Last Days (6 page)

‘But you gave her all of your money to be included.’

‘We didn’t need anything! I sold whatever I owned. Some jewellery from my grandmother. Cashed in my little savings account at the post office. I gave it all to her. To the Gathering. The same thing, really. Katherine was the Gathering.

A few poor girls gave up big inheritances, you know. Like Sister Urania and Sister Hannah. Trusts. Surrendering your worldly self was essential for entrance. One couldn’t be a part of the family otherwise.’

‘It must have impressed you.’

‘It was a movement. A future! A revolution, we thought.

We were to be wandering missionaries. Reliant on our wits, you know. We had to “purge” ourselves “through poverty”

she used to say. Start again. Rebirth.’ Susan paused and shook her head. ‘But I think the only thing that kept us going was the kindness and charity of strangers.’

‘What was this floor of the Temple used for?’

Susan looked about the floor. ‘We slept in here. And in those two rooms back there. The kitchen was used as a quiet room then, where we prepared for the sessions, or sat and thought about what we had learned from the previous night’s meeting. Sat and thought of how greedy and needy and selfish and jealous and childish we were.

45

ADAM NEVILL

‘About fifteen of us slept on the floors in here, in sleeping bags. On thin mats. There were people everywhere. At one point there were over fifty of us living in this building. You had no privacy. It was forbidden. For two years of my life I slept in this room.’

‘But you stayed.’

Susan threw her head back and shrieked with laughter. ‘We were celebrities, my dear man. Famous! People loved us.

Barefoot in summer, or sandals. Tight leather boots in winter.

Black capes and long dresses. We were witchy, darling. And the guys with their little shaped beards and long hair. Their intense eyes. The pentagrams in red silk thread. Or the Circle of Solomon, the ankh, the Celtic knot embroidered on our uniforms. What we believed in was irrelevant, but we had charisma, darling. We were dangerous. I mean, the stories the press used to write about us. Our orgies! Worshipping the devil, they said. Black masses! Nudity!’

‘Was it all exaggeration?’

‘Ridiculous. Every bit of it. We remained celibate as adepts for the entire first year. And later on, only after a promotion, could you go with a guy. But only the ones that
she
chose for you. Never the ones you wanted. Unless you were a favourite, of course.’

Susan narrowed her eyes, and gave the camera a knowing look that Kyle picked up on the laptop they were using as a monitor. ‘But men were intrigued by us Gathering girls.

Katherine only allowed make-up and perfume when we were out collecting donations and selling the
Gospel
. Encouraged us to flirt, she did. Made us better collectors. She taught us how to look into their eyes and to smile sweetly, like innocent little nuns and country girls. Guileless. “Make them 46

LAST DAYS

dream of another life,” she used to say. “Our life. And you.”

But we could be aloof too. She taught us how. So were we virgins or were we whores? Men never knew. Were we a cover for devil worship, and temptation? I think Katherine had a peculiar relationship with sex. With men and their desires.

But she was happy to let us use it to get donations. Make no mistake about that.’

‘I’ve never been in here.’ Susan shook her head in disbelief in the rooms that had once formed Sister Katherine’s former penthouse, astounded by the discovery that so much light and space even existed on the top floor of the building. ‘No one beside The Seven were ever permitted up here. She had a front door with a big brass knocker put in at the top of the staircase to separate herself from us down below.’

The top storey of the building had been remodelled just like the flats downstairs: wood floors, white walls, fresh paint.

What it had looked like in the Gathering’s London heyday Kyle could only imagine. No photographs had ever been found.

‘Who were
The Seven
?’

‘One of the reasons I left, dear. Her chosen. A lot of people were promoted and then demoted from The Seven in the first year. But her favourites for most of the last year in London were Serapis, Belus, Orcus, Ades and Azazel. And Sisters Gehenna and Bellona. They were bullies who kept control for her. They had this way of being aloof all of the time. They never smiled, but they would turn and stare, intensely, straight at you. Inside you. And when they did, you were terrified. Of displeasing Katherine. Who they reported to, of course. We were always so scared it would be our turn next 47

ADAM NEVILL

for an attack in the sessions for being weak, for letting the Gathering down.’

