by Nevill, Adam
But bent low to the wet paving, his sight found nothing more than an old sheet, blown from a washing line and caught upon a spiked fence; fabric seemingly invested with life in the turbulence. Begrimed by traffic and dust, but now restored to suppleness by a month’s rain in twenty-four hours, the linen had recreated itself in his mind as a flapping shroud, released from disinterred remains.
The tension leaked from the father’s muscles and left his limbs jittery. There is nothing else, only this wounded earth and us upon it.
Refuse swirled. Rain flooded over every doorstep, kerb and car tyre. Water sheeted down the hill, overran his boots, plumed clear from drain grates. Narrow lanes of terraced houses, their paint faded, their rendering pocked and worn, created channels for the black waters to hurtle down to the thrashing waves of the harbour.
Between the terraces he could walk in a straight line, but in this weather, no one else risked the streets. At intersections and on the wider streets, he’d stagger, head down, the wind trying to lift and roll him at the same time, as he watched for detached guttering and sheet iron blown loose. He’d heard the clangs and groans in the places beneath roofs where materials had broken free, and he had seen roof tiles skitter like giant woodlice across the road he’d come in through.
Dim candlelight chinked through curtains and around the storm shutters of the houses. The street lights were out; the power had been down since the previous night, another incentive to leave his room on the outskirts and to enter the roaring tumult of the dark. But towards the end of his journey, up through the harbour town, such was the force of the wind that the father was forced to pull himself from lamppost to doorway, storm porch to front garden wall, car by car. He’d struggled up through the streets from the harbour in similar fashion, his slicker shiny as eel skin, his front-strung rucksack a tatty water bladder blackened by rain. But on the higher ground, the weather now seemed cursedly worse and portent-heavy.
Near the summit of the hill he reared into the stone front of a small house, its sooty cement cold through his poncho, transmitting a chill into his bones. He peered up at a new form that flicked out between two chimneys, a ribbon or shred as long as a serpent, thin, darting to strike, black as jet.
But only a flag, its pole shuddering in the wind. This night, he knew his mind was going to be his greatest enemy.
Earlier that evening, the detective had sent him a message and the details of where he could find his getaway. Good luck. I’ll be in touch tomorrow. The replacement vehicle waited one mile north of Brixham.
For a mile on foot, from Churston Ferres to Brixham, he’d been battered and blown sideways across the fields of crops he’d crossed, taking cover behind stone walls and earth works, where they existed, to avoid the thrashing trees and fall of branches in the woods set back from the coastal path. Then he’d advanced up and through the wind-flayed town from near the harbour. As he moved through the evening, lower sea-level sections of the headland and the harbour wall had entirely vanished, every few seconds, beneath the enraged surf.
From the end of Churston Ferrers and the town limits of Brixham, the great Moor Edge refugee camp now continued to the banks of Long Wood on the River Dart, engulfing Kingswear. Oleg Chorny’s last known address, the chapel, was close to Raddicombe Wood, set back from the Kingswear Road. The father had another half a mile to walk, through the fringes of the vast temporary encampment, now larger than many British cities. Three miles wide and five miles from tip to tip, but still growing northwards to join the Riviera camp behind Paignton and Preston. And from that point unto North Devon, the largest drought-resistant grain-producing area in Britain – over two hundred square miles of wheat, soya, maize, millet fields, five nuclear power stations and the three new reactor sites that were hastily under construction.
Through the dusk and rainfall, pressed into the saturated earth beneath the coal-black sky, the father could see the silhouettes of the first great blocks of white prefabricated neighbourhoods that comprised the vast refugee settlement, the entire grid divided by wide lanes to prevent fires jumping. The pale, unchanging, cuboid mass of housing was silent, but tens of thousands of candle flames pinpricked the wet vista upon the hills.
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and Greeks lived alongside the southern Italians, the Portuguese, Bangladeshis, and half a million North, East and West Africans, in two-room buildings. Three- and four-storey apartment blocks, each living space as long as a chalet, had begun to supersede the bungalows on the eastern side of the camp.
Like watch towers about old Roman forts, the newer apartment blocks faced an older, alien world, from which the buildings’ inhabitants had streamed, aboard anything that would get them across the Channel and sea.
The father eventually found the old Baptist chapel, trembling in the wind, fifty feet behind a shuttered healthcare centre and a large primary school for refugee children. He moved carefully, now close enough to the residential areas to be within reach of the security patrols, recruited from within the camps to deter smuggling, thieves and the direct-action nationalists that hounded the settlement.
Not good weather tonight for any nocturnal activity outdoors. The entire area appeared to have locked down as the storm swept across the south-west. If the winds broke eighty miles an hour, a great many of the prefabricated dwellings here would be uprooted and destroyed. If the hurricane season returned as it had done for the past six years, the cabins would soon have to be replaced by the sturdier towers.
