by Phil Rickman
The cellphone’s shivering against Grayle’s thigh. She should maybe get it this time.
‘So Wishatt’s still remembered,’ she says. ‘Um… what about Abel Fishe?’
‘Oh well…’ The hint of irony in Mrs Rutter’s smile is dispelled by an uneasy twitch. ‘What they say about Mr Abel Fishe is… that he was up on the church already.’
‘I don’t…’ Sensing this is likely to take some time. ‘Mrs Rutter, I’d really like to pursue this, but someone’s calling my cell— my mobile phone?’
Mrs Rutter looks mildly cross.
‘Ah, these dratted little phones. Demand more attention than a baby.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Grayle drags it out. ‘Underhill.’
‘Grayle, where the fuck—?’ Defford in person, no happier than he’s been all week. ‘Kate’s called you twice. You do realize you should be recording the fucking chapel prelims?’
‘I’m in Winchcombe, Leo, middle of some research. I thought—’
‘You’re fucking everyone up for something that should’ve been done weeks ago?’
‘I thought it wasn’t until this afternoon.’
‘We rescheduled an hour ago. Get your arse back here.’
Gone.
‘Mrs Rutter…’
‘I know, I know… Off you go.’
‘Can I call you later?’
‘If I’m not shopping, I’ll be here. Billy doesn’t answer the telephone.’
‘Meanwhile, could you just tell me, very briefly, what did you mean by Abel Fishe being on the church already?’
‘Old wives’ tale.’ Mrs Rutter’s on her feet, guiding Grayle to the door. ‘Just an old wives’ tale, and I’m just another old wife who shouldn’t pass this nonsense on.’
‘Is it? Nonsense?’
‘Of course it is.’ Mrs Rutter opens the front door into the street, and there’s the church on the other side of it. ‘People used to say he was there.’
‘So if I call in there now, is it likely I can see him?’
‘It’s more usual, I’m told,’ Mrs Rutter says, ‘to pray that you don’t.’
34
A form of containment
‘MY NAME IS Cindy Mars-Lewis, and I claim ancestral rights to slip through the curtains between worlds.’ Cindy shakes his head in apparent horror. ‘Heavens, what does that sound like?’
Grayle doesn’t respond. She’s been told not to ask any questions for about the first ninety seconds. Let them establish themselves.
She’s in the reality gallery, inside the big truck. The reality gallery controls the house, its heating and lighting and also houses the booth from which Grayle does her interviews with the residents in the chapel. In front of her, the mic with its bendy stem and its mesh screen to stop the pops on consonants. Cindy’s on the monitor screen in front of her, wearing his pearls and his beret and his tweedy spinster suit. All you see either side of him is the new/old panelling over the Holy Trinity stained glass.
‘Now, in case I’m not allowed to expand on this later,’ Cindy says, ‘I should tell you that Celtic shamanism – or any kind, really – is a state of mind, a way of perceiving. It’s about walking the corridors of ancestral memory. Living at the joining point of different spheres of existence. A state of mind, a state of consciousness. A state of being.’
He stops.
A small, domed green light blinks in front of Grayle.
She takes a breath. Will these be her first words on TV?
‘Cindy, the more observant of us might’ve noticed that you’re a man who habitually dresses in women’s clothing. And, um, wears make-up and pearls and bangles?’
‘Well, there we are.’ Cindy beams, spreads his hands, which are in soft tan gloves. ‘A foot in both camps, isn’t it? About living on the cusp of worlds and on the fringe of society. In the old days, the shaman was, if not exactly an outcast, then certainly someone on the periphery of the tribe, respected but regarded with suspicion and often feared. And would dress accordingly.’
‘On the, uh, cusp of the sexes?’
‘Exactly. Well, now… I’d love to be respected and feared, but, sadly, that aspect of it just never seems to come right. Regarded with suspicion, however… well… story of my life.’
