December (79 page)

      
'Why we have to be so secretive about it,' Eddie said, dipping
his fruitcake into his tea, 'I really cannot imagine. Not at this stage of the
game.'

      
'It isn't a game, Eddie,' Isabel reminded him.

      
'Figure of speech, girl. I know this is no game, by God I do.'

      
Isabel had clearly been anxious at first to get away from the
handicapped kid clinging to the chair. But then Eddie had come along the
street. Eddie who expressed instant curiosity about the strange woman and the
little girl at the vicarage and what
their connection was with Simon.

      
Eddie who, on learning Vanessa was the child born out of the
holocaust in the hills in 1980, had been only too happy to accept Meryl's offer
of tea at the vicarage and to exchange information.

      
But suspicious Isabel was still resistant. 'We shouldn't go shouting
it about, we could get ...'

      
'In trouble? That's not like you, girl. Who's going to cause trouble
for us? Is Abbot Richard Walden going to sue if we brand him a child-molester,
a Satanist, a murderer?'

      
'No, but some of what I discovered last night at the W.I. is
not so far in the past.' Isabel swung her chair abruptly around to point at
Meryl. 'And I don't understand. This is not Tom Storey's wife, so what's she
doing with his kid?'

      
It was not yet nine a.m.

      
'If you have the time,' Meryl said, 'I'll tell you the whole story.'

There
was
some blood. It came out in a sickening, greasy trickle, with
the candle, which proved to be almost a foot long and lumpily irregular in
shape. Moira tore off a length of bedsheet. wrapped the sticky cylinder in it,
took it out of the room and laid it, with a final shiver of revulsion, at the
top of the stairs.

      
It troubled her in another way, this candle. Its wick seemed
to be of a vegetable nature - possibly a rush or a reed. And although the
candle was many times longer than the ones she remembered, the colour and the
rudimentary moulding were horribly similar.

This had to be settled.

      
On his bed, Simon was sobbing with relief. Simon was breaking
his heart into the pillow. When, grimacing with pain, he rolled over, there was
blood and water and shit and mucus where he'd lain.

      
'I still think we should get a doctor,' Moira said. 'You could
have internal haemorrhaging, anything.'

      
'There are all kinds of little capillaries and blood vessels
and things in the anus. Looks worse than it is, I'm sure.' Simon rolled over on
his back, pulling the eiderdown up to his stomach.
      
'Certainly feels worse.'

      
'Oh, yeah? How can you be sure you're no' seriously damaged up
there?'

      
'Because if it was as bad as it feels I'd be bloody dead, and
if Dave doesn't recoil when he sees me, I'll assume there's nothing imminent in
that direction. Oh ...
God
!' Simon
beat a fist on the bed. 'I wouldn't turn the other cheek on that bastard Walden,
if I ever …'

      
'Simon, this is a spirit. An essence. A vapour. This is the Abbey.'

      
'It's a battle,' Simon said. 'There's personal malevolence
here. Last night - this morning - I told him he was finished. You remember? I
said: You're fucked, Richard. Not me, old boy, he's saying.
Not me, exactly
. Richard Walden, Satan,
the Abbey, I don't care what you call it, it's personal. It's something set in
motion years ago.'

      
Moira thought he should have some rest. She also thought this
was as good a time as any to raise the question which worried her the most:
whose side had Simon been on?

      
'The candle,' she said. 'I was hardly going to examine it
thoroughly, but that thing looked dreadfully familiar. Mmmm?'

      
'Yes,' he said wearily. 'I thought it might.'

      
'I'm thinking back to a circle of thirteen of them.'

      
'Yes.'

      
'I'm thinking about how you were so cool, assuring Tom it was
probably a practical joke.'

      
'I was very cool in those days. Cool and self-assured. And
fascinated by something that was dark and mysterious and ... and somehow powerfully
religious, too.'

      
'How long's it been going on? How long you been able to do it?
Can you lift your legs?" She was easing the soiled sheet from underneath
him.

      
'Thanks. I can't remember a time when it
didn't
go on. Strange little objects used to appear in my cot, they
tell me. But nothing remotely as spectacular as ...' He turned on his side, face
creased in discomfort '... Richard's little gifts. I didn't ... you see, I
didn't think it was evil at first. You don't, when there's ... love.'
      
'Love?'

      
'OK, eroticism. There's no more ... powerfully corrupting combination
than ... religion and sex. I was hooked. From the beginning. When Goff first
set us up for this, I read everything I could find on the Abbey, and I
discovered Richard, the pederast monk who rediscovered his soul. I mean, don't
get me wrong, I've never been into choirboys, in any sense.'

      
'Well, that's one wee mercy.'

      
'But Walden was very, very powerful and so very, very
glamorous. He'd had a holy vision, a direct link with God, and now ... now he
had a direct link with me. I suppose that made me the conduit.'

      
'We were all conduits in different ways.'

      
'And the candles were a really dramatic demonstration of it,
of what we had. Him and me. I mean, even after what happened that night, it took
me a long time to work it out. And then there was the matter of getting free of
it ... on every level. First, there was Max Goff to pay off.'

      
'Oh, Simon ...' His face was dirty with dried sweat and
stained with pain, like a casualty of some old war. 'You never liked Goff. Even
physically, he didn't have ...'

