‘What is your name?’ Mr Geddes repeated in a moment, in the same tone, with its note of compelled severity. Gerald suddenly drew in the chilled, still air with a gasp; he had been holding his breath.
Again, Mrs Pearson’s body did not move nor any voice come from it. Gerald, from his height, could look down on the slits of the eyes; his thoughts began to wander, and he recalled the glistening green surface of a pond near his home; brilliant as gems, suggesting some marvellous Byzantine or Hindu pavement, that would part and reveal darkness and slime beneath.
The patient question, and the silence that answered it, proceeded without pause.
His wandering thoughts were recalled to the enclosed circle that was the room after what seemed a very long time; there had occurred, he realized, a change in the sensation that had held his body interminably; the faintest lessening in the grip of the cold.
Another fifty or so repetitions of Mr Geddes’s question into that furious silence, and Gerald was certain. He moved the muscles of his chilled shoulders cautiously. Something was building up in the room that was driving back the cold. It was invisible and it was silent. But he felt it.
It, whatever it might be, was beginning to fill the space about the bed where they stood. They were surrounded, lapped, bathed in it. Freshets of power, Gerald thought, that will swell to a river, to a flood, and at last to the colossal strength of the sea.
His dreaming stare, fixed unseeingly on Mr Geddes, was disturbed by a sudden gesture. Mr Geddes had wiped his forehead. He took his own stare from the creature coiled in the bed and looked across at Gerald and nodded.
Gerald parted his lips. They parted stickily and with difficulty.
‘What is your name?’ he began.
The last light was beginning to wane down into the west, and the roofs were darkening against the sky; the confused roar of returning traffic had subsided into its usual ominous drone. A window opposite sprang suddenly into yellow light. Gerald heard his own voice, sounding gentle, almost casual.
‘What is your name?’
Into the silence. A brief pause; the voice of twenty-seven years moves more quickly than that of sixty-odd.
‘What is your name?’ And silence, and no movement, and Pearson’s head lifted, listening, and again ‘What is your name?’ into the rebutting, furious, fighting silence.
Gerald felt that his quiet voice could not be of any use, it was weak and inept. But at the same time he could feel himself drawing upon the power that was building up, and instinct told him strongly not to force any change into his level, almost relaxed, tone. He could feel the power; there was no human word for it, nor any picture of it in his mind’s eye; but it was strength, and he could draw from it, and when he drew from it, it was not lessened but increased. Knowing nothing of its nature, suspecting all, he feared to change even the position of his hands, that he had begun by clasping tightly, feeling them slippery with sweat and trembling, and presently found linked, and unmoving, and cool.
At some moment in time – it may have been just after nine, for he seemed to remember having heard chimes striking from some church in the world outside the room – he came, as it were, back into consciousness and heard himself ask, ‘What is your name?’ It was the sixth-hundredth time, because he was young and strong, but the remote sound of the hour striking threw him off his balance, and his concentration faltered for an instant. He looked across at Mr Geddes, who, lifting his head slightly, at once began.
‘What is your name?’
They had not moved from their places. Sweat poured down under their clothes, draining away energy from their bodies. But, precisely as a stream replaces the water pouring through its bed with an endless benison of more from the source, so Power poured through them, channels that they were; that they had allowed themselves to become.
All this time they had not looked at Pearson. He had remained half-lying beside the bed, from which he had slid on to his knees, motionless except for an occasional twitch of his limbs, while his eyes unmovingly watched the face on the pillows.
But, in a moment when Mr Geddes was passing the task over to Gerald, he did glance down at Pearson, and he experienced a second’s dismay. The man’s face expressed an unmistakable fierce hope. It’s too soon to hope, Mr Geddes thought dimly, and then thought – all thought – faded again as he rested (he could rest now) on the Rest in the room. And the hours passed.
It was at the two thousandth asking that the change came. Mr Geddes had spoken the question; he did not know that now his voice was as if rock itself had been given vocal chords, or steel could speak.
