by F. G. Cottam
People had started stamping. They stamped in unison to the rhythm of the song they hummed and the single collision of a thousand feet boomed like thunder and the earth shook under them. Then the sky flickered and spat a zig-zag of fire and Ruthie looked up into the deluge and saw that there was a storm raging right above them, lightning tearing bright, antic paths through the gloom and thunder in a creeping barrage loud enough to make her ears hurt and her skull shake.
Something was solidifying at the centre of the stones. Something was etching itself into life, darker than the murky gloom surrounding it. It was a dark shape and it looked human as it unfolded and rose there.
Someone screamed. There was a surge to either side of and behind Ruthie as people broke ranks and rushed towards the figure at the centre of the circle and she was pushed awkwardly forward and tried to break her fall with her hands as her head descended towards the stone in front of her, accelerating with her own unbalanced weight and pitch of momentum, only half succeeding so that her head hit the stone hard and for a star-filled, black moment of pain she thought she might lose consciousness.
She lay on the ground. She was winded as well as dazed. Feet had trampled over her back, possibly shod in cowboy boots judging by the pain. It didn’t feel like concussion in her head, it felt like waking with the worst hangover she had ever experienced except innocent of any drinking binge to trigger it. She lay there and became aware that the rain had stopped and that the sun was warming her palely through her wet coat. Someone helped her to her feet and she clung to the stone that had hurt her for balance for a moment. She put her hand to her head and it came away bloody. She saw a silhouette approaching her out of the light and it was Eddie Coyle.
He looked concerned and when he spoke, his tone was kind. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up and patched up. Carter Melville will have my bloody guts for garters.’
‘What just happened?’ Ruthie said. Her voice was a stranger’s; weak, shaky, disembodied.
‘That rather depends,’ Coyle said.
‘On what?’
‘On one’s perspective,’ he said.
Her teeth felt bruised. That wasn’t medically possible she knew, but she had bitten down hard on nothing and heard them squeak when she collided with the stone. Maybe tender was a better word. She was ruefully aware that a human jaw against ten tons of granite was a genuinely one-sided contest.
There was a first-aid station rather shrewdly placed strategically, Ruthie thought, between the cider and the beer tents. Both were open now and both were very busy. The air smelled of hot dogs and hand-rolled tobacco and patchouli oil. She was cleaned up by a very solicitous St John’s Ambulance volunteer while Eddie Coyle watched with what she thought was a rather sardonic expression. She underwent a thorough test before the medic finally conceded she wasn’t concussed. Outside, the mood was raucous, celebratory. They’d been vindicated, hadn’t they? They had come here hoping for some sign or portent and their god had responded by coming among them, summoned back by his most mysterious and celebrated song.
That was what had happened on the face of it. But as Frederica Daunt had demonstrated to Ruthie, these things could be embellished or even faked entirely. A thousand people had gathered willing it; a thousand suggestible souls. A legion of wishful thinkers with a single shared desire to have fulfilled. What had really happened? On the solitary occasion Ruthie had been cajoled into attending a cricket match, the players had come off for bad light. She thought at noon around that stone circle, it had become conveniently gloomy. A cricket umpire would certainly have offered batsmen there the light.
She walked in silence beside Eddie Coyle until he came to a halt. They walked past the now incandescent fire-eater and past the human triangle of wobbling acrobats and through scores of people looking now slightly the worse for drink. And they reached the thick trunk of a fallen tree Ruthie realized made a natural bench as Coyle stretched a long leg over it and he sat down.
‘I hope there are some designated drivers among this lot,’ Ruthie said.
‘Most of them are fairly law abiding. Can I get you something to eat?’
‘My teeth are too sore to eat.’
‘I’m genuinely sorry about what happened to you.’
‘You told me to expect fireworks. I didn’t think they’d be going off in my head.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What happened,’ Ruthie said, ‘when they got to him?’
Coyle shook his head. ‘They never get to him. It’s a vision, or an illusion. It has no substance. When you get to it, it’s gone.’
‘Like a mirage?’
‘Good analogy. I’ve only seen it happen twice, though. And I’ve attended these gatherings all over the world.’
‘You seem quite a rational man,’ Ruthie said.
Coyle frowned. ‘In view of what?’
‘The conspiracy theory stuff on your website.’
He laughed at that. He said, ‘That’s a double-bluff, Ruthie. That’s my early warning system. It attracts the cranks so I can weed them out so they can be ostracized by the respectable Legionaries.’
‘Isn’t that an oxymoron?’
‘Is it? You didn’t find today’s evidence compelling?’
‘It was certainly entertaining. And puzzling. And dramatic. I enjoyed the part of it I spent vertical.’
‘It’s a very powerful ceremony. That’s a very powerful song.’
‘When did you get into Ghost Legion?’
‘At St Martin’s studying for my degree in fine art. Sebastian Daunt taught for a term there. He did a lecture on the cover design for King Lud. I was sufficiently intrigued to listen to the music. And I was hooked straight away.’
‘You’re an artist?’
‘I’m a landowner, Ruthie. I inherited as the eldest child. Money doesn’t necessarily make people happy, but it does sort of insulate you. I’m rich enough not to have to worry about what people think of me.’