His eyes register sorrow in the second before another face slams up in front of his, filling the screen. This face has huge malevolent eyes, a yellow beak and what you can only describe as punk plumage which jitters as the beak springs open with an insane cackle.
‘Never was a problem for me, lovely!’
Grayle sighs.
‘Hello, Kelvyn.’
There’s a break while the editors mess with the rushes and someone moves in to collect Cindy from the chapel. He’ll be guided through the house in the opaque glasses and sent back up the windowless plastic tunnel that connects the house with the restaurant and the pop-up hotels. Maybe they should also put glasses on Kelvyn Kite, ventriloquist’s evil dummy and mystical totem-bird.
Suddenly, Grayle feels better. Explaining Cindy and Kelvyn for however many million viewers can’t be a bad start. And the more you think about it, the more suited to this show Cindy appears. He lives his whole life with weirdness; the other residents just have to get used to it. And they will.
At one week, this show will run for less than a third the length of a BB series, but Jo Shepherd’s told Grayle it takes no more than a couple of days for individuals to become institutionalized. Over the past months Grayle’s watched five series of Big Brother, mostly celebrity. They all have people who look rational to begin with, but at some point, you start to wonder why some have never been taken into psychiatric care. And they’re just living in a big kindergarten.
Problem is it’s contagious. Month or so ago, she downloaded details of a study by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and some university in Dresden, which had found that just being around a stressed person could stimulate your body to release the stress hormone cortisol. This is never more apparent than in a Big Brother house.
Grayle steps down from the truck, pulling on her woolly hat, but doesn’t wander too far in case the stress-vessel Defford’s somewhere close. She shelters from the wind under a big, creaking ash tree which she’d never noticed until leaf-loss turned its upswept boughs into an impressively complex candelabrum.
Takes out her phone and calls Mary Ann Rutter. But Mrs Rutter’s out food shopping.
‘Always says I don’t answer the phone,’ Billy Rutter says. ‘That’s because she don’t trust me to remember who called. You got her in a state earlier, Miss Underhill.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no, she likes that. Getting into a state. That Abel Fishe. They didn’t know what a psychopath was, did they, them days?’
‘Um… Mrs Rutter seemed to be suggesting that… it might go a way beyond that.’
‘I’ll tell her you called,’ Billy Rutter says. ‘I’ll write it down.’
After leaving the Rutters this morning, she had to pass Winchcombe church to reach her car. The church is right next to the road. A mellow old church with a very traditional-looking weathercock on top of the tower. A lucky bird: it’s spared the horror of looking down at all the stone faces, scrunched and twisted, pop-eyed and slack-mouthed.
A weird humour at work here. Like Cindy said, there are definitely two different kinds of grotesque, some obviously representing human beings, male faces leering or, in some cases, looking terrified.
And now she has a connection between these horrors and Trinity Ansell, and the connection is a man called Abel Fishe. She needs to talk to Cindy about him. Only problem is when.
At the door, before she left, she asked the admirable Mary Ann Rutter if it wasn’t just some local joke about the face of Abel on the church wall. Mrs Rutter said if it was a joke it was a very old one and not, given what the man did, all that amusing.
The ash tree rattles in the wind. Grayle recalls the stone faces in the air, the second kind, the
demonic ones, with their stunted wings and stubby horns and the black holes in their eyes. Devilish, rather than pagan. What are images this distasteful doing on church walls? Are they to frighten people away from sin or repel whatever evil they represent? Or is it about imprisoning evil in stone rising from sacred ground? A form of containment.
But they’re just stone images. People don’t get scared any more by sculpted stone. Probably not even little kids like Jo Shepherd’s daughter.
Unless they mutate in dreams. Acquire a body, with all the functioning parts. Like Cindy says, dreams are another state of consciousness. Anything can happen to you in a dream but, when you think about it, rarely does because some mechanism wakes you up. Dreams die on the cliff edge.
But where does Abel Fishe stand?
Does he have a body, too?
The new face in the monitor is serene. Fine, white-blond hair swept back, angular earrings. A quite low-cut cream dress, a white cardigan around the shoulders.