      
'What he did have was the tapes. Which Russell gave him. After
we burned blanks with a few first-takes stuck on the front, in case we checked.
He refused to destroy them, but I ... persuaded him to bury them, as it were. I
believed ... I was given to believe ... that those tapes would have been ...
used ... if I hadn't had ... been helped. That is ... what convinced me ...
Goff crying out.
Oh Richard!
when ...'

      
He rolled over, weeping into the already saturated pillow. 'I
was used. I let myself be used. I
enjoyed
being used. I'm just shit, Moira.'

      
'That's the pain talking.'

      
'Don't fucking patr— Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm never going
to be able to repay you for this.' He tried to sit up and his eyes filled with
agonised tears. He fell back. 'What you did for me ... I can't repay that,
ever. And all I do is rant at you.'

      
'Simon,' Moira said, 'if something shoved twelve inches of
stiff candle up me, I'd be ranting from now till Hogmanay and then I'd get
drunk and rant some more.'

      
He grinned momentarily. 'I must smell bloody awful. I've just
got to get myself down to the bathroom, but I don't think I can even make it to
the bloody basin.'

      
'Patience, Vicar. I'll fill a bowl of water, see what I can
do.'

      
'You've done enough for me, Moira. Far too much. No wonder
Dave ... I'm sorry. Not my business.'

      
'After everything you just told me? Dave ... He's a nice guy,
always was. As guilt-ridden as any of us. But Dave and me? I don't think so any
more. Could've been, once. Or maybe not, I can't say. I feel so sorry for the
guy. And I feel sorry for Tom, you ... even myself, just a wee bit. But that's
no' the same thing.'

      
Simon stared at the blackened beams in the ceiling. 'I've been
virtually celibate since that time with Goff. Going into the church ... that
was a fairly obvious step. That I should study theology. I was a good vicar,
you know?'

      
'I'm sure you were.'

      
'Not here. I've not been very good here up to now.'
      
'Why
did
you come back? Or is that obvious, too?'
      
'I had to know.'
      
'Whether you could resist him?'

      
'Yes. Because I'd been celibate. The first time I'd been what
you might naively call a free spirit. And therefore - you know - open to
enslavement. Emotionally, sexually. And I thought I had a purity now. Arrogance,
you see? I told you I'd been arrogant. And sooner or later, anyway, I was
always going to have to find out the truth. About which of us had been the bad influence.
About the nature of his ... conversion. But as soon as I got here, I realised
how ambivalent all this can become. We're only human, Moira. There are no absolutes
for us.'

      
'However,' Moira said. 'I think the nature of his conversion
is now pretty obvious. When you publicly rejected him - it - the position was
made painfully clear.'

      
'Like I said, it's a battle. This time yesterday I was
convinced I'd broken through. That was the first time I defied him. On top of
the other tower, above the mist line.'

      
'I could tell. It galvanised us all day. You brought the band together.'

      
'And look at me now.' He closed his eyes. 'That's what arrogance
does for you.'

      
'Wasn't arrogance. You've no arrogance in you. What happened
was, something liberated you. Or someone. A realisation maybe. A dawning?'

      
Simon opened his eyes and looked into hers. 'A woman. Can you
believe that?'

      
'Oh, aye. I always could.'

      
'A crippled woman, in a wheelchair. A woman from the village
who lost the use of her legs when she fell from the tower I was standing on
yesterday. While making love with her boyfriend. He was killed. It was a long a
time ago. Twenty-one years ago.'

      
'Well, well,' Moira said.

      
'Every seven years,' Simon said. 'Every seven years, the Abbey
takes a life.'

'On December 8th, 1959,
there was a terrible storm. Mother talks about it still. Apparently, we were
almost flooded out next day.'

      
Isabel paused for a sip of tea.

      
'Anyway, a man called Reg Welsby was farming up at Stoney
Ridge, back of the forestry. He had some sheep and they'd got loose in the
Abbey grounds and he went over there to get them back in and was struck by
lightning.'

      
'Dead?' Meryl asked.

      
'Instantaneous. They found him lying on a flat stone halfway
up the nave, which was odd - not exactly the tallest target in a vast open
space, was he? But you don't question lightning, do you? It strikes where it
strikes.'

      
'Act of God,' Eddie said.

      
'
I
bet,' said
Isabel. 'Want to hear the rest?'

      
Eddie shuddered. 'I don't
want
to.'

      
But Meryl did. She sat rapt, chilled, but so horribly thrilled
by the idea of cyclical deaths in this ancient ruin that she knew she had to
see the Abbey before the day was out.

      
'Let's see ...' Isabel counted on her fingers. '1966. When the
Abbey was an outward bound hostel for maladjusted boys from Birmingham, and two
of them became even more maladjusted and there was a very nasty fight in one of
the sheds, with hatchets, apparently. One of them died in hospital from his injuries.'

      
'December?' Eddie asked.

      
'Almost certainly. I can't get the exact dates, unless we go
to the local paper offices and look it up in their files.'
      
'No time,' Eddie said. 'What else?'
      
'Oh, there was a death in 1952 ...
heart attack, I think, but I couldn't get much because old Mrs Collis was there
last night and it was her
brother,
see.
Well
, it was getting fraught
enough by then, me wheeling myself around with a bit of Cheddar on a stick and
a glass of Chateau Pontrillas '93, asking discreet questions of different women
and forgetting there's no such thing as discreet at the Women's Institute.'