Lights in a Western Sky

by Roger Curtis

  ‘Well, that’s the puzzle. He may have done, but we can’t be sure. If you’re feeling brave there’s something I need to show you.’

  In the cellar beneath the inquisition room Emma saw the scattered fragments of the broken stool. ‘That’s difficult to explain,’ Father Patros said, ‘but what’s more odd is this.’ He handed her the fragment of parchment from the codex. ‘It was lying on the floor here.’

  Emma stared at the piece of parchment, dimly recalling its origin. She handed it back to him. ‘Can you tell me what it says?’

  ‘It recounts the fate of the young monk, Antonis Stavros, who was… well… died here. It seems that after his death his body was taken by boat to his home village on the island of Evia, which you can see across the water from here – and from your house. For some reason neither the boat nor Antonis reached their destination. Can you think why that might have interested your husband?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. Then it occurred to her to ask, ‘If my husband was here, wouldn’t he have been seen coming out?’

  ‘You’d think so, especially as there were people in the hallway most of the time. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but one of the monks said he thought he heard a noise, possibly a scream. But of course he could have been mistaken. After that there were people about all the time.’

  The police search continued, but Emma knew there was no point in telling them what in her heart she knew would never be believed. The investigations would have to run their course, then be quietly forgotten amongst the records of lost persons. Sister Melina stayed with her that day and into the evening, by which time a friend from Volos – Carol Jackson – had arrived to keep her company. They stood together on the veranda, looking down the valley.

  ‘You mentioned a light out to sea,’ Sister Melina said, ‘but I don’t see anything now.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you will,’ Emma replied.

  When Sister Melina had gone Carol said, ‘I’m sure the police will find Hugh in the morning.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Emma said, not really listening. Instead she was thumbing through a notebook she had picked up from the coffee table.

  ‘What’s that?’ Carol asked.

  ‘It’s Hugh’s address book. You may not remember Graham Spooner…’

  ‘The barrister?’

  ‘Right. He was the chief prosecutor at Tony Savage’s trial. The conviction against the odds threw him into the spotlight. It boosted his career – which is more than can be said of my husband’s. As it happens they were close friends, in spite of Hugh being heavily in debt to him. I thought I’d invite him to the memorial service, assuming we have one.’

  ‘Memorial service? Isn’t that a bit premature?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Emma paused, at first uncertain whether to continue. ‘I think Graham Spooner might be interested to look around the monastery.’ She got up and walked to the window, then stood staring out towards the sea. ‘I must remember to mention it to Father Petros.’

  Window on the Mind

  The flick of the switch, rather than extinguishing the lights of the primate room, only resulted in a barely perceptible dimming – the simulation of dusk – that would take another half-hour to reach extinction. Alex Parker lingered in the doorway, his finger still on the switch. He stared into the void between the cages banked on either side of the central gangway. Tiny hands clasping the vertical shiny steel bars were all he could see of the monkeys within, but he could still recognise each of them. ‘Goodnight Vanessa, Charlie Boy and the rest of you,’ he called. He could not tell whether the sudden rattling of the bars was in answer, but he chose to think that tonight – of all nights – it really was.

  He had known some of these monkeys since he joined the company as a raw graduate in toxicology almost a decade before. In the early days he had flexed his young muscles, and management, over the years, had made the cages larger and their contents more interesting. As the lot of the animals improved, some of the anger seemed to go out of their eyes. Alex liked to think it was gratitude, but experience told him that for wild animals such as these that could not be so. Still, given the constraints of his work, he thought he had not acquitted himself badly.

  Down the corridor his fellow scientists were still busy logging data into their computers. More disciplined than they, he had cleared his own work and closed his terminal. But tonight he was drawn back to it and switched it on. As the dense columns of figures reappeared he flicked the screen with his finger. ‘Just has to be,’ he whispered to himself. Then he copied the results to disc, switched the machine off and went home.

