Jago (6 page)

She swallowed two pills with her first mouthful of tea. They stuck briefly in her throat, then washed down. She drank more tea and licked the roof of her mouth to make the bitter taste go away. Jenny asked after Susan’s headache, and she gave a noncommittal reply. Sooner or later, she’d be called about her habit, but she’d deal with it then. Anything to stay sane.

The girl hovered, waiting for Susan’s cup. Her long blonde hair was centre-parted, swept back behind slightly prominent ears. When she first came to the Agapemone, she had worn only black, with a gypsyish load of bracelets, earrings and bangles. Now she favoured white, and a small crucifix around her neck, usually under her dress. In her late teens, she looked younger. Susan remembered the fix she’d been in at that age. She had been Witch Susan, not Queen of the May. That was long gone now, and forgotten. Except by David. Jenny picked up a heavy book and stroked its binding. She opened it and paged through, looking for photographic plates. Susan bit a tiny hole in the bitter, purple skin of a plum, and sucked the sweet flesh.

Almost nobody else used the library, which alone made it ideal for Susan. During the last few weeks, she’d spent most of her waking hours at the desk in the middle of the room, spreading books and papers on the broad expanse of aged oak. She read, made notes in shorthand, cross-referenced volumes that had gone unopened for half a century. She was supposed to be here to build up the big picture. David should never have let it go this far, should never have let the project get so out of
IPSIT
’s control. Now it was up to her to make him understand precisely what was going on out here in witch country. She rolled the sour stone around her mouth, tongue scraping away the last threads of plum. Finding nothing of interest in her book, a theological tract from the 1860s, Jenny put it down and looked at one of the Winthrop-Kaye scrapbooks. It had ‘1924’ scrawled in watery blue ink on a paper plate pasted on the front cover, but the brittle newspaper cuttings inside came mainly from forty years earlier. At first, Susan had thought it was just someone’s collection of juicy scandal.

The first few pieces related to a gruesome murder spree of 1887. Jeremiah Gosmore, a farmer, had killed Martin, his son, and Jerrold Hogg, the local verger. He had also attacked his wife, whose name wasn’t recorded, and a Colonel Edward Winthrop before being captured, tried (incredibly enough before Winthrop, a magistrate) and hanged. The murderer’s pitchfork had been bought from the widow by Madame Tussaud’s waxworks for their Chamber of Horrors. Lurid, Susan supposed, but not very relevant.

Jenny was absorbed. ‘Gosmore must have lived at Gosmore Farm. The Pottery as now is. The chief witness was called James Starkey. My nana was a Starkey. James must be some great-great relation. There’ve always been Starkeys in Alder. Funny how you never hear about these things. I thought Alder had a dead boring history. Year after year of harvests and floods. They must all be buried in the churchyard.’

‘Except Jeremiah. They don’t put murderers in hallowed ground.’

Next came a tiny scandal: the birth on 3rd July 1888 of a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, to one Alice Frances Pym, aged fifteen, who would appear to have been unencumbered with a husband.

‘This doesn’t sound very Victorian.’

‘It wasn’t all hard work, happy families and muscular morals. The age of consent was twelve or thirteen. Old newspapers are full of pieces like that. The mystery is why the man who put the scrapbook together thought it was worth clipping this particular one.’

Jenny looked back at the date in the front of the book. ‘1924. Mary Elizabeth would have been grown up. Perhaps he married her.’

‘Oh no. Edwin Winthrop was otherwise engaged.’

The tenor of the items in the scrapbook changed. The headlines became unusual by the standards of any age. ‘Miraculous Apparitions’, ‘Psychical Researchers Investigate’, ‘Poltergeist Phenomena on Haunted Hillside’.

‘What’s this?’ Jenny asked.

‘Ghost stories, I think. The man who lived here in the 1920s was interested in psychic phenomena. He wrote books about ghost hunting and local folklore.’

“‘Burning Man Sighted in Somerset”? Sounds like the
Sunday Sport.’

All this had been in the library, undisturbed, long before the founding of the Agapemone; long before, even, the birth of Anthony Jago. Susan shivered like the damn fool in a ghost story who, poring over manuscripts recounting obscure and bygone atrocities, feels the lengthy, many-jointed fingers of the unquiet dead reaching out for her rapidly beating heart.

‘Alder is a very haunted village, Jenny. Whatever is happening here has been happening for over a hundred years.’

Jenny chewed her knuckle and turned a creaking page. A newspaper article, folded in on itself because it was too large to fit the book, flopped open.

