Last Days (17 page)

ADAM NEVILL

lips. Tried to slow his heavy breathing under the weight of the equipment he carried. Bit down on his panic and staggered past the former artisan’s workshop in the direction of where the meadow continued below the farm.

Once clear of the main farm buildings, he spotted the chimney of what had to be Sister Katherine’s little house, about half a mile away, almost entirely concealed by a line of willow trees.

His focus returned. Nervous excitement bustled anew. A long shot on the tripod, then a medium shot, would be ideal to catch more of the curious atmosphere contained in the landscape he no longer doubted was imagined. But the time for varying the camera work was long gone, as was a delay of the inevitable.
Now or never.

Cursing Max, Dan and Gabriel, Kyle broke through the long grass and headed towards Sister Katherine’s abandoned
fermette
, alone.

Forty years after Sister Katherine packed her bags, the
fermette
remained fifteen square metres of squat stone of uneven sizes, beneath a mostly absent layer of earthen stucco. One end of the house was concealed by ivy that clambered up to the chimney. Many roof tiles had dislodged, but the lines and angles of the roof appeared straight and firm. A sea of grass, white at the tips, reached the sill of the ground-floor windows.

The panes of glass were intact and the front door in place.

Kyle set the camera up on the tripod and shot close-ups of the
fermette
from the front: one door; three small windows, two of them on the ground floor. He lined up the sound on the mixer and fitted his mic. Took a breath and looked about the darkening landscape. Satisfied he was still alone, 146

LAST DAYS

he turned to the door and hoped it was locked. It wasn’t. He pushed it open.

In the grainy light prior to dusk, three thick beams crossed with smaller ribs of the same dark timber appeared on the ceiling. Dirty plaster filled the spaces between the beams and covered the walls too. On the cement floor, before the great blackened fireplace, he was confronted by an ancient-looking bathtub, mounted on clawed feet. It supplied a sudden notion of domesticity he found unwelcome amongst such neglect. A cramped staircase made of dark wood turned once then disappeared into the first floor.

Kyle crept inside and set up the camera to resume his com-mentary from behind the tripod by reading from his script.

If this wasn’t extreme guerrilla film-making, then nothing was. Battery level on the camera wasn’t great. There was a spare in the bag, but he wanted to be quick; though he refused to dwell on the reasons why.

‘This is Sister Katherine’s
fermette
. In London, the trend was set. And the same physical separation between herself and the rest of The Last Gathering continued here. This building had electricity and basic plumbing, but it was still more primitive than she could stand, and she would never sink to this level again. In the Arizona desert, she bought the fabulous art deco palace for herself, miles from the abandoned copper mine that her followers in The Temple of the Last Days occupied. Perhaps the mansion was a reaction to the
privations
she endured in France.

‘There are no photos in existence of the interior of this building during Sister Katherine’s occupation, so we can only rely upon the hearsay of the apostates that Irvine Levine interviewed, to imagine what it was once like. But out here in 147

ADAM NEVILL

those cold Norman winters, it was claimed that Sister Katherine acquired a fondness for antique furniture and thick rugs, for velvet drapes. She was sensitive to the cold and impatient with the heat.

‘The luxurious furnishings, the queenly fittings, are long gone. The floor, as you can see, is now bare cement, stained in places by what looks like oil and some water damage.’

In the gloom, he quickly recorded the solitary artefact of her occupation in a close-up, and ad-libbed some narration.

‘I mean, it’s amazing, to find this. Sister Katherine’s bathtub is still here after forty years. Makes you wonder why no one has taken it.’

None of the terrible figures he had seen in the barn were present on the grimy plaster of the
fermette
’s walls, which made him giddy with relief. But again there was an acute and incongruous stillness.

‘It’s really strange, but in here, there is an atmosphere.

Again, just like in the temple. Pregnant. An anticipation almost. It’s like the very moment before the arrival of some -

one, or something. An event perhaps suspended in a fixed state within the space in which I am standing. When we first arrived here, Brother Gabriel reported feeling something similar. He has since decided to leave the shoot. He’s very upset with coming back here. Dan the cameraman is with him. So I am continuing solo from this point.’

