The Lucifer Chord

by F. G. Cottam

  Or would they? Before the Crash of ’29 and the Great Depression and the spread among the workers of a bit of Bolshevism, the English were completely accepting of the class system. No one questioned the right of the wealthy to privilege and excess. Perhaps something more personal to Fischer had upset the locals.

  Klaus Fischer disappeared at the end of 1927. He just vanished, which was a far easier thing to do, Ruthie thought, in the first half of the previous century. Nobody then had a credit file. No one could be caught on CCTV. Finger-printing was the most reliable method of identification, but still far from definitive. And only known criminals had their fingerprints taken and filed and Fischer had been rich and apparently law-abiding, if not totally respectable.

  It was odd, him disappearing like that. But no one had made much of it at the time publicly. The age had been celebrity-obsessed, but with the likes of Fay Wray and Jack Dempsey and Charlie Lindbergh, not with a corpulent German factory owner with a well-indulged appetite for cigars and cocktails. He’d partied without courting publicity beyond his own somewhat louche circle. And then he’d stopped and sold up and gone without a trail to follow. It had been abrupt, this departure from the demi-monde. But it had not provoked a single headline or retrospective news story. Or not one Ruthie could source.

  He’d been a collector. He’d collected huge quantities of all kinds of arcane treasures, but religious artefacts had been a particular enthusiasm. He tended to buy at London and Continental European auction houses and he did so through sharp-eyed and well-schooled agents he retained.

  Ruthie wondered if there was a connection between Klaus Fischer and Martens and Degrue. She thought it possible. But when she really thought about it, the likeliest way in which Martin Mear would have heard about the Fischer House would have been through the Crowley connection. Some of the big rock names of the period had been drawn to the legend of the self-styled Wickedest Man in the World and Martin, from university days, had apparently been among them.

  Ruthie yawned. She would have to be careful broaching this subject with Paula in the morning. Speculating on Martin’s solitary sojourn on Wight, on the Fischer House and the Crowley connection could easily seem like prurience, or sensationalism.

  She thought it relevant, though. She thought it likely to be more fertile ground when she came to speak to Terry Maloney on Tuesday afternoon. He’d sounded extremely relaxed on the phone. If he had his insights, and she had no doubt he did, she thought he’d sounded quite reconciled to having committed himself, at last, to sharing them.

  Her phone rang. It was April Mear.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind being contacted on a Sunday evening.’

  ‘I’m delighted you’ve taken the trouble.’

  ‘I know you’re seeing Paula tomorrow. Carter Melville told me you’re seeing Sir Terence on Tuesday. I wondered if you’d have recovered sufficiently by Thursday to listen to some of my reminiscences about Dad.’

  ‘Dad.’ It was still difficult for Ruthie to see Martin Mear in any kind of mundane domestic role. It was imagining a medieval knight doing the washing up in full armour having swapped his steel gauntlets for a pair of rubber gloves. It didn’t seem at all natural. The idea of him changing nappies or even pushing a child’s swing seemed slightly surreal. He’d been a figure, at least on stage, cut out for curses and quests. Men who battled dragons atop mythic crags didn’t readily do Mothercare.

  ‘Thursday would be fantastic.’

  ‘Are you a morning person?’

  April Mear was fifty-four years old. She had the unlined face, at least in the few photographs Ruthie had sourced, of someone who had never really suffered the affliction of a single adult care. She’d didn’t need a job. She’d never needed a job. There was a childlike quality to her sing-song voice, despite her being middle-aged. It occurred to Ruthie that her father’s wealth had perhaps condemned April to a life so devoid of responsibility it had amounted to a permanent childhood. That would be another kind of curse, wouldn’t it?

  ‘I’m a morning person if you are,’ Ruthie said, which hadn’t always been true in her past but would do, for the present.

  ‘Do you know the Riverside Café?’

  ‘I do if you mean the one on the Promenade, the Kingston one.’ Ruthie remembered that April Mear had a house in Kingston, only a mile or so distant from the Surbiton home of Michael Aldridge.

