by F. G. Cottam
‘We wait.’ In candlelight, with her tight smile, the skin on the medium’s face looked momentarily shrink-wrapped. Then the smile was withdrawn and she closed her eyes and her breathing became sonorous and the room seemed to grow colder.
The window behind Frederica Daunt faced the road outside and beyond that, the night river. Ruthie could hear the drift of occasional cars from outside and below. The sound was faint and distant. The rattle on the panes of rain in fitful gusts was closer. But these exterior sounds did not provide the comfort of the mundane. They made her feel trapped and isolated from normality. The flame topping one of the candles tore like renting cloth and she felt an emotion she thought was quite troublingly close to fear.
Nothing happened. For what length of time nothing happened, Ruthie couldn’t afterwards have said. Probably it felt longer than it was. It was an interval in which she grew no more comfortable than she’d been at its outset. If anything, the opposite was true. She could feel the steady acceleration of her thumping heart. She became more restive and anxious and the chilly air grew heavy as though something dangerous impended not far beyond the four walls confining them. Behind brick and plaster she had the sense this hazard squirmed and pressed, uninvited.
One of the candles snuffed out. After a moment, the others followed. Ruthie frowned, because this didn’t feel like trickery.
Frederica Daunt slumped in her chair like someone suddenly become boneless inside their body. Her head rolled back and then canted to one side where it rested, the right cheek almost touching her shoulder, the tendons in her exposed neck like whorls of knotted rope. It was not a flattering look and must be extremely uncomfortable, Ruthie thought, assuming the medium was conscious and faking, which her breathing, like this new posture, suggested she wasn’t doing at all.
She became aware of a sound. It was a low, faint, insistent buzzing. Almost imperceptibly, it got louder. She tried to determine where it was coming from, but even when it became quite insistently real, it had no obvious source. Instead it was all around her, like an aural fog.
The room grew dimmer as the volume of the sound increased. She knew that physics would suggest the opposite should be happening, even with the candles extinguished, as her eyes grew accustomed to the ambient light that must have been leaking at the edges of the heavy curtain through the window from the lit street outside. But the darkness became denser. This happened deliberately, as though invisible hands were wielding brushes, daubing the walls with a layer of gloomy paint.
The sound was a drone. It was the sort of singular, endless note characteristic of tribal music. It sounded as harsh and insistent as the note a set of bagpipes might produce, were the player capable of so endlessly sustaining it. It was growing in loudness all the time. It had become a shriek Ruthie did not think she could bear for much longer in the deafening charcoal smudge the space around her had now diminished into.
It stopped. It just ceased and the medium’s head jerked and she woke with a startled look as a crash like gigantic cymbals shivered through the blackness.
Frederica Daunt screamed.
Ruthie had recognized the sound. It had been far slower and more drawn out and vastly louder and more vibrantly abrupt in that cymbal clash, but she’d heard it before and heard it only recently. It was the start of the first song on the second side of King Lud, the Ghost Legion debut, the album the medium could not have known she’d been listening to driving through the rain on the way to the séance. Its title, aptly, was, ‘The Ruler Returns’. In the song, he did so by boat. As if to prove the point, from the river beyond the window, a horn emitted a single grave blast that groped over the water and through the night air to reach them.
Frederica Daunt’s nose had begun to bleed. Fat droplets dripped from her nostrils and inked the front of her dress blackly. It was still gloomy in the room, but Ruthie thought the light had improved since the music had stopped. She thought that if this was a put on, it had been put on very professionally. What she really thought was that it hadn’t been conjured at all. Not by them, it hadn’t. Not by the two living people sitting and enduring it.
The medium looked like someone recently mugged. There was the blood, the paleness, the reel of assaulted shock in her emerald eyes. Ruthie didn’t think anyone was this good an actress.