  Alex knew that this departure from his usual routine – fifteen minutes of inconsequential time – would not go unpunished by his wife. The food was already getting cold on the table.

  ‘Have you forgotten Jessica’s got her first exam tomorrow?’ Margery demanded.

  ‘There were some unusual findings,’ Alex said. ‘I had to stay.’

  Across the table his daughter was sketching aimlessly, from time to time chewing at her pencil. She seemed oblivious to her parents’ bickering.

  ‘So what’s so new?’ Margery persisted. ‘The drugs you feed those animals either make them sick or stop them getting that way. What’s so different this time?’

  Alex swivelled in his chair to avoid the angry eyes that every mealtime now seemed to find a different fuel to burn. The day before it had been their forgotten wedding anniversary, the day before that keeping her waiting in the supermarket car park – trivial things that a more reasonable person might take in their stride. No way would he tempt providence by telling her that he had discovered something quite remarkable, something so unusual that he had even – and for the first time – withheld it from his colleagues.

  He studied Jessica’s clouded face, then looked at the tense hand clutching the sketch-pad. The pallor of the knuckles almost merged with the whiteness of the paper. ‘What’s the problem, Jessica?’ he asked.

  ‘It just doesn’t come,’ she replied, her voice trembling with frustration. ‘And it’s for the bloody exam.’

  The rending of the paper as she tore it from the pad echoed his own frustration when his experiments didn’t go right. Was it dedication to a subject she loved – or confrontation of an obstacle too difficult to surmount? It was hard to tell. But when she looked at him, the fear – the same primal fear that he had seen in the eyes of his monkeys – told him which it was. At school she had been the most gifted in her year, but they both knew that relinquishing the Oxbridge place that had been within her grasp to study at art college was becoming an unwelcome spectre at the door.

  Margery refused to make his usual coffee. He made that an excuse to leave the table and the room.

  In the attic, where he kept his computer, he took the disc containing the copied data from his briefcase and inserted it. He stared at the now familiar figures. The monkeys on the highest dose of the drug – developed to restore memory loss in ageing people – had performed the tasks quicker and better. That was not unexpected. But there was something else there, something that suggested more than just an improvement in mental agility. The objects that the animals had been required to position on the touch screen seemed to have been grouped in ways that Alex could explain only in aesthetic terms. The animals appeared to have become creative.

  Alex pulled at his desk drawer. Rummaging behind the pens and packets of envelopes he withdrew a bottle of Scotch. Smiling to himself he patted its flat face and replaced it in the drawer. ‘Later,’ he exclaimed. ‘Tonight you have a rival.’

  He placed a blank sheet of paper on his desk. From his briefcase he took an unlabelled amber bottle and carefully broke the seal. The pale yellow contents fell like flour onto the paper. With the edge of another sheet he divided the pile, first into two, then into four, and so on until he had many equal mounds. Then he transferred the powder
to transparent plastic envelopes, of which he had a copious supply. He half-filled a glass with water intended for the whisky and emptied into it the contents of one of the envelopes. Against the light the scintillating particles rode the vortex, then disappeared. In one determined gulp he drank it down.

  Alex was not unprepared for what came next. Only two years before, the company had developed a drug that had reached clinical trials – that is to say it had been tried for the first time in people. But no sooner had that got underway than the long-term toxicity studies in rats showed that the drug could cause blindness. Further development was stopped, but by then Alex had tried it on himself. One morning he had woken to find he could not dissociate his thoughts from the dreams of the night before. For nearly a whole morning he had inhabited a surreal and terrifying world, in which violently complex images fought for possession of his head. When he emerged from his study he could not explain – even to himself – the abrasions on his face and bruises on his body. After that he devised tests to assess his own responses to small doses. One involved the resolution of complex patterns into simpler geometric forms – in which he was surprised to find the classical golden ratio figured prominently – and in another colours and shapes were juxtaposed. In the early days he had tried these tests on his colleagues. But without giving sufficient explanation he had been ridiculed for his efforts.

