by Phil Rickman
‘Need the money. We all need the money. We all compromise ourselves to survive in the bastard material world.’
‘It’s more than that. I need to work.’
She doesn’t need to explain. He was there when she had the near-breakdown that she failed to recognize at the time. There’s two or three silent seconds, then he says,
‘Actually, they contacted me some weeks ago.’
‘Who?’
‘Hunter-Gatherer. Appealing name, but that’s where it ends. Patronizing bastards said they were looking for what they described as “opinionated enthusiasts”. Lot of psycho-babble about a multi-disciplinary approach to unscrambling the paranormal. Believers and sceptics in lengthy, exhaustive and, ah, heated discussions over a period of a week. Live, apparently. Teenager who rang, to her credit, had clearly never heard of me.’
‘Whoa… hold it there, Marcus, let me get this right – you’re telling me you’re involved in this project?’
Marcus coughs.
‘Would have done it. Gather the money’s not inconsiderable. Possibly more than I’ve made in the past decade.’
‘So…’
‘Anderson said no. Thinks I’d be in cardiac bastard arrest before the first night was out.’
‘Well… I mean, she knows her stuff, Marcus.’
‘Threatened to alert them to my medical history.’
‘Well, I don’t really think—’
‘What medical history? It was a minor cardiac blip. Unlikely to recur, especially considering the way that woman restricts my diet. Virtually living off bastard cabbages now.’
‘Marcus…’ Grayle’s picturing Sister Anderson standing in the doorway, behind an acid smile. ‘You do realize they’d have you checked over by a doctor before they even drew up the contract?’
‘Bastards.’
‘The way it is these days.’
‘So they asked me if I’d be a consultant. For their research. I declined. Book to write. Besides, the money would be somewhat less if I wasn’t on camera. Can’t be arsed.’
There’s another silence. The likely truth is he couldn’t stand to be on the outside looking in. Grayle stares into her coffee where shapes are starting to coalesce. Lengthy, exhaustive…? The programme is clearly not shaping up to be what she figured.
‘When did all this happen, Marcus? When did you talk to them?’
‘Some weeks ago.’
‘After I told you my job was hovering over the dumpster?’
‘Possibly.’
‘So, like, was this… you? You offered to put them on to someone you knew who was a professional journalist with knowledge of the… paranormal milieu?’
He kind of rumbles for a while.
‘Indirectly,’ he admits.
‘And you didn’t think to ask me first?’
‘You’d probably’ve refused. Are you telling me you wouldn’t, Underhill? Which is why I thought it might be more expedient if they got at you through your employers. Who might think of a way of handling it, out of pure self-interest. Clean break, no guilt.’
Grayle pushes away the coffee, sits up, changes ears with the phone.
‘Marcus, you…’ She speaks slowly. ‘If I remember rightly, you were the one pushed me out of the weird stuff. Back into real life? The New Age carnival was over. You said that.’
‘Meant the cheesecloth and scented candles bollocks, that was all.’
‘Secular society, now, no going back. No Bible Belt buffer in the UK, so the churches are closing down faster than pubs. And you get fired for wearing religious symbolism, unless you’re Islamist, in which case we kiss your ass so you won’t kill us, and that just makes it worse. You said all of that, if you recall.’
‘You already knew all that. It was what depressed you.’
Sure. Still in her thirties and already a walking anachronism.
‘But you haven’t changed,’ Marcus says. ‘Have you? You’ve just gone underground. And angry, perhaps?’
Anger. Like he could talk. But, yeah, that was an unexpected development. You get helplessly angry at being labelled a fruit-cake, screaming inside yourself at people’s self-satisfied complacency, their contempt for any form of self-development, any yearning for transcendence. Like your old man, he of the New England intelligentsia, who thinks—
‘What the hell are you doing to me here, Marcus?’
‘Thought I was keeping you in remunerative work, Under-hill, but if you’re going to throw it in my face—’
‘I’m just wary, is all. Can’t quite get my head around what they’re planning for Knap Hall, and if—’
‘Where?’