She got up and exited the room and found a bathroom along the landing where she wet a hand towel with cold water to provide the bleeding woman with a compress for her nose. She was shaken by what she’d just experienced and was struggling to find a rational explanation for. She was still sufficiently frightened for the job of first wetting and then wringing out the towel to be accomplished only clumsily, by fingers that didn’t quite yet feel completely under her control.
Movement obliged her to glance up from the sink into the mirror on the wall behind it where she saw a ghastly, blood-soaked apparition, pale and fraught, wide-eyed and with a rictus grin of trauma distorting the lower half of her face.
Frederica looked a fright, but Ruthie’s first thought was, At least she has a reflection, it means she’s human and alive, doesn’t it?
She hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words to the medium since her arrival and got nothing further out of her before her departure half an hour later. She helped staunch the blood from her nose and steadied her jittery progress down the stairs. She seated her in what she assumed to be the drawing room and went back upstairs to make sure that the candles in the room used for the séance really were all extinguished. Going back in there was an ordeal. But she wasn’t treated to any more strangeness. The room was still and quiet, smelling slightly of wax and singed wick and maybe, just slightly, the sour secretion of fear.
She found the kitchen and made tea. Had she not had the drive to face, she would have sought out something more potent. Houses like this one always had generously stocked drinks cabinets and a brandy or whisky would have been welcome. Tea would do, she thought, grateful that at least she was getting away from the place, able to put several miles between here and her night’s sleep in North Lambeth. If, that was, she did sleep.
She made a strong breakfast brew and put sugar and milk into the mug she made for Frederica Daunt without asking about her usual preference. This was not a routine situation. The mug was grasped with a small smile between grateful hands. She waited for a while, until most of the drink had been sipped and swallowed. Then she spoke.
‘Has it ever been like that before?’
The medium blinked before replying. Something seemed to recoil in her expression, as if her mind had moved on from the moment as a defensive reflex and considered dragging her back to it ungracious or in bad taste.
‘I can’t discuss what happened. I can’t talk about it now. Not now, I can’t.’
‘Can I call you tomorrow?’
‘You can if you wish. I might not be much help.’
Ruthie nodded. She stole a glance at her watch. It was 9.45. She waited another ten minutes, feeling slightly guilty but unable really to do anything more, reluctant to speculate on what had occurred until she was safely in Veronica’s home behind a locked door. Then she rose and went for her coat and said goodbye to Frederica Daunt, who neither rose from her drawing-room chair to see her out, nor even met her eyes in nodding a curt goodbye.
The rain had only strengthened in the time she’d been in Chiswick. On reaching and unlocking the car she glanced back at the house she’d just left and thought it had the sombre grandeur and stillness not of an abode, but instead of some great mausoleum. She breathed in river air, gusty and dank, rank with tidal ebb and very welcome. She thought of the churchy smells in the séance room and a shudder ran through her she didn’t owe to the cold. It was October, but the night, though wet, was mild.
She’d left a place of death. She was no longer convinced that Frederica Daunt was any kind of fraud. The woman suffered for her art, if art it was.
Ruthie got into the car. She composed herself before switching on the ignition and lights an
d slipping the transmission into gear. She’d switched off the CD player on arrival. Ghost Legion’s debut reposed within its slot loader. She’d reached the second side of the album. She could switch it on and hear a less loud and spectral version of the drone and cymbal intro to ‘The Ruler Returns’ than the one to which she’d been treated an hour ago. Or she could leave it un-played, which would probably be wisest.
Martin Mear could bellow and roar with the best of them, but he had whispered and crooned that particular vocal, when it finally insinuated its way over the strengthening melody. She did not want to listen to it there, alone in the car, with the gusting wind rocking the body slightly on its suspension and the rain drumming on her roof in an unfamiliar location, alone.
She took her iPhone out of her pocket. She had switched it off before ringing the bell at the house. She switched it on and saw that there were no new calls or texts or emails to have to reply to. She was tempted to make a call herself, to Carter Melville, to ask him just what the fuck kind of introduction the supernatural cabaret she’d just endured was to the subject she was supposed to be researching. She was damned sure the experience would not feature in the finished essay.