At the edge of the chapel’s front lawn, and a long untended pumpkin patch, a faded wooden sign had been bent and shaken by the wind and now lay flat upon the earth. GLORY TO GOD AND HOPE TO THE WORLD had been stencilled above a hand-drawn picture of an open bible. Like an old wound, a metal crucifix ran to rust down the painted cement blocks on the building’s front. It was an agricultural building, from another time, with a galvanized roof, but converted from slaughtering livestock, or poultry, to human use or habitation. The doors to the old church were locked, the windows shuttered.
The father assumed the abattoir had been engulfed by the refugee settlement when the land was reclaimed by the emergency government, and later procured on the black market by Oleg Chorny and his lover. The National Land Registry still listed it as a private building, the purpose religious. Whatever new use the place had been put to, someone with money had once chosen to live amongst the dispossessed, on the edge of a vast camp, a new city with a population created solely from the stateless, the homeless. Perhaps a good place for a serpent to hide and to operate if he was part of the many organized criminal enterprises that now controlled most of the camps, in the same way they controlled the city ghettoes and prisons, and had allegedly captured half of the world’s money within half a century.
The father flashed his torch around the perimeter. No alarms. No cameras. Weather-worn signage filled a frame beside the front entrance: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12.)
The father turned about in the darkness and flashed his torch across the ground and the neighbouring buildings, and over wet cement, silvery cascades of rain, white roofs, wires shaking like skipping ropes, treetops panicking, grass and flower beds blown flat. In the distance another of the many greenhouses imploded from the pressure of the fast wind. They’d been going off like light bulbs since he’d left Brixham.
The father circled the building. Three entrances. Double metal doors at the front. Two old wooden fire exits: one at the rear, the other at the side. No light shone within. It looked deserted. The father wiped his bare face. From out of the rucksack, he withdrew a handgun that he’d boosted from Yonah Abergil’s house. He holstered the weapon in the front pocket of his trousers and slipped the nerve gas into the other trouser pocket at the front. Once inside, the handgun would be only a back-up for the stun charge and gas; he dared not hold the handgun in his business ha
nd. The torch occupied his free hand.
He chose the emergency exit at the side. If this tattooed man was here, the father knew he would have to reach the target quickly before he could arm himself. And then he needed to immobilize him with the stun charge or spray, cuff and gag him, before extracting him through the storm to where the new vehicle was parked, less than a mile away. They would have to wait out the night inside the car, and that is where the interrogation would take place.
The father briefly steadied himself against the cinder-block wall. Closed his eyes and thought of his daughter’s small face.
Tucking the handle of the torch under his arm, he brought out the small crowbar from his rucksack to lever open the door. The father forced the wedge between the handle and tin frame, and pulled on it, using his body’s weight like an oarsman fighting the surf. The door snapped open, and the father stepped from night into something altogether darker.
TWENTY-FOUR
The building did not feel abandoned. By men, perhaps, though not by the presence suggested by the appalling things daubed upon a wall that his thin torchlight found a few seconds post-entry. And within the void, the beam of white struck a sickly yellow face first, its eyes red and vacuous, the mouth open. The face grew in the disc of illumination until the father realized it was attached to a hairless head, crudely crowned, but barely supported by a thin body, bound more than robed in red. The figure occupied a rust-coloured throne.
The corpse king’s feet were fleshless and he sat beside a queen lacking in all of the grace, elegance and nobility expected to accompany a royal title. Her face was a bloodless oval, her head covered with grubby linen bindings. Small pink eyes peered with an imbecilic intensity into the black air about the regal seat. The female figure’s raiment was plain, whitish, and resembled a nun’s habit.
The couple stared blankly at what stood before their thrones: another emaciated human emblem of bone, naked save for a loin cloth, the parchment flesh lacerated from the sharp heels to the hairless scalp and weeping black tears. Before its stitched-up eyelids, it carried a box filled with small brown skulls, a gift to the abominable royalty that sat so straight-backed and listless before the messenger.
The father had shut out the roar of the storm by pulling the door shut behind his swift entrance into the building. But the dimming of the volume seemed to make the pictures even worse than they were, as if a reverential hush had descended about him in the rank darkness.
Unlit, the building would have been unnavigable without a torch because he could see that the windows and rendered walls had been covered in thick layers of black emulsion, before being further vandalized by the lurid paintings. Extending from the throne-room scene, the father’s torch revealed that the same artist had covered all four walls with his ghastly mural.
Dumbfounded by the assault upon his eyes and senses, the father operated on instinct and immediately replaced his stun weapon with the heavier resin handgun. Some inner cry demanded a greater protection in this place, but even the unholstered weapon felt insufficient in the face of the horrors plastered upon the walls of the Baptist chapel. He feared they might move.
Disorientation further warped the dimensions of the room, suggesting that the blackness between the multitude of painted figures went on forever. It was as if he’d come into a space that was far larger than it had seemed from the outside. If any pews or chairs had once been present on the black cement floor, they’d been removed, presenting the ground as that of an empty warehouse, reaching into an infinity underlain by the vague taint of blood and dung: the very residues of where the livestock of the past had jostled before skull-splintering slaughters.