Kyle found the right page of his script and dropped his voice to a softer tone as he read into the mic; he was becoming breathless with excitement at the find. ‘This is a significant place in the history of the cult. In this building, perhaps even inside this very room, Sister Katherine transcribed
The Book of One Hundred Chapters
: the theological 148

LAST DAYS

text recited to her by what she called the presences, and Holy Spirits. It’s a thin, almost unreadable book, but it was manda-tory for the adepts to quote from it upon command. And this is the very space in which she administered the highest and most personal theological instruction to the brothers of the cross, The Seven. Five of whom tried to wrest control from her at this farm. During the resulting schism that followed the failed coup of 1972, this is also the very building where The Temple of the Last Days was born: the version of the cult that destroyed itself in Arizona. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it was the actual place where Sister Katherine was completely accepted by her last few loyal followers as

‘a living divinity’.

‘She and the two remaining members of The Seven, Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona, were the nucleus from which the diaspora to the new American Temple was launched in 1972, when Sister Katherine declared to what remained of her blessed elect: “Take up the cross and follow me”. Words that were to become notorious in the Sonora desert.’

He would have to come back down for the sound equipment, but took the camera off the tripod and put it on his shoulder, and gingerly tested each stair before rising to the next one. The old steps creaked, even made snapping sounds, but instinct assured him they were firm enough for a careful footfall and an average weight near the sides. He filmed as he moved upstairs. It would look horrible without the Steadicam rig on the second camera that was with Dan, but at least he’d capture something before coming back down for the tripod and sound equipment to get better footage.

Like the ground floor, the second storey was one great room with a ceiling supported by stout timber beams. Little 149

ADAM NEVILL

light made it through the one grimy windowpane, but enough to show him the water that had seeped down from the roof and left the plaster and paint in a terrible condition. But even in the gloom, Kyle still gaped in disbelief at what he saw, because Sister Katherine’s bed remained in the upstairs room.

How was it that the locals did not disassemble and cart away such a colossal bed, let alone the bath? Great purple curtains, now rotting and sodden with damp, swept from the canopy and suggested the original magnificence of the four-poster.

He’d have to go and find Dan.
Where the hell was he?
He wanted the
fermette
shot in its own light, and then again with one of their ensembles of lights. He wasn’t half the cameraman Dan was and this was far too good to mess up.

Kyle went back down for the sound equipment and tripod.

Quickly checked the levels and then set up as best he could with the boom pole lodged between two soft floorboards for the sound.

‘It’s as if this great bed, still remaining in the middle of her boudoir, attests wholly to the grandeur of an Empress.

The Empress she probably always believed herself to be, before she became a Goddess.’

Kyle shot the great fireplace, its brickwork black. ‘She must have been quite comfortable in here. The fireplace would have roared at the foot of her bed on those cold winter nights, while the children shivered with the dogs up in that wooden agricultural structure built for livestock.’

When he came around the foot of the bedframe, his boots scuffed through rotten tendrils of a once luxurious rug, to film the other half of the room. Below the small window, set deep in its stone casement, something caught his eye. The answer to his earlier query as to why the locals had not made 150

LAST DAYS

off with the bed. Because no one sane would have lingered long in a room with
that
charred upon the wall.

The very moment he glimpsed it, he quickly backed away.

The thick mattress, still wrapped in the wretched bedding, indented the back of his knees and made him sit down upon the wet bedclothes and whatever it was that oozed outwards on either side of his sodden buttocks.

He leaped to his feet. Swatted the back of his jeans. Turned and noticed the head of the bed in greater detail; saw the remnants of one long dark pillow, with vestiges of pale tas-sels at either end. If he wasn’t mistaken, the middle of the roll was indented, as if with the recent memory of a head at rest upon it. And when the bedclothes moved around the hollow his backside had made in the mattress, his breath sealed itself inside his chest and his teeth clamped down on the shriek that gathered in his throat.