‘And something
is
happening, isn’t it?’

Susan nodded.

‘Beloved knows, doesn’t He?’

Careful, Susan. Whatever else this girl is, she’s also a Sister of the Agapemone. Jago, or Brother Mick, could have Taine break your neck.

‘Beloved will tell what He knows in time, Sister. I’m just clearing the way for His revelation.’

Deep in the house, something vast stirred. Susan tried to blot it out of her consciousness by concentrating, visualizing the newsprint of the clipping Jenny was looking at. The article was a long interview, dated ‘13-11-87’, with a Dr Joseph Skilton who, in a faded photograph, was displaying a bandage-mittened hand like a rabbit paw. The thing still moved. She felt the ripples. A swallow of cold tea did not help. Fear stabbed her. This could be an attack. She held her breath, shut her eyes, pressed her knees tightly together, and laid her hands on the table. Inside her head, she put up shutters, trying to conquer the fear. She was a minute creature of the deeps, caught up in the current as an unimaginably huge whale swims by, blind but full of purpose. With relief, she gathered it wasn’t hostile specifically to her. But that didn’t make it any less dangerous.

Then, the giant was gone.

‘Are you all right, Susan?’

‘Just more headache, I’m afraid.’

‘You should get that seen to. Mum gets migraines. She says they’re crippling. Who did you say collected these?’

‘Edwin Winthrop. The son of the man who hanged his mistress’s husband. He wrote books too, mostly in collaboration with his wife, Catriona Kaye. Well, actually, I think they weren’t married. That would have been unconventional then.’

Susan wondered again about Edwin, who had apparently trod the same scholarly path back in the 1920s. He had come out of the First World War with some funny ideas and an even funnier set of associates. She hoped to find more of his books in the still-unopened Winthrop trunks upstairs. They were her link to the past.

‘Here, this is him.’ Susan stood, and turned the pages of the scrapbook. In the photograph, Edwin, dapper and Gatsbyish in evening dress, was accompanied by two women. A veiled beauty with black feathers and what had then been an unfashionably deep décolleté, and a smiling girl in a light dress with bobbed hair and a tiny hat.

‘The dark woman is Irena Dubrovna. Her real name was probably Irene Dobson. She was a medium. I imagine she was a con artist and what they called “an adventuress”. But she had something, a Talent. She was good at what she did. Very theatrical. She knew Arthur Conan Doyle.’

‘The Sherlock Holmes man?’

‘Yes, he was interested in spiritualism. He had a row with Winthrop, actually. Edwin called him a “credulous fool” for believing in fairies.’

‘And the other woman?’

‘That’s Catriona. Catriona Kaye.’

‘She was pretty.’

‘She probably still is. Jago—Beloved—bought this place from her. She inherited it from Edwin. I’ve not heard of her dying, so I assume she’s still about, revising her old books or whatever. She wrote these.’ Susan indicated a pile:
Where Women Go Wrong
,
Ghost Stories of the West Country
, and, famously,
An Introduction to Free Love.
They had strange enthusiasms, Edwin and Catriona.’

The Winthrop-Kaye book collection was much more arcane than the psychedelia and charlatanism favoured by the current occupants of their house. They had Crowley in the original editions, also Harry Price, Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, Madame Helena Blavatsky. A glance at
The House of the Hidden Light,
which she had never heard of, by Machen and Waite, revealed a personal dedication from Machen, ‘To Edwin and Catriona, for Shedding Much Light’.

Really, Susan ought to feel at home. After all these years of anonymity, she could be Witch Susan again.

‘Why are you looking all this old stuff out?’

Susan rehearsed her excuse. ‘Beloved chose Alder as the site of His community. It wasn’t a random decision. This is a place of power. He wants to make us all aware of that. Brother Mick has asked me to prepare a dossier on local hauntings, psychic phenomena, spiritual things…’

‘But what have ghosts got to do with Beloved?’

‘Look again at the burning-man pages, Jenny.’

The girl flipped back.

‘It’s a local story. Most of these clippings are from the 1880s, but Winthrop found other records, going back earlier. Alder has its ghosts. But the burning-man isn’t usually classed as one.’

Jenny found a line drawing, an artist’s impression based on Dr Skilton’s testimony. A beautiful man in a loincloth stood in flame, a circle of fire around his head, crudely sketched wings spreading behind him.

‘He was supposed to be an Angel.’

For a moment, Susan thought she sensed a trace of recognition in the girl’s mind.