The air of the building also carried the smell of stale paint, dusty cement, the cold rain outside and the sharp kidney taint of human urine. The artist may have pissed where he worked. Flavours of an ecclesiastical history had remained in vestiges too, as if to hallow the desecrated room with a sense of the apocalyptic despair that must have once been conjured by the Baptists’ shrill preaching. Instinctively, the father became momentarily convinced that something was still worshipped within the terrible room, even enshrined in the unpleasant visions on this broad canvas transforming the interior.
More of his dumbstruck glances revealed an artist’s obsession with poorly drawn sarcophagi or crude caskets, stood upright, and filled with murky silhouettes. And bonefaced bishops, equipped with sceptres, soiled surplices and hoods, stood upon daises, their pointed hands more like surgeons’ anatomy diagrams than those of the living. These skeletal church authorities drew his attention to the pallid shapes lying below their unshod, bone feet: a dead congregation that barely indented or impressed their insubstantial bodies upon twisted linen, or winding sheets open at the neck. Black-socketed, eyeless, open-mawed: many of the dead figures on the ground wore the caps of popes, the headdresses of sheiks, the crowns of kings; as if receiving last rites from an already dead and decayed clergy.
The father hesitated, to make certain these figures all around him were not actually moving. It may have been a trick of the torch’s light that suggested motion, perhaps a vibration, even a distant squirming at the edge of his sight.
And elsewhere, on all four walls he could see a great violence, and the resulting slaughter; suggestions of battles on grand scales amongst the other miserable components of war: the stick-figure silhouettes hanged from rafters and leafless trees, the dead children and emaciated mothers. More of the black-eyed corpse kings sat here and there in the devastation, immobile, enthroned, surrounded by riches but lifeless.
Sometimes the figures in the mural were depicted on all fours, their faces a mixture of the mad and the animal; beggars and kings alike had degenerated with a peculiarly apelike quality. There was something of the chimpanzee or bonobo in the toothy grimaces, the bulbous whites of the eyes, idiotic in their rage, gleefully insane, committed to a bestial savagery everywhere, and into the far-reaching hell on earth, if indeed it was even the earth.
The paintings seemed to represent events that were about to happen or archetypes of what had always occurred. The same thing. The eternal tragedy. A monstrous fantasy that made the viewer envy the pale, still cadavers, now mercifully excused from the energy of the great dieback.
Across other swathes of the walls, the bones of the departed were stacked in numbers beyond the confines of any charnel house. About sickly ruins and the ragged, forsaken humanity, starved insensible and queuing into a meaningless distance, a robed thing often stalked, either sat upon a cadaverous mare, or bent from the weight of its scythe. Death. The Reaper. King Death.
The father averted his eyes from its skeletal prancing, but between the figures the black chasm, the empty space, gaped. The chapel’s devotion to human horror was total and unflinching. It continued inside his mind and shortened his breath. Nothing yet seen on any screen had made him so aware of the world’s deterioration, a course set in motion that could only gain a greater momentum.
But the building’s true purpose still eluded the father. This could not be a grim depiction of the times alone. He believed it had to mean more, was perhaps a physical embodiment of a faith, something revered. The father then feared this shrine imparted knowledge; that this was an oracle for the profoundly disturbed to ask their questions. He forced himself to suppress a new and unwelcome suspicion that his presence might make possible the awakening of a deity within the unlit space.
Leading from the large room, two wooden doors offered a retreat from the disfigurements of the chapel. The father guessed the doors must open into what had once been a vestry or the church offices. He moved to them, but stopped when his torch flicked across what he took to be an upright figure. He panicked, brought his weapon about and made ready to fire until the clip was empty.
Rising from the lightless floor, before the backdrop of a black wall, he saw what he’d thought was a cowled figure, the head bowed. And then realized that it was static, solid, and not a figure at all, but a pillar. Whatever the object
was, it had been built over the place where an altar or pulpit should have stood, or maybe the black installation had consumed and superseded the holier feature.
The father moved closer to the pillar. Perhaps it had been intended to represent a long head, oval and tapering to an apex, like some primitive ancestor facing the sea on a Polynesian island, where civilization was long-collapsed and gone to dust. To pass to the rooms at the rear he would need to encircle this column that had seemed to suddenly manifest, between the desecrated walls, as if to prevent him going any deeper inside the building.
He washed the structure with the white beam of his torch. And it didn’t take the father long to realize that the subject matter embedded upon the column was similar to what he had seen inside Yonah Abergil’s office, though that specimen was a fraction of this one’s size. But this was another shrine, and about this shrine must stand a temple.
Materials used in the construction of the dolmen would have been illumined by the plethora of red candles in glass holders, had they been lit, though the father found his torchlight was more than sufficient and he illumined more than he wanted to see. The creation had more of the primary school craft room about its design and crude manufacture than the antique sophistication of the feature in Yonah Abergil’s study; as a result, this effigy created a more grotesque impression.
Perhaps the Baptist congregation had left behind a quantity of their hymn or prayer books too, which formed a dark mortar and stucco, plastering the original frame, or actual altar, which had been extended and built upwards, with thousands of pages and pamphlets carrying sacred words and evangelist messages. The plaster stank. In places the pale sheets of paper had dark red smears across them, and the father suspected the paste was manufactured from blood.