But she decided against doing that. She needed to sleep on the experience and Melville was not a counsellor or a nursemaid or a psychologist. Neither was he a psychic investigator. That was her role, should there prove to be any substance to the stories of the magic her subject’s antics in life still apparently provoked after his death. Those stories were plentiful and persistent, weren’t they? Frederica Daunt and the blood and wax of her séances weren’t the half of it.
She’d call Carter Melville in the morning. She remembered that he came from New England. She wondered if he was related to the famous New England Melville who had written the great American novel of the nineteenth century, in Moby Dick. She knew that Moby the musician was related distantly to that Melville, thus the nickname.
She looked at her car stereo again. She wasn’t restricted to that or to King Lud. Her new employer had given her all six of the Ghost Legion albums in all formats. She could have driven the route to the sound of any of them. But she decided she’d drive in silence. She was in the mood only for a stiff nightcap when she reached the bland homely refuge of Veronica’s flat. She’d spend the journey trying to dissuade herself from drinking that.
FOUR
Ruthie had not wasted the first full day of her Martin Mear assignment. On the first morning, she’d put in calls to the three people identified on the single sheet of paper in Melville’s envelope as being the closest to her subject in life. They were his daughter, April Mear, his girlfriend, the then notorious groupie Paula Tort, and Ghost Legion’s chief roadie and all-round fixer and factotum, Terry Maloney.
Martin was only sixteen when his daughter was born. He was still at school, still regularly doing homework and a paper round in his home town of Shaftesbury. The mother was older, nineteen and a hippie drop-out living in a ramshackle rural commune. Martin had taken to pedalling over there on his bike to join in their scrumpy-fuelled jam sessions on his first semi-acoustic guitar. April was the product of a drunken fumble that went further than it should have.
Her mother died when April was six months old of a brain aneurysm and the girl spent the first five years of her life in an orphanage. Martin got her out of there on the day he signed his first recording contract and for the next seven years, despite his demonic reputation, had apparently been a loving and attentive father. April was only twelve when he died, but she remembered him vividly, it was said. And she cherished the memories.
Paula Tort was twenty-two when Martin died, Seattle-born and a rock-scene fixture since leaving home to follow a Stones tour at the age of sixteen. It was fair to say she’d been around the block and then some by the time the two hooked up five years later. But she looked like no one’s idea of a tramp. The pictures taken back then showed a beautiful natural blonde with a full-lipped smile and cheekbones so sharp they looked capable of engraving glass.
There was never anything shop-soiled about Paula’s appearance. Her sartorial style in the ’70s was the gypsy look favoured by the likes of Carly Simon and Stevie Nicks. She and Martin shared two intensely romantic years that proved to be the last he would live. Now she headed up a fashion empire embracing everything from couture clothing ranges to luxury perfume. She was sixty-four, a handsome woman, single, rich and someone who had never before spoken on the record about her relationship with the dead rock god.
Terry Maloney had also prospered. Back then he’d done more than just cart gear for the band. He’d started out like that, loading the guitars and amps into the Bedford van in which he drove them to early gigs up and down the M1. But their rise was incredibly rapid and by the time of their pomp, they toured in a private 727 with the Ghost Legion logo etched in black and gold on the silver aluminium of its fuselage.
By then Maloney was booking itineraries, shepherding the band’s women, haggling over the damage inflicted on hotel suites and negotiating discounts done on volume with local drug dealers wherever the band played. He arranged their biker security whenever they played stadium gigs and he kept their names and antics out of the papers when their misbehaviour threatened to exceed what was permissible even in exceptionally liberal times.
That was the principal contrast, Ruthie thought, between then and now. Then, the records and the live performances sold the band. Their music and stage presence made them famous and successful and rich. They couldn’t rely on MTV videos to shape their identity and peddle their wares because all that was still over a decade away. They couldn’t harness YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, because none of those routes had even been thought of.