‘What is your name?’ he demanded.
Then the head on the pillow rolled right round and the eyes stared at him and the thing behind their slits, struggling like an impaled snake, shrieked, ‘No – no!’
The protest whistled through the air, unstirred for hours by any sounds except those of the question, seeming to cut it; it was thinner, higher, shriller than the keenest audible sound; indeed, it was only just audible.
Mr Geddes started forward.
‘Your name – tell me your name!’ he thundered, transformed, towering. ‘In the Name of Jesus of Nazareth the Christ – your name!’
‘Your name …’ Gerald repeated softly and almost dreamingly; he was a channel worn down to its bed, too exhausted to produce more than echo of the older priest’s words. Years of experience and of unquestioning, unfaltering, unself-conscious giving, had enabled Mr Geddes to lay himself open more completely to the Power on which they were drawing.
‘Your name!’ Mr Geddes called again. The room, the streets lying beyond, the sky with its bright risen stars, were held and locked and cradled within the Power.
The green eyes rolled upwards, almost disappearing into the head and displaying whites milky and flecked with emerald; Mrs Pearson’s lips parted and out into the room fled a single sound.
It was almost visible; so dry and glittering with malice was it; but it made no syllables recognizable by human ears. It was kin, in its un-humanity, to the snake’s voice and the hissing of sand blown along by the wind. Yet it came through from a world belonging to neither. Instantly, on the rustling past of this sound that was a name into the presence of the Power, there followed a new sound.
It was a voice, human, yet not human, coming to their ears with a sense of exquisite refreshment because, for the first time since the exorcism had begun, they heard a sound that was beautiful. This voice, also, came from the lips of Mrs Pearson; and neither of them ever spoke, afterwards, to the other of their mutual astounding conviction that there had been in it a note of holy triumphant laughter.
‘Peace,’ it said to them, ‘be at peace, I have her now. Come with me’ – and it uttered the sound that was the creature’s name – ‘come. Out of her.’
And that was all. When that voice ceased, a silence began that was different. Something was beginning to withdraw from the room, whence the paralysing cold had already retreated. Gerald became aware that he was stiflingly hot; of course, the electric fire was full on, and it was a summer night – Midsummer Eve … he wrenched his thoughts back, with an effort.
Mrs Pearson’s body lay on the bed, empty. The mask-like and shell-like change had taken place. She had gone, and the temple was void. There was not a shred or shadow of hope about that going and that emptiness. The shell, inhabited, had been so pretty, and one man had loved it so much, and now it was a white peace.
That man was edging himself along the bed towards it.
The two watched, breathing heavily in silence, too tired to move, for a moment; then Mr Geddes lurched stiffly forward, holding out a hand in protest.
But Pearson had wrapped his arms around the body, in frenzy, calling her name. Gerald’s strength was returning. He gripped him by the shoulders, trying to lift him away, speaking quietly because of the presence of the dead.
‘Don’t, don’t do that – leave her alone – it’s all right – it’s all right now, I tell you, it’s a
ll right.’ But Pearson neither ceased his writhing nor his frantic cries.
A current of cool air suddenly flowed over Gerald; Mr Geddes had staggered to the window and with an effort hauled down the heavy sash. He stood, gaspingly breathing in the air’s refreshment, then came back to the bed.
Gerald, taking away his hands from Pearson’s shoulders, turned to him helplessly.
Suddenly, Pearson was quiet. They watched him, surprised, their thoughts suspended for an instant; then Gerald sprang forward to catch his hand.
But he was not in time; it had been crawling to his pocket and then to his mouth while they were only hearing his cries and seeing his writhing body.
There followed a time so dreadful that their nerves were not capable of responding, and they felt nothing and could do no more than hold his arching body between their feeble, horrified hands, their eyes fixed upon his face, where a desperate eagerness struggled with the appalling agony.
They heard him gasp something in another language through the foam on his lips, and then they saw the spirit shoot out of him – go, in a kind of leap, a frenetic haste, as if it had literally sprung away after her.