  ‘If it’s fine I’ll meet you there at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘And if it rains?’

  ‘Then the coffee shop at John Lewis in Kingston proper. I like anonymous places. They’re more comfortable, with strangers. If we get on, we’ll stop being strangers and I’ll be happy for you to come and speak to me again at home.’

  One of your many homes, Ruthie thought, thinking that April meant the one with the panoramic view of the Thames. The others were in Cape Cod and the Bahamas. For their shared purpose, they were a less practical proposition.

  ‘I’m looking forward to this experience,’ April said.

  ‘Then I hope you won’t be disappointed,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘It’s a terrible pun,’ April said, ‘but in some important ways, I feel the record needs to be put straight.’

  NINE

  Before she went to bed, Ruthie thought she’d view the disc Carter Melville had given her, with a whole sack-full of other research material, of the concert Ghost Legion had performed in Montreal in December 1972. This was the concert in which Martin was supposed to have levitated. It was inconclusive for two reasons. The first of these was the quantity of dry ice shrouding the lower half of the stage. The second was that Martin had never subsequently claimed to have done what most of the audience swore they’d seen happen.

  Carter Melville had told her the levitation happened – or didn’t – about forty minutes in. She searched for the spot, on Veronica’s Blu-Ray player, rubbing her eyes with the hand not operating the remote, with finger and thumb. She was tired. She had only had a couple of vodkas in the afternoon with Malcolm Stuart and nothing alcoholic since, but the experience at the flat in Shadwell had been wearing on her nerves and stamina.

  She found the footage she was looking for. Martin was backlit, centre-stage, his hair a riotous auburn halo cascading onto his shoulders. He wore hip-hugging blue jeans with a belt secured by a turquoise inlaid buckle and a denim shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal his sculpted pectoral muscles. His skin looked pale and taut, as though he didn’t tan, but that could have been the light, white and brilliant above the roiling, gaseous surface of the stage.

  He was singing ‘Siren Psalm’, a song from the second of the nameless albums, the album the band’s followers referred to simply as ‘2’. He reached the instrumental break, a long ethereal piano solo sometimes played live on Mellotron by keyboardist James Prentice.

  Martin had been holding his stand-microphone between both hands. Now he released his grip on it and closed his eyes and raised his head and held his arms stretched out to either side in what a Christian Fundamentalist might take to be a parody of the crucified Redeemer. Several had, over the intervening decades, Carter had told her. Martin had been denounced from some thunderous pulpits since the Montreal performance all those years ago.

  His shoulders swayed. He seemed to rise in height. The increase was subtle, but there. You could achieve it, Ruthie thought, by standing on tiptoe. But what happened next you really couldn’t, as his whole body shunted right and left, back and forth, his posture stiff and vertical, his lower limbs motionless as far as the knee-high vapour opaquely concealing the stage floor.

  His eyes opened. He came to a halt. The close-up camera caught sweat gathered like sparkling dew in the hair on his forehead, as though the movement just accomplished had been physically strenuous. He smiled a smile that seemed absurdly secretive given the spectacle he represented, up there in front of sixty thousand adoring fans. The volume fluctuated as the sound-man struggled to find a level to accommodate the roar his trick of weightlessness had provoked fro
m the crowd. He was their God, the ovation suggested. And they had only then witnessed a miracle.

  The keyboard interlude ended. Martin Mear seemed to remember the Stratocaster slung around his neck. He fingered the fret-board and bent a run of notes out of the instrument with uncanny speed. The drums kicked in with a twist of his head and a spray of sweat in the direction of Jason Ritchie, enthroned on the high pyramid of his kit.

  It had been suggested that what Martin was actually doing at Montreal was a kind of prototype moonwalking. That would have explained the weird absence of hip and upper-leg movement; the way he had seemed to be able to glide about the stage above his cloud of dry ice. With Michael Jackson and his unearthly choreography still a dozen years into the future, Ruthie thought the explanation absurd.