‘And you think Martin Mear’s coming back?’
‘More than that,’ Coyle said. ‘I think there’s a sense in which he never went away.’
Ruthie left shortly after this conversation concluded. She sensed that Eddie Coyle was impatient to join in with the fun, the celebration. He’d hosted the event after all, he’d gone to the trouble of making a kind of carnival of things. He’d paid for the catering and the entertainment and he’d be left presumably to do the cleaning up. She had six rural miles to drive and much thinking to try to do and didn’t want to wrap a hire car around a roadside tree after a couple of rash glasses of fermented apple juice. Coffee and Nurofen were what she needed. It was still only two o’clock in the afternoon.
On the short journey back to Shaftesbury and the Bell Street cottage, she was able to some extent to rationalize what she’d seen. Rain could be sown in the sky from an aircraft. The Russians had perfected the technology in the 1960s. It required the right formulation of chemicals and there was an airfield close by, at Compton Abbas. And the figure at the centre of the stone circle could have been a projection, or a hologram. Or he could have been flesh and blood and come up from a trapdoor concealed by sods of earth. If you could hire acrobats and fire-eaters, you could hire illusionists. And some of them were these days very accomplished.
It occurred to her then that she could have been deliberately hurt, by someone wishing to distract or divert her or actually stun her, to prevent her from examining matters with a level of clarity that would prove them bogus. Was that paranoid thinking? Eddie Coyle, friendly, ebullient Eddie Coyle, had been vigilantly looking out for her. Only two people had known she was going there. One of those was Michael Aldridge, who had no connection whatsoever to Coyle. The other was Carter Melville.
Or Coyle could have just put two and two together. To get full access to his website you had to register and thus identify yourself. Ruthie’s name had come up as one of those people intrigued enough to want to know details about the time and exact location
of the ritual she’d just witnessed. Coyle knew her name because his daughter was a fan of her fiction. At least, he’d said she was. And she’d been named specifically in the Melville Enterprises press release alerting interested parties to the imminent launch of the Martin Mear box-set.
What Ruthie couldn’t come up with was a motive for faking what she’d just witnessed. Unless Eddie Coyle just delighted in fooling gullible Ghost Legion fans, she couldn’t think of anything that was plausible. Perpetuating Martin’s myth?
He’d said he was a wealthy man. What if that was a lie? What if Carter Melville was paying Eddie Coyle to big up the Ghost Legion mystique just as a marketing ploy? Except that seemed a bit far-fetched. His admiration for Martin had seemed genuine. And he said though he’d attended events like the one he’d just hosted all over the world, he claimed to have experienced something like what she’d just witnessed only once before. It was a modest return for a trickster or conman.
From the Silver Band car park, Ruthie called Frederica Daunt.
‘Did your dad ever lecture at St Martin’s School of Art?’
‘I don’t know. But he’s here. I’ll ask him.’
‘Ask him does he remember a student there by the name of Edward Coyle.’
Frederica called her back less than five minutes later. ‘Dad remembers him well. Eddie apparently badgered him into signing his King Lud album sleeve. Talented student, but born with a silver spoon, apparently. Only thing he applied himself to was listening to Ghost Legion. Fanatically, Dad says.’
Early on Monday morning, before handing the keys back to the volunteer librarian, before the library opened, as dawn broke, Ruthie drove back to the site of what she’d seen and heard and endured the previous afternoon. She parked her hire car in a now empty meadow and walked over the hill and down to the stone circle. The stones themselves had a poised look about them, their shadows lengthy in the ascending sun. The tents and stalls and she assumed their attendant litter had all been taken away. She walked to the centre of the stones and examined the ground. She had the circle to herself. The sheep that grazed there must be penned somewhere, she thought. She tested the ground with her full weight and discovered nothing hollow sounding, no trapdoor. No place of trickery and concealment.
She looked around. She could see her breath in the dawn chill. No birds broke the silence with song. Everything seemed very still, almost petrified. And she didn’t feel alone there. She felt observed, as though the victim of some deliberate and infinitely subtle intimidation. It filled her mind with thoughts of running away and finding a refuge where she could hide unseen in safety. She wasn’t sure, though that such places really existed. She walked back to the car, trailing dew. She sat at the wheel and smoked a cigarette and consoled herself with the thought that before day was out, she’d be at his home with Michael Aldridge. Or she would if they got out of the Proctor Court flat unscathed.
TWENTY-ONE
She met him outside the underground station. He was attired quite formally, in a suit and tie under the raincoat he wore. That was fawn-coloured and single-breasted with concealed buttons.
‘This is as close to fancy dress as I ever want to get,’ he said. ‘If someone sees us, and someone will, they need to assume I’m an estate agent. You, they’ll remember. You’re having another look, which is the most natural thing in the world.’
‘Not there it’s not. I doubt anyone ever has a second look.’
‘We just need them not to call the police, Ruthie.’
‘Where did you learn your burglary skills?’
