he must catch it, hold it within the circle. No pussyfooting. He wants answers.

  Debussy has finished. All is silent. Cindy lets it lie for a moment.

  ‘Persephone?’ he whispers at last.

  She nods.

  ‘When you are ready,’ he says steadily.

  She does not respond at once. Cindy glances at Grayle’s soft, candlelit blondeness. She is looking past Persephone at Bobby, half lit by the hurricane lamp behind him. Grayle’s face is solemn. Probably since a night of thunder and lightning and death at the Rollright Stones, little Grayle has been hiding, even from herself, certain feelings for Bobby Maiden. Oh dear, oh dear, so many complications. Such an emotional tapestry is hardly the safest backdrop for the theatre of souls.

  ‘The …’ Persephone’s voice is cracked ‘the line …’ She swallows.

  The calm is fractured, Cindy sensing a sudden acute trepidation in the part of her – the personality – which must now allow itself to be pushed into the back seat. He closes his eyes and opens his hands in his lap, sending her the steel-blue light of fortitude.

  She breathes out once, through her mouth, a long and hollow breath, like the sound from a seashell or a cave.

  ‘Haaaaaaaaaw.’

  Cindy opens his eyes, focuses on the middle distance.

  ‘The lines are open,’ Persephone Callard states. Though it is little more than a croak.

  Seconds later the first indication is from the dog. Malcolm howls once, pitifully, far away in Marcus’s study, another world.

  Marcus’s eyes flicker up at once, in concern, and Cindy gives him a hard look – stay.

  Marcus subsides. Malcolm subsides, but Cindy knows the dog is panting now, in fear, as some animals do during an electric storm. He will crawl under Marcus’s desk and lie there, trembling.

  The air in here feels thin – like the air, it is said, on the top of a high mountain. It is a sensation Cindy has experienced – for reasons, of course, other than altitude – upon Cader Idris, the sacred mountain of Snowdonia and, most joyously, on little Carn Ingli, near his home.

  It is not so joyous here. The candle flame grows longer and, under the whine of the wind, there is a scratching, like rats, at the wall, from outside.

  Next to him the sixth chair creaks. ‘Oh God,’ Grayle whispers.

  Marcus frowns. Cindy’s eyes meet Grayle’s and he sends a shushing across the space between them. Don’t look at the sixth chair.

  But Bobby it is who stirs. Standing up quickly. Looking confused, glancing from side to side. He walks out of the circle.

  Stop him?

  Wait a moment.

  A tiny chittering voice in the corner of the room becomes louder, passes through the chair circle, is gone like a breath of wind. Perhaps only Cindy has heard it. But, no … there’s a sharp glance from Marcus; he has picked up the sound and Cindy can almost read his growling thoughts.

  You and your bastard ventriloquism.

  Marcus will always be the first to suspect Cindy, but Cindy knows that the little, chittering voice was the voice of the spirit which draws back the curtain.

  And that the lines are indeed open now.

  He sees that Bobby has returned. The boy has on his knees one of the office jotters. He’s watching Miss Callard most keenly, his hand moving on the pad.

  The rain beats on the long window. Reminds Grayle how, one time – the only time – she saw what might have been a ghost. Or something.

  Not so very long ago, on an autumn day, she was alone in the rain up on High Knoll and she saw this little girl, who could not have been there. A little girl in blue who ran in the rain, was part of the rain – ran and ran in the same patch of crystal rain, getting nowhere. Not existing outside of the rain. And Grayle ran, too, terrified, all the way down the hill, to where Bobby Maiden found her and brought her to Marcus and Marcus’s whisky. A day of destiny, though she couldn’t have known it, her future being shaped around her as she shivered in the rural rain.

  Through the rain noise, she’s heard Callard say,

  The lines are open.

  Well, sure, big deal.

  The candle flame is, like, two inches long. Grayle looks away from it, down at her sneakers. Though she feels safe with these people – with most of these people – one thing she isn’t gonna do is look at that goddamn sixth chair, get into some stupid hallucination trip, like no way.

  Marcus ponders. Those small voices, meaningless as twittering birds … certainly possible that Lewis could have been doing that; in this light he needn’t even worry about being seen to move his lips. Equally – there was a radio, wasn’t there, in that ghetto-blaster thing of Underhill’s? Perhaps it had activated itself when the CD ended. Or perhaps Lewis himself … Yes, it was Lewis who turned the music down. The creature was a conjuror for a while wasn’t he … devious bastard.

  Lewis says, ‘It’s here, isn’t it, Persephone?’

  Marcus stares through the candle at Lewis and then, boldly, angrily, at the sixth chair.

  Seeing nothing there but a fucking chair.

  The nearness of Seffi Callard. The erotic sound of her breathing in a darkened room. Bobby Maiden can’t stop thinking about Seffi Callard and he wonders if she can feel his longing, rising like the candle flame.

  His right hand, tight around the pencil, moves across the pad. Across the space between their chairs, she seems to reach out and touch his hand with one long finger.

  Bobby Maiden shudders with a sudden rush of passion for her that’s far more complex than desire. He needs to draw her face, convey the weight of her hair, the dark lamps of her eyes.

  And Cindy’s brain pulses with the sudden sense of something violently squalid, poisonously shrivelled.

  Assailed now by the stench of a lavatory lust, so strong and physical that he wants to run from the room before it sucks him into that steaming, sordid pit on the edge of which – more than once, to his shame – he has teetered.

  Cindy is badly shocked, close to panic, almost wrenches his chair away from it, from whatever monstrosity is forming like a gas in the chair next to his own. It is with enormous difficulty that he keeps his voice low and steady.

  ‘Talk to it, Persephone.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Try,’ Cindy hisses, teeth clenched.

  ‘I don’t know what to call him.’

  ‘Ask for a name.’

  Persephone sits with her spine straight, her hands clasped in the lap of her skirt.

  She says, her voice robotic, ‘What’s your name?’

 
Cindy urgently visualizes the seventeen little stones – under the window, at the foot of the shelves, beneath the computer table – and, with a burst of will-power, makes them glow.

  Persephone says, stronger now, ‘What’s your name?’

  Cindy conjures in his head the sound of a drum beating, his own drum, his painted bodhran (knowing that the drum, lying on the back seat of his car, will now be vibrating).

  ‘Who are you?’ Persephone cries in anguish. ‘Who are you, who are you, WHO ARE YOU?’

  The drum is beating on its own, Cindy thinking rapidly: this business of No Name indicates not so much the absence of a name but that Persephone refuses to hear it. Refuses to confront the possibility – Grayle, it was, suggested this and Grayle might well be right – that she may, in the time-honoured, deliberate formality of the seance, be conjuring a personification of her despised art at its most foetid and contemptible, summoning a spirit of the lowest order, comprised of spittle-like strands of sick longing.

  You and I, we are prisoners in the same old, mildewed tower.

  ‘Ask its name, Persephone!’

  ‘He won’t … tell me.’

  He. Always he. Part of the denial. Giving it maleness, giving it a hard, damaged face.

  ‘All right. All right then …’

  The drum beating louder in his head, the circle of seventeen stones glowing brightly there, Cindy braces himself, aware that what he is about to suggest is not terribly wise. It will bring with it pain and suffering, awaken memories of old, foul dreams.

  ‘Throw it to me,’ Cindy says lightly, and turns to look directly at the sixth chair. ‘Throw him to me, lovely.’

  * * *

  His hands, both of them, moving rapidly on the pad, Maiden is becoming aware of a surge of enthusiasm, a sense of violent arousal. His thumb is smudging the freshly laid pencil shading into misted whorls as he sculpts the face.