  She had an observation of her own. She thought that she probably owed it to the unpleasant part of the afternoon she’d spent in Docklands. She watched the sequence again. She finished doing so unsure about whether Martin Mear had actually levitated or not. It was always possible someone had fitted castors to his boots to enable him to glide about the stage like that.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said to the screen, snorting into her glass of San Pellegrino and thinking that she really ought to go to bed.

  She’d mapped in her mind the geometry of his movement. And you could claim all sorts of weird revisionist shit about Ghost Legion. And people like Malcolm Stuart’s dippy sister did exactly that all the bloody time. But Ruthie was pretty sure that in his shunting this way and that, Martin had described the shape of a pentagram. And she thought the idea of his having done so with his feet trailing the floor and his arms out like Jesus more than a little disturbing.

  Her phone rang again. She frowned and looked at her watch. It was 10.20 pm and felt like three in the morning and she needed a night’s rest before Paula Tort. Her caller was Carter Melville.

  ‘Is this going to be our evening ritual?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You phoned me last night.’

  ‘I’m entitled to phone you every night, weekends included, baby. Twenty large opens a wide window into your life. You’d find it expensive to slam it shut in my face.’

  ‘Charmingly put.’

  ‘I’m rightly famed for my tact and diplomacy.’

  ‘Do you want anything specific?’

  ‘I’m just touching base, honey.’

  ‘I’ve been watching the Montreal footage.’

  ‘Reach any conclusions?’

  ‘It must have been shot originally on VHS. The digital quality has been enhanced for Blu-Ray. It’s been cleaned up and the motion smoothed out and the colour enriched. But the original film was recorded before CGI was invented and if it’s been tampered with, I’m buggered if I can see the joins.’

  Melville was quiet. Then he said, ‘You might want to ask Terry Maloney about that on Tuesday. Terry reckons he saw Martin do it again, on a terrace after a dinner in Montevideo. Said it was totally for real. Apparently, it was something Crowley could do, one of the old magician’s party pieces, before he lost his mind and powers.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘I believe drugs were ingested that night in Montevideo.’ He laughed. ‘It would have been a bigger miracle than levitation at a Legion party if they hadn’t been.’

  ‘So what Sir Terence saw was drug-induced?’

  ‘He wasn’t Sir Terence then, sweetheart. He was a completely different person, all of us were. Experience changes us. So do intoxicants. Memory is subjective. Best to ask him what it was he did or didn’t see that night. But don’t obsess over the occult thing.’

  ‘The occult thing sustains the myth.’

  ‘The music, baby, is what sustains the myth.’

  ‘And magic seems to have inspired the music.’

  ‘Now we’re going around in circles.’

  Geometry, Ruthie thought, thinking that she preferred circles to pentagrams. She decided that she would say nothing to Carter Melville about her Shadwell experience. She wouldn’t be pushed into conclusions about Martin Mear. She wasn’t a censor or a propagandist. He could have hired a public-relations specialist if all he wanted was airbrushing. Her job was finding out the truth and for better or worse, she intended eventually to deliver that.

  ‘Paula giving you butterflies?’

  ‘To some extent, yes,’ Ruthie said. ‘She’s a formidable woman.’

  ‘She’s a pussycat,’ Carter Melville said, registering the first statement he had made to her that she knew to be an outright lie. ‘Goodnight, honey.’

  ‘Sweet ones, Carter.’

  TEN

  They called it the Clamouring. Numerology figured large in Ghost Legion lore and Frederica Daunt thought that the Clamouring was probably the myth most pervasive among the many Legionaries convinced that the band’s catalogue was capable of more ominous feats than merely providing background music.

  This theory concerned the sixth track on the sixth and final album and the title of the track was ‘Cease All Mourning’, which was innocent enough in isolation, if a little clumsy and unpromising as song titles went. It wasn’t alluring or intriguing, was it? Basically, it was an instruction to stop. It was a negative message. In the argot of the period in which the song was recorded, taken literally, its title was a downer, man …

  But ‘cease’ was also the way the French pronounced their word for six, spelt exactly the same way in the French language as it was in English. The final album had been recorded largely in a chateau in the French Pyrenees. Sixth album, sixth and final track and a title providing, through a bit of linguistic trickery, the third 6 required to invoke the Number of the Beast. The hoary old Biblical 666; that terrifying cliché referred to when Apocalypse and Antichrist were the subjects under discussion; the number associated with the End of Days and Lucifer’s final triumph over a God no longer Almighty.

