Last Days (44 page)

‘The first one. Yes? It is called
The Siege of Jerusalem
. It is the beginning of the end for Konrad Lorche and his Blood Friends. At least for a while.’

Kyle glanced at Pieter, who nodded at the canvas. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Kyle looked to the top of the first ancient wooden frame and moved his eyes downwards. Saw a thin strip of distant sky, red and black, cut above an arid plain of dry or scorched land. In the top third of the picture, beneath the angry sky, an army bristled with pikes and lances, their steel helmets were close together, and the armoured cluster moved as one mass upon a mostly broken wall. About the rubble inside the town a handful of men with thin legs threw their arms into the sky, or stood with drawn swords and banners. It looked like a final stand.

‘I see the army. The siege?’

‘The besiegers. Seven hundred soldiers. Two hundred 389

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mercenaries. Spanish. Very disciplined, with much experience slaughtering Protestants.’

‘The walls are broken and the soldiers are pouring into the town. St Mayenne, I’m guessing.’

Pieter nodded. ‘What are the people doing in the town?’

Horribly thin and miserable women wearing cloth caps and long gowns trailed bone-thin hounds about their skirts.

All of the people’s faces were depicted with hollow eye sockets. Mouths hung open and were dark inside. Round-headed children watched from the upper windows of one building. The few male figures he could see were at the collapsed walls. Only a few wore armour or clutched weapons.

Hopelessly, women threw buckets of dirty water at the fires that licked out of three visible windows. ‘The women are putting out fires.’

‘Yes. And they also repaired the buildings and the walls at night. The Catholic army fired cannon shot at them. The siege lasted six weeks.’

‘Six?’

‘The army built a trench round the town and decide to starve the Blood Friends. See how they all look? Niclaes Verhulst painted them as bones in rags. They have no eyes, their jaws hang open like the dead. The royal court held the stores of food, which ran out very quick. And the people had no bread for six weeks. It was forbidden to eat the dogs, so they ate the horses, they ate the rats, then they ate the grass. The Unholy Swine, he was all right. And the Prophet’s elect. The royal court of God’s one true king ate well while the people starved.

‘Lorche sent sorties outside the walls and he even des -

troyed the army’s cannons in one skirmish. But the Catholic 390

LAST DAYS

soldiers, they still surrounded them. Starved them. Lorche killed those people who tried to go over to the Guise army when the town people were promised sanctuary if they recanted. See the market square?’

Kyle found it. Eight headless figures in white winding sheets lay in the dirt of the square before a figure in purple robes, who sat upon a golden throne. The seated figure looked up to heaven. Its face was greenish, its grin skeletally beatific.

‘Apostates,’ Pieter said. ‘Beheaded. He offered their blood to those angels he served, with whom he had a pact. You see Lorche? He looks to heaven, waits for the angels who guide him to save him as he promised his followers. But the people have no food and little water. There is disease and many bodies fill the houses. So in the final days, Lorche told them to drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh of Christ. Lorche got the pig-bishop to bless the bodies of the sick and the dying and said
eat
to his people. So they stayed alive a bit longer eating their own dead.’

Kyle swallowed the bitter taste that had come into his mouth.

‘Look upon the table in the market square. You see the feast?’

Kyle did, but wished he had not. Entire skeletons of horses littered the flagstones of the square before the church. Picked clean. Before the doors of the church a table was laid with bowls of reddish-brown liquid; lifeless sticklike arms and legs were laid upon great steel platters. A scattering of empty coffins were built up in a pile beside the banqueting table.

‘Now look to the next painting.
The Martyring of Fools
.’

The market square filled the entire canvas and was depicted 391

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in much greater detail; a dirty, rubbish-strewn space of wet stone in poor light. Either the painting was filthy with age or dark, greasy smoke had been deliberately conjured to drift across the area and stain the background. The flagstones were littered with the dead and the dying. Faceless figures in dark steel armour formed a border about the slaughter. Upon the long shields of the soldiers the thin red crosses looked wet.

But the apex of the picture’s images concentrated on a series of upright poles with things attached to their upper lengths.