‘I’m Dr Ashley Palk. I’m a psychologist, author of several books on the nature of belief and I’m the founder and editor of The Disbeliever, an Internet magazine for people who realize our fate – not my favourite word – and that of the planet are entirely in our own hands.’
It’s a clipped accent, with only a hint of Scottish. Edinburgh, maybe. Grayle has in front of her the first briefing document which says,
Dr Palk, 35, has appeared on several documentaries to debunk the claims of so-called psychics. Specifically, she showed that the famous Cambridge Poltergeist was a product of communal hysteria among students at a private music college. Palk has degrees in psychology and anthropology.
‘I imagine I’ve been invited into the house to cause a certain discord and annoyance amongst believers in the supernatural, but actually I’m a very easygoing person.’
Ashley smiles a wide, white, grimacey kind of smile. A kind of explanatory smile for people of inferior intellect, and she tilts her head to one side whenever she produces it.
Grayle says, ‘Ashley, can we take it you don’t believe in ghosts or anything that might… occupy another dimension?’
‘Do you want the short answer or a cosmological dissertation?’
Not your job to get into arguments, Jo says.
‘Can I put it another way. How would you feel if you were the only resident? If you had to stay here for a week entirely alone at nights.’
Palk gives this some thought.
‘I would be a wee bit afraid,’ she says. ‘I’d be afraid of the possibility of somebody getting in, for the purpose of robbery or worse, and me not being aware of that because the house is probably very big. And I’d be afraid of rats – hate rats. But I wouldn’t be afraid of anything you might describe as metaphysical.’
Grayle says nothing. Ashley Palk considers some more.
‘However, after a few days, I might well be telling you I’d be less bothered about being entirely alone here than having to listen any more to some of my more credulous companions. Not that I know who they are. But the thought of who they might be – that is a wee bit scary.’
‘So, briefly, how does a house like this get a reputation of being haunted?’
‘Well, as I just said, if I was alone here I’d be afraid of robbery or rats. In earlier times I’d have a whole range of phenomena to fear – with the full permission of the Church. The Church wanted people to be afraid of the unknown, and the Church was a dominant influence on everyone’s life. Now, as we all know, there’s been a dramatic decline in churchgoing in recent years. Ghosts are now seen as… almost comical. Cinematic effects are far more scary.’
‘So what would you say to someone who thinks he – or… or she – has experienced something, in this house, which can’t be attributed to any human source and has left her feeling deeply disturbed?’
‘Well that would depend on—’
‘And we’re talking about someone who would consider herself – or himself – to be an intelligent person who’s… been around.’
‘Well, I think most of us would consider ourselves to be intelligent, so that has to be relative. But I’m afraid I would have to begin by looking at that person’s emotional condition.’
‘So you’d think they were crazy?’
‘Oh, my dear, I would never use that word,’ Ashley Palk says.
And does the explanatory smile that says,
Well, of course, I would consider them to be either extremely stupid or in need of psychiatric counselling.
‘Thank you, Ashley,’ Grayle says.
35
Women and ghosts
SHE COMES OUT of her booth in the reality gallery, jumps down from the truck into the damp afternoon. Needing to talk to Defford, but you don’t just walk in on him any more. Defford has a personal portacabin. The biggest. Until recently he just seemed like a guy, now he’s God in his celestial city. You don’t approach him any more, you’re just grateful if he sends for you.
But she can’t wait for the next time he does that. She grabs a Jamie coming out of the reality-gallery truck, asks if he can find Kate Lyons and get her a half-hour with Leo.
This is complicated. She doesn’t even know what she’s going to say to him without sounding like a person in need of psychiatric counselling. She wants to tell him not to trust the house, and she doesn’t know how. She can’t explain it. Don’t challenge them, never try to befriend them, Marcus says. Marcus who never claims to have answers, who thinks the processes of human logic cannot be applied in these situations.