They lowered the body on to the bed. ‘Thank God in His mercy,’ Mr Geddes said weakly, in a moment, ‘much the best thing. Much the best.’
He wiped his forehead.
‘That’s right,’ as Gerald drew something over the awful face, ‘cover him up, poor chap. Poor chap. I – poor chap.’ There was a pause. ‘Upon my word I – will you go down and telephone the police? I’ll be with you in a moment … Tell them – I’ll be with you in a moment. Tell them to hold on – I’ll speak to them. I’ll be with you in a moment.’
He lowered himself to his knees, beside the bed, pressing with both hands to support his trembling body. But nothing, no words, came. He merely knelt there, shaking violently and feeling, through the darkness between the palms covering his face, the presence of the two deserted shells lying side by side, a few inches from his bent head.
When, after some minutes, he looked up, and out at the world again, the first sight that met his eyes was a mighty star, flashing in the darkness through the open window.
It had not the five needle-points which man’s imagination has given to the star, but was a great blur of light, a finger-shaped burning, lying along the blue cavern made in space by its own sovereign flame.
36
The suicide of Pearson attracted little attention.
There was a third of a column in the local paper, and that was all.
Gerald reproached himself, afterwards, for enjoying his caricature of a ‘pale young curate’, with his ‘shocking’ and his ‘very sad’, and his apparently simple-hearted rejoicing over the happy settlement of the two old ladies left in Rose Cottage: they were to keep house for a nephew living in the country. And had the young reporter heard that Rose Walk and the two cottages were coming down? Camden Council was to make an Adventure Playground on the site.
He wondered, fantastically, while he was seeing the reporter out of the Vicarage door, whether any of the black and white and brown children who would play there would ever meet with another kind of adventure, from a haunter lingering starvedly by that levelled ground? But he did not think so; he could hear the voice that had rescued her yet; it rang in his inward ear, and he felt certain that she would not again come through to Earth.
Some weeks went quietly past for the Barnes sisters.
Gladys had been reduced to saying at intervals that it never rained but it poured. Shock upon shock! And now the Walk coming down. But that, stupendous event though it was, would not, thank God, affect them. They were going to live with Georgie.
Though Gladys was always loyal to the past and a great repeater of old saws and songs and reminiscences, she also lived for something to look forward to, an attitude not affected by her passionate relish for, and enjoyment in, what was happening now. She was thus suspended, most enviably, in three worlds all equally pleasurable. She was also unendurably irritating to people whose feelings were deeper.
So lively was her talk and manner, on the evening six weeks later when they were sitting on Osney station, awaiting Georgie and the car, that Annie told her for goodness’ sake to be a bit quiet.
‘What for?’ Gladys stared. ‘No-one to hear me, is there?’
The surprisingly large station was, indeed, deserted. No-one had got off the train except themselves. Osney station was due for closure; it lay at the end of a branch-line that was the middle of a satisfactory chain leading to off-the-mapness, and it was four miles from Osney village. It could have just as well been called Clinton-by-Bede.
‘I should think they was glad to see the last of us,’ said Annie.
‘Who was, I should like to know?’
‘Them in the train.’
‘Oh – them.’ Gladys looked joyfully round at the dim sweep of platform, the afterglow touching the white chimneys of an intimidatingly large hotel looking aloofly down at them in their hollow, and finally at their collection of shabby bundles. ‘Lot of miseries. What say we go up and wait outside?’
‘Up all them stairs? Oh Glad, I can’t. I’m that tired.’
‘Tired? You been sitting down two hours.’
‘Well, I am. And all that stuff to carry.’
‘Oh come on. I’ll help you. We don’t want to bring Georgie down all this way.’
Collecting their carrier-bags, and Annie’s old friends the coats, and their small ancient suitcases and their paper parcels, they made their way slowly along the platform and across a bridge that offered them a view of quiet fields, fading into a twilight misty with heat, below a cloudy sky flooded with rose-red. Annie paused, partly to ease her aching arms and partly to consider the prospect. But she said nothing: she was thinking vaguely that it looked lonely but not sad. A distant scream recalled her. ‘Not a sign of him!’