‘In the middle, upon the longest stave, you can see Lorche, the Father of Lies. Around him, The Seven. They were all stripped of their clothes. Their legs and their arms were smashed with poles while they are still alive. Then they get tied to the beams and raised vertically. Slow fires of dung, tow and pitch are built under their feet.’

Kyle felt unwell, lightheaded, and adjusted his feet. The floor of the room groaned beneath his boots.

Nine thin black posts held dirty ruins of barely recognizable forms, engulfed in smoke. About the figures on the poles, others were strapped to wooden chairs with red fires beneath the seats. Yet more had been tied to and broken upon cart-wheels raised on thin poles. The agonies of the Blood Friends were captured with white twists of face and sinewy throat, reaching upwards to escape the fumes. Every figure yearned for the boiling black sky.

‘Nine. There are nine posts.’

Pieter smiled. ‘Here burns the King, The Seven Elders, and their bishop, the Unholy Swine. You see his feet. The last one on the right in the picture. Pig feet. The picture is dirty, but if you look closely you also see his vestments. They burn him in his holy robes and his bishop hat.’

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Kyle chose not to look any closer. ‘What happened to the others . . . the peasants, the people of the town?’

‘They were slaughtered in their homes. Few lived. The soldiers lied. Said they would be saved if they ended the resistance. But they found most of the people too given over to Anabaptism to save, and alive with demons, so they cut their throats in their homes. Many were beheaded. Hundreds.

Maybe a thousand. Who knows now? Their corpses were salted. The children and some women were sent to other towns in the diocese, but nearly all others died here on this last day of the siege. Verhulst was an educated man and his parents had money. He survived because we think he bribed the Spanish mercenaries. Now look at the sky. Tell me what is happening there.’

The sky seethed with a cumulus of pitch-black smoke, from which curious vanilla gases appeared in places as if a sickly sun was trying to light the ground. A thin red fire glowed on the horizon. Kyle found his throat to be so dry he could barely speak. ‘It’s dark. Smoke maybe, from the fires.

Or a storm.’

‘The captain of the soldiers claimed a storm came on the final day. The Last Day. As they put the heretics to the sword, and as the town and the bodies burned to ashes, he said a terrible wind came up and started to scatter the bones. He said the air was full of smoke and embers and they were forced to withdraw. What was left of Lorche and his chosen was meant for steel cages, to be taken around the nearby towns. The cages were to be hung from the steeples of churches as a warning. But the storm, it spoiled that. Because when the wind blew in St Mayenne on the last day, on the day of the false martyrs, a priest with the soldiers wrote that 393

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the sky filled up with ash and then rained with black bones.

All the soldiers ran when this happened. Now look above the walls, before the air is dark. What do you see?’

‘Birds.’

Pieter nodded beside him. A score of black shapes, crows, seemed to hover lifelessly above the ruined walls. ‘They’d been coming in for many weeks to eat the blessed dead. But on this day, they got lost in the wind. It took them too. Took them into the sky with the remains of Lorche and his dis -

ciples.

‘And now, we come to the end of Verhulst’s triptych.
The
Kingdom of Fools
.’

Rising to the upper margin of the grey charred sky in the third painting, a single figure immediately captured Kyle’s attention. The Unholy Swine. The pig clutched a sceptre in one uncomfortably prehensile trotter, and a gilt-edged book in another trotter. But what most unnerved him about the pig was its apparent glee at the elevation, or even levitation while seated in its throne. Up it went, into the broiling maelstrom of the heavens; the air now depicted as an unpleasant sulphurous-yellow mist.

The pig and its host rose above the suggested miniature detail of a blackened town, crowned with smoke, at the foot of the piece. Up into the sky the host of tormented and stricken martyrs writhed; thin wretched forms of at least a hundred naked human figures.

The ghastly sky filled two-thirds of the picture, with its tainted air seeming to churn, circle, and pull at the earth far below. Birds who were still feeding on the listless human carrion of the air, grinned as if delighted by their ghastly ascension, and were also whirlpooled into the sky. Bone-thin 394

LAST DAYS

dogs with long snouts, lolling tongues and prominent rib -

cages rose upwards too, as if on their hind legs, and barked at the turmoil in the heavens about them.