Ghost Legion had never given an interview collectively and Martin had only ever given two as an individual. The band had never bothered to release a single. They had never done a Christmas special or a Top of the Pops appearance or even a charity gig. They had done everything on their own terms and had conquered the world that way and Terry Maloney had the inside track on how it had all been accomplished.
He was Sir Terence, now. He was the chairman of a merchant bank, a pillar of London’s fiscal establishment. His home territory was the Square Mile. He was a member of exclusive clubs and a patron of two children’s charities and the Tate Britain art gallery. He had a titled wife and two grown-up sons and a stately pile in Bedfordshire and he was about to speak, on the record, for the first time ever about his involvement with Martin Mear.
She was reluctant to pre-judge, but Ruthie couldn’t see what Sir Terence had to gain from dragging up this lurid period of his own past. To his City peers it would seem scandalous, squalid and possibly even criminal.
April was a woman of fifty-four now, tall and slightly haughty in appearance, long-limbed, strong-featured and with Martin’s luxuriant head of wavy auburn hair. She grew richer daily on the royalties rolling in as the only beneficiary of his will. She would naturally wish to set the record straight about the father she had loved unconditionally. With April, it would be a heartfelt tribute.
There was an iconoclasm about fashion-world values which meant that exposure of Paula’s decadent past would only increase her industry kudos and bring added status to her personal reputation. No revelation, however salacious, could do anything other than further her credibility in a deliberately edgy milieu. But Ruthie failed to see any upside in going public for the man who had begun life as plain Terry Maloney.
She looked forward to meeting him, though. Of the three, he was the one who most intrigued her. It was early days, but she was having difficulty pulling the character of Martin Mear into sharp focus. She thought that of the three sets of recollections, those of Terry Maloney would possess the clearest detail and the most objectivity.
None of the three had yet got back to her. She had to be patient. Two of them were very busy people and all of them had waited a long time to break their silence on a subject over whom the speculation vastly outweigh
ed any readily verifiable truth.
She drained her glass. She’d got back as houseguest in an empty flat on a Friday evening after a frightening experience and she’d succumbed to the temptation of Veronica’s fridge and a glass of chilled Chablis. She drank it in the sitting room. She switched on the television. The programme being broadcast was the regional news. She kept waiting to see the house she’d left in Chiswick, lit by flashbulbs and news crew floodlights, delineated by yellow crime-scene tape, as a grim voice-over described the grisly suicide of the famous spirit medium who’d been its occupant.
They’d found her hanging from her attic rafters. They’d found her drowned, wrapped in her sodden purple shawl washed up at the edge of the river. She’d been discovered in a crimson-filled bathtub with her arteries opened by a razorblade or carving knife. She’d been stretched out stilly in bed, her counterpane a litter of empty pill bottles.
There was no such item, of course. The bulletin finished with a whimsical end-piece about a duckling being nursed into maturity by a Labrador after a Staffordshire bull terrier mangled its mother to death.
‘Cut out the middleman,’ Ruthie said at the screen. ‘Mangle the Staffies.’ She’d been cautious around dogs since being bitten by a Doberman six months earlier, walking off a hangover on Wight’s Tennyson Trail.
She switched off the TV and rose to fix another drink. She would switch on her desktop and study the claims made by Frederica Daunt concerning her contact with Martin Mear. She hadn’t done that before the séance because she hadn’t wanted to attend the event in any way prejudiced, or with the sort of preconceptions that could blind you to what you were actually witnessing.
She doubted very much that what she had earlier experienced had ever happened to the medium before. She was tougher than she looked, if such events were regular occurrences. But what grief-stricken client, looking for contact with a departed loved one, would fork out hard cash for so sinister an ordeal as that? None, was the answer. Ruthie was more and more certain the event had surprised and troubled Frederica every bit as much as it had her.