‘I work with high-end people. Carpenters, engravers, guilders, locksmiths. You learn some tricks of the trade. A sixty-year-old council-fitted mortise lock is not a difficult mechanism to pick. I can do the Yale with a credit card.’
‘And there’s me thinking you’re an honest man.’
‘I was. You’ve led me astray.’
‘You’re more fun than you used to be.’
‘I don’t think we’ll be having much fun when we get to Proctor Court.’
‘You are though.’
‘When we first met I was in an unhappy marriage,’ he said, ‘though I didn’t realize that then. And I was in danger of losing my daughter. It’s largely thanks to what you found out for me then that I didn’t. And I’m immensely grateful.’
‘That why you’re here?’
‘There’s more to it than gratitude. Always was. You know that.’
‘Doesn’t mean I’ve got tired of hearing it.’
‘You’re more insecure than you look, Ruthie.’
‘And right now, I’m also scared.’
‘Sure you want to do this?’
‘There’s something there. I’m sure of that. I need to find it.’
Together, they walked the route to Proctor Court. Ruthie appraised Michael. He looked fitter than most of the estate agents she’d seen outside their offices, having a fag break or talking on their mobiles. His suit was a better fit and the fabric wasn’t shiny and his shoes weren’t pointy enough. He’d put product in his hair and combed it straight back from his forehead to give him a more businesslike, commercial character. It was a detail that made her smile. She didn’t think he was a man with much personal vanity and she liked that.
He got them through the door in seconds. He did it very coolly, she thought. But then it was a door at that moment he had never previously been through.
The smell hit her straight away. That churchy scent of charcoal burning incense. And there was something else, which Ruthie thought might be candle tallow. That and something else again, sourer.
‘Sulphur,’ Michael said, closing the door behind them, wrinkling his nose.
‘It gets worse,’ Ruthie said, aware of the grey, furtive quality of the interior light. Though light was an exaggeration. Murk was better, as though the windows were opaque with years of grime, which they weren’t. When they walked into the sitting room, the window possessed a dull, lustreless sheen.
Ruthie looked around. There was no noise in the flat. No ticking, absent clock with a phantom pendulum swinging invisibly from side to side in its non-existent case. There was no noise from above, none from below and none from the street. It was as though the world had become stilled around them, she thought, as though they were the only people still extant and alive.
‘We need to get on with it and then get out,’ Michael said. ‘This place is intolerable.’
Ruthie nodded.
They checked the kitchen cupboards and the bathroom cabinets. They looked behind all the radiators. Michael stood on tiptoes and ran a hand along windowsills. All he got, was dust.
‘There’s nothing here,’ Ruthie said. She sounded crestfallen. ‘I was sure, but I was wrong.’
Michael was staring at the bare floorboards. He said, ‘One of these has been taken up and put back again.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I specialize in restoration and I’ve worked with some of the best chippies in the business.’ He nodded at a floorboard. It was unvarnished and around four feet long and looked to Ruthie exactly as they all did.
‘Not seeing it, Mr A.’
He was sweating, she saw. There were beads of sweat at the hairline on his brow and he’d grown pale and his skin had a waxy pallor. It wasn’t hot or muggy. It was October. It was this place they were in.
He said, ‘The grain is different, Ruthie. It’s been put back the wrong way round. It’s a snug fit, but I’ll be very surprised if it’s nailed down. It’s concealing a hiding place.’
There was a noise then, a sort of feathery thump. It was loud enough to make both of them jump. Ruthie said, ‘What was that?’
‘I don’t know. But it came from inside the wall. I think we need to be quick.’
Michael got down on his hands and knees and tried to get some play into the board by pushing it. It shifted just a fraction, but it was enough for him to reverse his position and prise the timber out with his fingertips. Sweat was running down
the sides of his face in salty rivulets and his facial skin looked almost translucent, like that of a resting corpse. Ruthie wondered if she looked as bad as she felt. From the direction of the sitting room, she thought she heard a clock begin to tick.
There was only one item in the shallow rectangular space Michael Aldridge revealed. It was a bundle of postcards; old, cracked, faded and tied with a criss-cross of black ribbon like a small gift. Ruthie reached for it and put it into her bag. Michael replaced the floorboard, she presumed the right way round.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
Michael relocked the door. They walked in silence to the Prospect of Whitby pub. Ruthie felt no feeling of triumph or even of satisfaction. She sensed she was about to discover something both secret and significant. But she had an ominous feeling it would deepen rather than solve the mysteries she was grappling with.
Michael got them drinks and they found a quiet table. Then Ruthie took the postcards from her pocket and untied the ribbon and put the postcards face-up on the table. There were seven of them and they all showed the same picture. Some of them had cracked glaze from age and handling. The picture on each was black and white and it was the Statue of Liberty.
Ruthie turned the postcards over. They were all addressed in handwriting to Max Askew and they’d all been written by the same hand. They’d been franked and the franking dated them. They’d been sent at six-monthly intervals from July 1975 until July ’78. Not one of them had been sent from New York, but their sender had been to lots of other places. They each bore the same freehand legend. It read: Liberty is sweet. And they all carried the same signature and the name was Martin Mear’s.
‘He didn’t die in 1975,’ Michael said.