‘Not just any ghost, Jenny. A Holy Ghost.’

H
e had typed ‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn-of-the-Century Fiction by Paul Forrestier’ at the top of too many sheets of A4. He used to put ‘
fin-de-siècle’
rather than ‘turn-of-the-century’, but now rejected that as a frenchified frill. Five variant opening paragraphs and more than forty complete or incomplete first sentences on folded pages were now in use as bookmarks. Large chunks of the thesis were written, waiting to be cannibalized from the last three years’ worth of essays. He just needed to join them up and smooth over the cracks. But there were always ways of putting off real work: books to be read and reread and annotated; the shop to be looked after when Hazel was too busy; telephone calls to be made to parents and friends; the desk to be kept tidy and usable; Hazel to be lived with, however remotely…

The sun ground down, making the blank page in the IBM painfully bright even through shades. Hazel had started a tan in Brighton, and sunbathed in her lunch break and after work. He traced her bikini marks in bed. He hadn’t brought sunglasses, and the only pair he could find in the house were antique mirror goggles that made him look like the Man with X-Ray Eyes. Hazel said they were creepy, but he got used to them. He thought she thought he used them to hide what he was thinking.

Yesterday, he had done real work. Vaulting over his sticky opening, he whipped the conclusion into shape. Discussing Arthur Machen’s
The Terror
and Haggard’s
When the World Shook
in the light of the religious revival that came during the Great War, he pointed out that post-1914 fictions return the responsibility for the end of the world to supernatural forces. His central argument was that after Darwinism, writers of scientific romances saw the apocalypse as a result of evolutionary decay (The
Time Machine),
virulent diseases (Shiel’s
The Purple Cloud,
London’s
The Scarlet Plague),
high-tech weaponry and global war (War
in the Air,
Shiel’s
The Yellow Danger),
passing comets or cosmic phenomena (Flammarion’s
La Fin du Monde,
Doyle’s
The Poison Belt),
invading Martians, or other natural or man-made forces. But while the Age of Doubt was going at full sceptical blast, there were still plenty of religious maniacs running about between 1875 and 1900 proclaiming the End of All Things. It always happens as centuries close. He could guarantee that before 2001 there would be a lot of Armageddon nuts about. If, as it sometimes seemed, he got
The Secular Apocalypse
out around the end of the century, he would be able to cash in on the furore.

‘At most, terrestrial man fancied there might be other men on Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves, and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise,’ Paul read again, consulting his much pencilled-in
War of the Worlds
paperback, with the album-cover artwork. ‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’ Wells was the key, and no matter how many intriguingly obscure and unread contemporaries—Garrett P. Serviss, Grant Allen, Matthew Phipps Shiel—he exhumed, he still found himself drawn back to Herbert George. His short-sleeved shirt sweated through, he could not help but think he was living in the days of the comet.

Hazel was struggling with the clay, more often than not mashing her finished work back into a lump and starting all over again. The board on the lawn was barely half-covered with drying bottles. She had been briefly enthused by the visit of the couple from the Agapemone, but now she was closed like a flower that shows itself only to the noonday sun.

They had met on Easter Sunday, at the Brian-Alex-Eugene party, for which they’d coopted a large garden from a lecturer. The first weekend of the big heat. Sally and her new boyfriend had made an entrance, dressed like Betty Boop and Tin-Tin. Paul remembered people not much older than him, even a few of his university contemporaries, were being dragged around by small children, murderously intent on ferreting out hidden chocolate eggs. Vaguely fed up, he noticed Hazel, with a crying little girl who hadn’t found a single egg, and rescued her by pointing to a foil-wrapped sweetie lodged in a cracked plant pot. The child belonged to one of her tutors, and she’d been given charge of her. Hazel was doing ceramics part-time at the polytechnic. She wore a lavenderish dress that left her legs bare, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. They talked, or were together, for most of the rest of the afternoon. Of course, he noticed she was a pretty girl. She was also, apart from little Amanda, unattached. They kissed goodbye twice. The first time was politely passionless, at about six thirty. Then they found themselves not parting after all. A parent claimed Amanda, but suggested Hazel stay on for the slimmed-down evening version of the party. Brian found a piano and started being Hoagy Carmichael, while Eugene impersonated the Battle of Britain with vocal sound effects and Alex sang cricket statistics to hymn tunes. Hazel didn’t stay long—her parents lived in Hove, she was expected for a meal—but a difference was made. They exchanged telephone numbers. The second kiss was different, with a hint of moving tongue. She left him something to think about.