  He withdrew a test sheet from another drawer and began to complete it. He did this with a different sheet every half hour for the next three hours. When he knew that the levels of the drug within his body would be starting to fall he went to bed. To his relief he found Margery asleep. The following morning he felt fine, as if nothing had happened.

  Except that it had. In each of the tests he had scored higher than when he had taken similar tests without taking the drug. For the next five days he repeated the exercise each evening, always with the same result. ‘You look a bit flushed these days,’ Margery told him one morning, but he attributed this to the success of his experiments.

  Margery seemed to be recognising other encouraging changes. For example, she had looked at him in bewilderment on finding him glued to the radio and humming along to Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps; and, later, while reading the paper at the kitchen table, tapping out the more complex rhythms of Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata with his left hand while executing complicated doodles with his right. When he smiled up at her she shied away as if the devil was lurking in his soul. ‘What I have to put up with! Will it never end?’ he heard her mutter to herself.

  At the laboratory he became secretive about the work he was employed to do, then tried to hide his findings. Each day he would get to work before his colleagues to massage the data, at first by changing the odd digit here and there; then, when that didn’t seem to make much difference, by repositioning decimal points in a way that could be interpreted as copying errors. He unearthed earlier toxicology data, but there were no records of effects on rats or dogs that even hinted at what he had found in his monkeys. One morning there was a meeting to review progress, and he stayed away feigning migraine, while sending an e-mail to say that his studies had shown nothing of interest. Then, out of the blue, the company ceased development of the drug in a rationalisation of company initiatives. But by this time his attic drawer was well stocked with tiny envelopes containing the pale yellow powder. That evening he felt quite light-headed, as if a weight had been taken from his shoulders.

  Each morning during the following weeks Alex rose early to be first in the kitchen. Having taken one of the envelopes from the drawer on his way to breakfast, he would stop on the stairs to inspect Jessica’s increasing output that was now spilling into the hall and downstairs rooms. He peered at each new work to judge whether it was better than what had gone before, but usually walked on bemused. He regretted his inability to recognise true artistic merit, having long accepted that Margery – not he – was the likely source of Jessica’s ability, limited though it might be. Still, he could see that there were changes, and that at least was good.

  Jessica entered her second year at college with an offer of a shared exhibition in a West End gallery. Alex, with a meeting in town, decided to walk past the windows. Then he retraced his steps and went in. ‘Abstract modern,’ he said, in reply to the salesman’s enquiry. ‘Then you may just be interested in this, Sir.’ ‘And the price?’ ‘Just five thousand guineas. The artist is still relatively unknown but shows great promise.’ That afternoon, with Jessica and Margery both out, he gave special attention to the contents of Jessica’s room.

  The light falling from a high window illuminated a grey and hostile interior. To Alex’s surprise the bed had been shifted and cringed, unmade, in a corner of the room. A trestle table in the centre was piled high with artists’ materials. The curtains from the windows lay crumpled underneath, as if they too were destined to be cut and daubed. The familiar easel now rested forlornly against the wall, giving way to an expanse of floor on which lay stretched a broad sheet of hessian encrusted and pustulous with globs of red and ochre flecked with grey. It reminded Alex of a particularly violent traffic accident. He looked for the conventional painted canvasses and eventually found them face down under the bed. No longer in doubt about his daughter’s ability, he still could not see the direction her art was taking. That did not matter though. So long as others could see it, then it was worth going on. Hearing voices in the hall below, he closed the door quietly and crept back up to the attic.

  Then, one day, there was a change in the morning ritual. To his surprise he heard Jessica’s voice in the kitchen as he made his way slowly past the now diminishing frames on the stairs. He found Margery tipping cornflakes into her bowl. Jessica was already dressed in her long brown smock and seemed to be in a hurry.

  ‘Is coffee ready, dear?’ he asked his wife, trying to control his annoyance.