She found Gladys in not quite amiable conversation with the elderly ticket collector in charge at the exit.
‘What – no caff, not even a refreshment room?’ she was exclaiming; on their previous visit they had been carried off so briskly by Georgie that they had had no opportunity to investigate the resources of Osney station. ‘I couldn’t half do with a cuppa and my sister’s wore out.’
‘There’s the Ladies. On the platform,’ said the collector, lingering at the open door of a little office where a storage-heater, turned off for the summer months, offered its sole and sullen company in the long twilight. There was also the scent of hay and dew, but that was not company.
‘Thank you for nothing – I should think so,’ said Gladys. ‘We just come all that way up.’
‘There’s a waiting-room, I meant,’ and he returned into his cell.
Gladys marched out through the dusky little entrance, past the ticket office, and piled her parcels on a melancholy old seat with a damaged back. The hotel, glowing with discreet lights and hung with flowery window baskets, still stared aloofly. A pale road, lampless, bordered by a dusty tall hedge, wandered off into the unknown under the fading pink sky. The air was silent and very warm.
‘Can’t go in there, cost the earth,’ said Gladys, studying the hotel with a stare as critical as its own. ‘Don’t expect he’ll be long.’ She sat down.
‘Had a breakdown, p’raps,’ suggested Annie.
‘Go on, be cheerful,’ said Gladys mechanically. She turned to her sister, ‘Best put one of them round you, catch your death,’ and she snatched a coat from her unresisting arm and draped it carefully round her shoulders, in spite of Annie’s protest that she was ‘boiling alive now’.
They sat beside their bulging parcels and composed themselves for a wait. At intervals, Gladys got up, explored the outside of the station, peered in through the window, not without mutters, at the collector reading his paper by the dim yellow light of a gas lamp beside the unsympathetic person of the storage heater, and returned to her seat.
‘’Ere he is!’ cried Annie, as a car approached, announci
ng its arrival moments in advance by the comet of its headlights flaring some miles down the road. But it dwindled into the distance, with an appearance of heartlessness.
‘I can’t get over it all,’ Annie murmured presently, ‘seems like a dream. I keep thinking about young Erika. Going to be a nurse. Paying for her and everything (not what Government won’t help). She’ll make a fine little nurse.’
‘If she don’t stifle the poor souls smoking,’ was Gladys’s detached comment, without removing her severe gaze from the view, growing ever more lost in twilight, down the road. ‘What I can’t get over is Mrs L. coming back to our church – used to tell me she was fed up with it. Always saying so. Keeping on about it. Used to say she envied me. A bit soft, I always thought.’
‘She ’ad a fright, Glad. A bad fright.’
Indeed, the fright had been bad; it was quite a year before Mrs Lysaght recovered herself sufficiently to resume her picking of ecclesiastical holes and her badgering of Mr Geddes and her alleged study of esoteric religions.
‘That Mrs Geddes was ever so kind, I will say,’ Gladys said presently, ‘it’s a draughty old place, I wouldn’t live there for keeps not if you was to pay me, and there wasn’t never enough tea –’
‘You was everlasting saying so.’
‘– and they got you down, going off to pray and that, and those black robes. I didn’t half want to laugh the first time they come in the kitchen wearing them things.’
‘But they was ever so nice to us, Glad.’
‘And that old rackman. Doing himself in. Best thing for him, wasn’t it – poor Mrs P. But it’s all for the best,’ she ended vaguely, and added a comment which, in this case, was true, ‘merciful release, really. Send Mrs Geddes a card at Christmas.’
‘I’m that thirsty,’ Annie was beginning, then broke off with a pleased cry as a biggish car, driven at a reassuringly sane pace, bumped gently round a corner from a lane, which they had not observed, at the side of the station. Both got up, peering anxiously.
Starlight (Vintage Classics) Page 29