‘Forget it.’
So they didn’t tell him the location. Damn, damn, damn.
‘Knap Hall, eh? Surely that’s where the Ansell woman—’
‘Marcus… I never told you that. You hear me, Marcus?’
‘Of course you didn’t. Interesting.’ Pause. ‘Is it?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Yes. OK, yes, it is. It seemed at first to be a documentary about Trinity Ansell escaping the modern age and the pressures of celebrity by buying a haunted house… and still playing the celebrity. Go figure…’
‘Evidently more than that.’
‘Well, yeah, now looks like they want to use her to kick off some high-powered debate on the validity of ghosts. There’s apparently a long, possibly secret history of the paranormal at Knap Hall that I’m supposed to find out about. What I found was that Trinity Ansell had developed an obsession about Katherine Parr? Buried up at Sudeley Castle? Trinity played her in a movie, didn’t seem to want to let go of the role. They died at the same age, both in circumstances linked to… procreation. So in my report to HGTV, I speculate that Trinity had become so locked into it all that when she found out she was pregnant she started to worry that the same thing might happen to her – that she’d die in childbirth? So she goes away without her husband, takes an abortion pill. And then has a heart attack.’
‘Hope she got a better send-off than Parr,’ Marcus says.
‘Meaning?’
‘Married a little too quickly after Henry. Not seen as terribly respectful, that. When she popped her plimsolls a year or two later, didn’t exactly get a royal burial. Just put into the ground or an ordinary sort of tomb. Such a cursory job that her body turned up again. In the ruins of the chapel at Sudeley after the castle got trashed during the Civil War, century or so later. Awfully well preserved, apparently. The body.’
‘Wasn’t in a red dress, was it?’
‘Discreetly reburied and then, in Victorian days, finally gets the fancy memorial. Underhill…’ Marcus’s voice has softened, become curious. ‘Ansell’s death happened somewhere else, didn’t it?’
‘At a holiday cottage owned by her parents. Never came back to Knap Hall. Memorial service in Gloucester Cathedral attended by movie stars and county gentry. You’re saying no one could think she was haunting Knap Hall if she died someplace else?’
‘No, not at all. In theory, it’s more of a reason for her essence to be drawn back there. As I understand it, that house was the focus of all the woman’s hopes and dreams and desires. That house is her.’
‘Was her. It’s kind of gone to seed. You read much about her?’
‘Couldn’t avoid her, living in the Cotswolds. Does Knap Hall have other ghosts?’
‘Maybe. Nothing too significant, far as I can make out.’
‘Won’t matter,’ Marcus says. ‘All these TV bastards want is Ansell. You must realize that.’
Grayle yawns.
‘I guess.’
This night, she dreams of Ersula again and wakes up suddenly in the dark.
Listening to the sporadic traffic. Thinking of when she and Ersula, on holiday with their parents in New Mexico, found their mutual love of fairy tales morphing into something more purposeful. Slipping into a sandstone cemetery at nightfall, crouching behind graves, watching shadows. When they were kids and Ersula hadn’t yet discovered scienc
e and was happy to follow Grayle on a ghost hunt. Before she left Grayle behind in la-la land.
You, their father said once to the adult Grayle, almost spitting it down the phone. You with your primitive, infantile obsessions…
Breaking off, not finishing the sentence with it’s your fault… you killed her.
Thus robbing the world of a superior mind.
Second time, we got it right. Dr Erlend Underhill has always left that unsaid. She tries to blank him out. But what if he’s right? What if the little girl she once saw alone in the rain, near a prehistoric site called Black Knoll in the Black Mountains near Marcus’s old home… the little girl in the faded cotton dress with blue flowers on it, coming towards her all the time and yet never getting any closer… what if she was just a little girl? And when she thought, later, still in shock, that she’d identified the kid from an old photograph, this was no more than the kind of corrupted déjà vu thing that occurs when you’re looking for evidence that you’re not crazy. What if that whole experience – her only personal ghost story – was just a product of anxiety and disorientation during the days spent searching for Ersula, maybe some part of her already knowing that Ersula was dead.