He gripped the sodden bedspread, perhaps once satin or velvet, but mostly just matter now. And tore it upwards to see what writhed beneath.

There was nothing in Levine’s true-crime classic, nor in Susan White’s fretful eulogies or Gabriel’s nervous testimony to prepare him for the sight beneath the rotten eiderdown.

As the ancient bedding rose in his fist, then came apart as lumps of mulch, he looked into the hole he had made and saw a murk of black and yellow flesh, twisting wetly in its own brine.

‘Oh God.’

Kyle aimed the camera at it. ‘This is incredible. I can’t believe I am seeing this. There’s . . . snakes . . . I think . . .

a terrible smell too.’ But before he could embellish his narration, the light in the room faded like his sight dimmed, or 151

ADAM NEVILL

a great curtain had fallen over the solitary window. In a panic, he looked to where the light had been, but only received a strong impression of the thin scorched figure beneath the stone casement.

A sudden stench of decay filled the room in one tremendous gust. And into his mind grew an image, so clear, so crisp, of a flock of lifeless birds, their dusty wings at rest on dry bodies, before a lake of fetid water, greened with flotsam.

Upon the shore an indistinct figure wrapped in tatty cloth raised its face to
see
him.

Kyle mewled like a lost and frightened child. Crouched down, dropped the camera onto the bed. Clutched at his eyes to rub away the vision of the figure and the terrible water: superimposed by that bony upright shape burned into the wall.

Huddled into himself, he turned his body away from the window. Needed to escape the hallucination, the things in the bed, everything . . . couldn’t bring himself to even look over his shoulder again. Closed his eyes to see if the vision had gone. It had. He was dizzy, disoriented by the smell, the bed . . .

A door slammed shut. Downstairs. The one he came

through.

‘Christ almighty. Dan! That you?’

There was no answer. He thought of the thin figure, running through the dark of the Clarendon Road house.

‘Dan!’ Then quieter, his tone pleading, ‘Dan? Mate?’

And Kyle remained bent over, a man reduced to a thing all shaky with moist unblinking eyes that peered across the stinking bed, at the doorway. That opened to the stairs. That descended to the ground floor. A space now indistinct at dusk; 152

LAST DAYS

its door shut against the dying light. Shut behind someone that had come
inside
.

Below him in the building, he heard a sound not dissimi -

l ar to the one outside the rooms of Sister Katherine’s empty penthouse in London: the noise of ungainly feet. A thud and shuffle amongst the detritus, in the pattern unsteady legs make as a search commences through the dark. A search for something, or someone.

When Kyle came out of Sister Katherine’s
fermette
, his mouth was a tight crease in a wide-eyed and bloodless face. He could barely feel his legs, let alone the camera and equipment he clutched with shaking hands.

Paralysed with fear, he had waited for twenty minutes after the noises of intrusion had abruptly stopped downstairs. But the sudden silence left an image in his mind, of a small thin figure stood at the foot of the staircase, that looked up and waited for him to come down.

Heartbeat paused, he eventually emerged from the room and began his descent from the bed chamber, deciding that one more moment in the horrid room beside the reeking bed, that still twitched with the movements of its small burrowing occupants, was still less preferable to a confrontation with a
visitor
in the shadows below.

But he was alone in the
fermette
. Inexplicably, it seemed he had been the only occupant all along. Though he was certain someone had come in. He’d heard footsteps, hadn’t he?

The mic might have picked them up too, in between his whimpers. He would check later. Maybe the front door had been closed by a wind of which there was now no trace.

He stumbled back through the long grass to the farm 153

ADAM NEVILL

buildings. There was still no sign of Dan or Gabriel. He called out for them, albeit weakly. When he received no reply, he located the remainder of their equipment bags outside the temple’s empty doorway, that he could not even bear to glance inside now, before dragging the bags to the edge of the courtyard. Talking to himself in a hurried whisper, with the first tranche of their gear, he set off across the meadow towards the copse of trees.