  ‘There,’ she replied, waving vaguely in the direction of the pot.

  He took the milk from the fridge, put some in his coffee, and stood with his back to them while he filled the jug. Then he placed the jug on the table in front of Jessica. ‘Why up so early?’ he asked.

  ‘I can get a whole hour in before I catch the bus to college,’ she said.

  ‘So things are going well then?’

  ‘I should say! I’ve got this fantastic idea for a mural – well, more stucco than painting really – in the college hall.’

  ‘And what will it represent?’ Alex asked.

  ‘It’ll be called Penitent Care. You know how the students stand there in order of year. The figures embedded in the wall will show how influences – social pressures, drugs, that sort of thing – are brought to bear upon their sweet and innocent little natures. The figures won’t be recognisable as such, just forms expressing their psychophysical degeneration.’

  ‘Has the college commissioned such a thing?’

  ‘No… But it will, when they see the designs. You see…’

  ‘That’s enough, Jessica,’ Margery interrupted. ‘Your father has work to do and so do I. Tell us over dinner.’

  Alex wondered how such a work might be executed, and in the days that followed looked in Jessica’s studio for clues. The floor became covered in wooden boards bearing clay models which he presumed were forerunners of the figures in her mural. As the days passed, the space became more and more cramped. Then there were signs of frustration and anger. One wall was half covered in a spattering of paint which Alex tried to interpret as a ‘work’, before realising that it had had the contents of a can thrown at it. Jessica’s request at breakfast therefore came as no surprise.

  ‘Things are going so well that I would like to use the spare bedroom,’ she announced.

  ‘Well, you can’t.’ Margery’s response was unequivocal.

  ‘But I have to. The college has said I can go ahead.’

  ‘You should have told us,’ Alex said. ‘Tha
t makes a difference.’

  ‘Don’t encourage her,’ Margery said. ‘It’s all nonsense.’

  ‘Then just phone the college,’ Jessica replied, getting up and leaving the room.

  Margery turned on Alex. ‘Why do you have to egg her on all the time? You’re just an unhealthy influence.’

  At Margery’s insistence the move to the spare bedroom took place when she and Alex were away for a weekend, and on condition that all was tidy on their return. That condition had been fulfilled but the pair did not anticipate the extent of the changes. The wall between Jessica’s room and the spare bedroom had been removed to form a single studio. On the floor lay the design for Jessica’s mural. ‘It’s only a tenth the actual size,’ she explained when they returned.

  With the construction of fibre-glass moulds and importation into the studio of a miscellany of metal, glass and ceramic fragments, it seemed to Alex that Jessica had at last determined the materials she needed. But there was another aspect of the project that began to concern him. The first intimation came one evening at dinner.

  ‘I would like to see your monkeys,’ she told Alex, while pouring gravy over her lamb chops.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘I’m just… well, I’m a bit into neuropharmacology at the moment, what with my project and all that.’

  ‘Well, I suppose…’

  ‘At least it gets her out of the house,’ Margery exclaimed. All that banging and clattering she does up there.’

  It surprised Alex that Jessica’s visit to his laboratory was a success. She seemed to captivate his colleagues with her knowledge of drugs and their actions, and impressed them by the time spent with the company librarian. ‘That’s a gem of a daughter you’ve got there,’ one told him afterwards. ‘Following in her father’s footsteps?’ another asked. He went home with a weakened resolve to indulge his daughter no further.

  Not long after, Alex began to have doubts. It was signalled by the installation of several CCTV cameras around the walls of the studio, with their terminal behind a screen in the corner – and a lock on the door. On several occasions he caught his daughter on the stairs carrying a large box – or what he presumed was a box – covered completely in black plastic sheeting. Once he was sure he heard a scuffling noise from within, and he thought instinctively of the bottles of worms and snails that he had seen on the table a fortnight before. Yet, if his hunch was right, these were nothing as lowly as worms.