Try telling that to a TV producer.
On the inside, Defford’s personal portacabin could be a penthouse suite. Red leather seating, pictures on the walls of HGTV’s previous successes including Defford’s last one for the BBC which had hospital cooks competing against each other to provide cheap, healthy dishes. First patient to throw up, the chef was out of the game, something like that.
‘Don’t have much time, Grayle. A million things to tweak.’
Defford waves her to a small plush chair without arms, in the well below his big desk. Kate Lyons is sitting in a red leather swivel chair, an iPad on her knees. The are two more ipads on Defford’s desk, and two TV monitors. Grayle wonders if there’s a camera somewhere focused on her now, and Defford’s watching her expressions in close-up.
Paranoia.
She has no laptop with her, no notes, only the peeling diary Mary Ann Rutter gave her, held demurely on her lap like a prayer book.
‘First off, Leo, I don’t wanna rock the boat.’
‘Grayle…’ Defford’s leaning back, tilted smile, the eyes wary and harder than the white hair and the gold earring. ‘You can’t rock the boat. The boat leaves in just over three hours’ time. Either you’re on it or you aren’t.’
‘If you, um… if you wanna continue with that metaphor, this is not as much about the boat as the sea.’
‘The sea.’
‘Or, like… what’s down there. In the dark water.’
‘In the house.’
‘When all this started, what we had… what I brought to you and you seemed to like… was Trinity Ansell and her perceived connections, living and dead, with Katherine Parr.’
‘Two charismatic women bridging half a millennium.’
She scans his face for irony. None is apparent.
‘Women, and ghosts,’ she says, ‘are not the same.’
‘Look. What you came up with, the tie-up with Katherine Parr, that was what persuaded me it’d been right to go for Knap Hall. I needed a little-known haunted house and I was intrigued by Ansell’s suggestion that his late wife might be one of its ghosts, even though he was clearly holding back on his reasons for thinking this. The fact that we now had Katherine Parr as well…’
‘But I think I made it clear at the time that KP could be wishful thinking on Trinity’s part. That maybe Trinity wanted her to be here because she played her in a movie.’
‘Although, Lisa… what’s her name…?’
&n
bsp; ‘Lisa Muir.’
‘Yeah, Lisa Muir thinks it’s rather more than that, obviously.’
‘Not as I recall.’
‘Oh.’ Defford looks vague. ‘You haven’t seen that interview?’
‘Interview?’
‘No, you wouldn’t have. Sorry. We shot it way back.’
A big cold space is opening up in Grayle’s chest.
‘You’re saying… you’re saying that Lisa Muir, who told me she could never talk about this stuff on TV without she’d burst into tears—’
‘No reflection on you, Grayle. We’re quite experienced at changing people’s minds.’
‘With money?’
Defford shrugs.
‘But you didn’t tell me. You purposely didn’t tell me.’
‘It’s a whole different area of production.’ He looks pained. ‘You’re research. We made the approach through a friend who knew the girl’s parents. We do what’s most expedient. In the case of Parrish, we thought she’d connect with another journalist, so we sent you. We go for what’s most likely to work. And then, once we had Lisa Muir, it was quite easy to get Pruford.’
‘Pruf—?’
Grayle’s lips have gone dry. She closes them.
Defford’s sigh is close to a yawn.
‘Yeah, we have Pruford, too. Soon as he was back in the country, we were on him. Everyone has a price. The story about the woman who photographed the two images in the doorway, he tells it well. Be very convincing overlaid with pictures of the relevant doorway. And Meg. And a little wizardry.’
Which he wasn’t going to do. He told her specifically there’d be no special effects.
‘So you put that together,’ he says, ‘with Lisa Muir’s story about her and Trinity talking to Katherine Parr through a ouija board… Grayle, don’t look at me like that. It was early days when you talked to her. She didn’t really know who you were. She didn’t think her parents would like it. Lots of problems like that. Once they were all sorted, she opened up. It’s what we do, we sort things.’