One of the more eccentric of The Vision’s correspondents, the cross-dressing self-styled Welsh shaman Cindy Mars-Lewis, has explained it to her according to the arcane principles of what he considers an ancient discipline but Marcus prefers to call a ridiculous conceit. She can see Cindy’s placid, tilted smile, his easy shrug.
Such things happen, lovely.
But Marcus is not entirely wrong. Cindy, though kindly, is madder than a March hare on mushrooms. Cindy relishes a life on the edge, likes to smuggle the esoteric into his television persona as The Last Ventriloquist with a hand up the sinister Kelvyn Kite. So, yeah. Grayle lies on her back, listening to the swish of night traffic. Go with Marcus.
There are things we’ll never know. Things we’re not equipped to know. This isn’t about petty science, Underhill. Not about arrogant bastards like Dawkins. This is far higher than all that, and the most we can aspire to is to live within the ambience of its mystery.
Marcus making a stand on behalf of people who don’t claim to be psychic but are still convinced there has to be more. He hates humanists, mistrusts mediums who claim to be comfortable in the company of the dead, but on the validity of apparitions he’s unequivocal. Grayle keeps two copies of his definitive editorial on the subject, guaranteed to reappear, in expanded form, in his book.
Ghosts… exist as momentary reminders. Accept them. Don’t challenge them, never try to befriend them. Don’t run towards them, waving your crucifix… back away. Instinctive, primeval fear – the shock of the cold-spot – is a necessary stiletto-thrust to mankind’s inherent complacency. I’ve heard sceptics and atheists say, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts… but I’m afraid of them.’ Well, exactly…
Trust terror, Marcus once said, wrinkly eyes blurred with emotion behind his spectacles. Little else is safe.
March
9
Until morning
WINCHCOMBE HAS AN affable air, Cindy thinks. It lies easy above the obscure River Isbourne, muddy rather than golden, and a touch hybrid – the creamy Cotswold stone giving way to the black and white timber framing you find towards Stratford and out into Herefordshire. Its shops are functional rather than twee; it still has the feel of a working town, careless of its image.
The late-medieval parish church of St Peter stands on the main road out of town, graceful, Perpendicular, unexpectedly light inside. An open, hospitable place of worship.
And then you look up and, oh dear God, here they come…
Well, now. He braces himself against the wall. Never seen anything quite like this before. At least, not in such profusion. It’s as if the portals of hell have been flung wide.
Against a grey and glossy afternoon sky with its cold, baleful white sun, a demonic host is swelling from the stone: a devilish bestiary, flapping and hissing and spitting derision, beaks and claws and dragon-wings, scales and horns and poking tongues.
Forty of them, apparently, although he feels it would be unlucky to count them.
You walk around and their bulbous eyes follow you. Oh, you can laugh if you want, you can say this one looks like the death mask of Homer Simpson, but no sooner have you fled its gaze than there’s another waiting on the next corner, gap-toothed and pop-eyed, ready to spring into your subconscious and out again at night, into the darkness of your bedroom.
I’m afraid it’s all your fault. You advised me to get the vicar in to bless the chapel, so I came down to look for him. It didn’t seem like the kind of request you should make on the phone. I’d never been to the church before, let alone looked up, but oh my God there they all were.
The famous Winchcombe Grotesques. Petrified malevolence. Cindy settles against the wall, under one that perches drunkenly like a deformed bird of prey and reminds him a little of Kelvyn Kite. He’s seen many such sculpted creatures on churches before, but mostly they’re gargoyles, waterspouts, serving a purpose other than to condition a visitor’s nightmares.
Some accounts suggest the more humanoid images may have been caricatures of local personalities, well-known faces back in the fifteenth century. These would be the ones portrayed in states of perpetual terror, as if driven mad by the very sight of you… or, more likely, the faces on either side.