  Cease all mourning could also be interpreted as a prediction, meaning that soon there would no longer be a reason to grieve. Mourning required a death and believers were convinced that in the song, Martin had predicted his own. In telling his followers to stop mourning, he was also hinting at the song’s power to restore him to life. That was where the theory behind the Clamouring really gathered its strength from.

  Resurrection from the dead was a Christian concept demonstrated twice in the pages of the New Testament. Christ had brought Lazarus back from the dead. Then he had proven his divinity by returning from the dead himself.

  Other faiths, though, ancient and more recent, had their own beliefs and rituals concerning a human defeat of death, a successful challenge to its cold finality. It was a common theme. It was a strong and persistent tenet of paganism from the Vikings to the Incas to faiths still practised in remote parts of rural Africa. It was a still-strong part of voodoo tradition in Haiti. There was the Gothic literary monolith of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And then of course, there was the role human resurrection had to play in magic.

  Frederica lit another cigarette. She was seated on her terrace where it was dark but still warm and where she could smell the still-warm sea and watch it glitter shifting in moonlight beyond the olive grove between her villa and the beach. She could smell salt and olives and pine resin on the offshore breeze through the strong Portuguese tobacco slightly stinging her nostrils. Her nose still felt raw from its haemorrhage of Friday evening. She was awaiting a visitor, even though it was quite late to receive a guest. There were guests and guests, of course, but this one was living and in human guise and it was late for that variety; the only kind her shot nerves could at that moment pleasantly endure.

  She sipped brandy from the heavy glass sharing the wooden table at which she sat with a white ashtray with lots of cigarette burns browned into it and the word Cinzano printed twice like the name of a ship a lifebelt came from on its rim. The brandy was cheap and local and tasted wonderful for being like nothing she would have surrendered space to in her drinks cabinet in her grand house in
Chiswick.

  Resurrection was the key to the Clamouring, unless the Clamouring was the key to resurrection. Either way, the theory was the same. The sixth song on the sixth Ghost Legion album, the one with the French pronunciation of ‘six’ playfully punned into its title, was said to be capable of returning Martin Mear to mortal life. That was what a lot of the Legionaries claimed, anyway.

  The Number of the Beast was significant because returning someone deceased to life would be the devil’s work. Their death had been God’s doing. Only Satan possessed the power to bring someone back and thus defy His will. Martin returned would wear the number branded on his flesh. Otherwise, he’d be the same as he was before his mortal departure.

  All that had to happen to accomplish this was for the song to be played, simultaneously, at a number of key places around the world. The problem was that no one could agree on the exact locations. And no one could agree the precise number of them. Synchronicity on that scale was difficult without such specifics. In fact, it was impossible. There was said to be a key, hidden somewhere. A key or maybe a formula. But nobody knew where. The problem with the Clamouring was that the ritual lacked a precise litany. There was no agreed script.

  The song’s lyrics didn’t help. She thought about the opening four lines, which ran: The sun will come back / The corn ear will flower / The lady will lack / For no bloom in her bower. It was quite pretty in a cod-medieval sub-Tennyson sort of way, but it wasn’t exactly detailed or emphatic. ‘And that,’ Frederica said out loud to herself; ‘is because “Cease All Mourning” is an album filler and because the Clamouring is actually one big fanciful crock of shit.’

  The brandy had emboldened her. The prospect of seeing her visitor had restored some of her courage and bolstered her resilience. She thought that she could hear his car approaching through the quiet of the night. She’d recognized the pitch of the engine. And she couldn’t help smiling at the thought that after all these years, Sebastian Daunt was still driving the Mini Moke.