‘You see the Unholy Swine?’

Kyle nodded that he did.

‘He holds a book.
The Book of One Hundred Chapters
.

It is Lorche’s hierophantic manifesto of the Blood Friends. A testament that deified him as immortal and those who follow him as saints. A written proclamation of their divinity. Sister Katherine wrote something similar, and just as badly. She said it was transcribed through her. Maybe this was one thing she did not lie about. Now see the faces. Those around the pig are in better detail.’ Several of the faces were turned sky-wards in a mixture of wonderment and cruel leers. ‘They think they are saved. But they are merely guests in damnation. Guests of those they served through Lorche. These angels. The Blood Friends are consumed by this other place, their souls are devoured, they become one with their angels, their false gods. They mimic the expressions of the Christian saints and martyrs. But this is an inversion. Now look in the top section of the picture. The final ascent into hell. Through the sky.’

The top third of the picture depicted a long, miserable stretch of what looked like pale dirt. A shore before a great body of lifeless water. A place positioned above the maelstrom of sky that the martyrs moved upwards through.

‘We’ll take two steps closer. Come.’

Kyle swallowed.

‘Up here. In hell. The Blood Friends frolic like blasphem -

ous angels above the world. They cavort with the pig and a pack of mad dogs, who stand on their hind legs. All their 395

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tongues flap to suggest idiocy. You see their simple crowns?’

All of the bone-thin figures were crowned like royalty in the featureless vacant space. The crowns were crudely made of wood. ‘Here Verhulst represents Lorche and The Seven as kings of emptiness, of vapours and foul gases. Their constituency is a pestilence of sinners executed and burned alive, a flock of dead birds who feasted upon carrion, and dogs who have eaten diseased flesh. You can see the birds around the feet of the people. The birds too are bones. This is the paradise they were promised.’

The Blood Friends were even more wretchedly gaunt and spindly than they had been during the siege and the martyring. They didn’t look like people any more. But the depiction was accurate; Kyle knew where he had seen such things before.

‘Instead of heavenly bodies they now are caged within twisted demoniac forms, human remains reshaped in the image of their masters. They can only masquerade as angels.

They grin like fools upon the devastation wrought upon their earthly forms. You see? Clutched in their hands are rags and bones. They clutch at ruin, but prize the things they have seized as if they are made of gold and are encrusted with precious jewels. In the middle you will see Lorche. He dances with the pig.’

Indeed he did. The horrible prance of a skeletal man who wore a wooden crown, about a pig with grotesque human features under a bishop’s headdress, made Kyle feel sick and nervous.

‘They are no longer men. They are the damned. Devoured.

Yet still they yearn for the light below that burns them. They await here, in the wasteland, for a call from those old places 396

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where they were once strong, or from those who have come to adore them.’

Kyle turned away. The images had been seared into his memory; he knew he would revisit them, often. And as he walked across the room towards the door, unaccompanied by Pieter, who had remained behind to hastily throw black sheets over the stands, all Kyle could see were the thin wretched faces of the Blood Friends in their Kingdom of Fools. Their white eyes were full of madness.

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TWENTY-SIX

camden, london. 24 june 2011. 11 p.m.

‘Mate. I’m outside. This is getting old.’ Kyle had lost the will to leave another message for Dan, who was still worryingly at large. There had been nothing from him since the flurry of calls during his flight to Antwerp. Finger Mouse had not seen him since he’d dropped off the master drives from the US shoot after they landed at Gatwick. Dan had told Finger Mouse he was going home to sleep.

They usually met at Kyle’s place in West Hampstead, because Kyle’s infrequent visits to the arse-end of Camden only served to cultivate his aversion to the area where Dan shared an illegal sublet with a performance artist, whose last kick was a painfully bad and entirely unsuccessful attempt at a burlesque act that Kyle had been coerced into filming: a self-important character called Raoul who mercifully spent most of his time in Madrid.

The red-brick block of flats looked empty, was mostly unlit. But then it always looked that way. He went through the broken front door of the block into a miasma of old urine on cold cement, because the concrete staircase was used as a latrine. As soon as the beleaguered council fixed the door, a scuffed sports shoe would unfix it and the local weasels 398