A shout from the street behind makes him turn round. An elderly yellow van putters past, plumber’s insignia on its side-panel. Someone inside it raises a hand to a young woman who walks briskly behind a pram without even a glance at the church or its horror show.
Nobody remarks on them any more. Except Trinity Ansell, in the pages of her diary.
I dream about them now.
It’s always when I’m alone. I dreamt about them last night. Harry was in Swindon yesterday for a meeting with WH Smith and then he had a dinner to attend so he stayed the night.
The way it used to happen, I would be walking along the street past the church, trying to remember where I’d parked the car and there would be this horrible beating noise in the air like a helicopter’s rotors only made of stone, and I’d not want to look up but it came lower as if it was going to take my head off and then I had to look up, and it was one of THEM and I could see its little beak-like mouth opening and closing and then I’d see all the others coming behind it from off the church, squeaking with excitement.
I know that sounds silly, like a cartoon, but it was truly awful. Well you did ask me to keep a diary of things like this.
For the others, see, the more predatory ones, there’s no simple explanation. Were these creatures carved by some individual in the throes of madness? And, if so, why did the town fathers of the fifteenth century let him loose on a place of Christian worship?
Hard to decide whether the ravages of the years have softened the savagery or made it all look more hideously organic. Maybe here on the edge of town, facing the high ground, they exist as guardians. Or as a dreadful warning, alerting townsfolk to something unspeakable, perhaps the Black Death, that voracious, indiscriminate plague that was doubtless seen as satanic.
The way he’s feeling today, he wishes he was up there with them, his mouth frozen into a Munch-like silent scream, distress etched into every chiselled wrinkle, a memorial of misery as he takes out his phone and reads the rest of the photographed pages he keeps on it.
But for last night’s dream I probably wouldn’t have mentioned them at all. Probably just have told you about the Katherine dreams, but the things from the church are such obvious nightmare material, aren’t they?
Last night it was the usual beginning sequence, which I put down to anxiety. I’m always forgetting where I left the car, which is a pretty crap situation when you have to leave it in a big car park and you’re peering over the roofs of other cars and people start recognizing you and nudging one another, probably telling each other you must have forgotten which of your six cars you
came in. I hate that. It makes me wish I was a Muslim woman in a veil.
But last night’s dream wasn’t in a car park, it was on an empty street, I think it was the one that slopes down to the river – is it Vineyard Street? Anyway, I was alone, and I was at the bottom of the street trying to get to the top where the car was parked. It was just going dark but the lights didn’t come on and the top of the street seemed to be getting further away with every step I took, and I felt that I was being watched from all the windows, but nobody came out to help and I knew, the way you always know in dreams, that this was because they were afraid to come out of their houses after dark.
And then (and I knew something was coming before it appeared) I saw this little thin figure coming down the nearly dark street towards me, and when it got close enough it was one of THEM with those horrible round stone eyes with the holes in them and its tongue sticking out and I knew I had to get past it to reach my car.
Actually, when I say it was ‘coming down’ it was actually dancing like an old-fashioned puppet, and it had a full body, a male body, and I saw that it was naked and… you know. I knew exactly what it wanted to do to me.
And that, of course, was when I woke up, and I must have been screaming because Lisa came rushing in and we went downstairs and sat in the kitchen, in front of the stove drinking hot coffee with whisky until morning.
It terrifies me because I know it’s real. It really exists. It’s there on the church, you can see it.
And what happens if one night I don’t wake up?
The first diary – a small but expensive page-a-day diary – arrived eighteen months ago, not long after his second visit. Only six pages were filled – six pages about the Katherine dreams, and they were disturbing enough. She said she’d started a fresh diary, would send it soon. As if she had to get rid of the first as quickly as possible, couldn’t bear to read it back.
And then the call from Poppy Stringer with the worst of news. He walked seven miles that day along the Pembrokeshire coastal path, into the bitter, punishing wind.