Kyle’s instincts told him they were getting good material.

Not just Susan’s natural storytelling and the abundance of information she was supplying with few prompts, but the lighting looked fantastic on the monitor. Dan had created a claustrophobic feel around Susan as she spoke in each room.

It helped dispel his earlier misgivings about her and the empty location. But what he had picked up in the building’s ambient sound, while he lined up the levels in each room as the shoot progressed, was an unexpected bonus.

Since
Coven
in Scotland, when he accidentally recorded some inexplicable subterranean noises in a tunnel beneath a ruined Bishop’s Palace, he’d made sure to record a lot of ambient outdoor sound and indoor tone in every location on their last film,
Blood Frenzy
. What he could pick up was often better than music for the soundtrack, and the ocean sounds of the Swedish forest alone had formed the entire soundtrack to the
Blood Frenzy
documentary; he’d never needed anything else to suggest such a sense of belittling vast-ness and age in a Boreal forest. But inside his cans, before they recorded Susan’s renunciation segment, deep inside the cult’s West London headquarters, he’d heard what sounded like a distant crowd. Before it faded, he’d then become certain it was wind. Far off. But like it had struck the top floor of the house. And come inside.

The boom mic must have picked up draughts and air currents in a riser, because all the windows were shut; they’d checked to reduce traffic noise. But the house had supplied its own naturally eerie sound effect, and one they’d be hard pressed to find in a sound library.

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LAST DAYS

‘Susan, can you tell us about Katherine’s changing role?’

Susan was nervous again. Or anxious after her disclosure about The Seven, or by the very fact that she was actually inside the penthouse. ‘Susan? Susan?’

She looked up. He repeated the question.

‘Yes. Yes. Katherine. In the second year she rarely led a session. She withdrew up here.’ Susan peered about the walls, as uncomfortable as a kitten beneath a shadow. ‘That would have been in 1969. We saw less and less of her from the Christmas of the previous year. After April of 1969, I never saw her again.’

‘She completely withdrew?’

‘Totally. Stayed up here. When we were out during the day, she tutored The Seven. They ran the sessions through the night in her absence.’

‘So while you slept thirty to a room, she had this entire floor to herself?’

Susan rolled her eyes. ‘And her dogs. Her beloved “vargs”, who ate like kings. That’s when it became known as the penthouse by some of us who were fed up. She’d taken to wearing a purple gown too. Imperial purple with an ermine collar.

And The Seven wore red. You know, to set them apart. As the leaders. Our spiritual guides. But I didn’t like it. This sudden exclusivity, when we were all supposed to be in it together.’

‘Is that why you left, because of the hierarchy she imposed?’

‘That was one of my reasons. She began electing favourites amongst us adepts too. Usually girls. The best earners and arse-lickers. The girls who indulged her without threatening her. The clever ones. The ones most like her. Manipulative.

Who had their choice of the guys. And her favourites were 49

ADAM NEVILL

always the attractive girls. Because she used them as honey-traps, and they started giving personal meditation and therapy sessions to private clients. Rich marks. Most of us were forced into celibacy and she was running call girls, dear. These girls would do anything for her, for the Gathering. You know she’d been a madam in her former life?’

Kyle nodded as he watched the monitor.

‘Well, we never knew all that then. That all came out later, after what happened in America. But she set up rooms on Wimpole Street for her favourites. A couple of the pretty boys too. Gave them very expensive gifts as rewards for their services. They had their own room on the first floor, at the front.

To motivate the rest of us and to make us jealous, to pine even harder for her attention. And we must have given ourselves away. How we felt. The long faces. Chatter. Gossip.

The Seven had informers amongst us. Oh, yes.’

‘So what do you think she was doing up here?’

Susan screwed up her small face with frustration and anger. ‘We were told Katherine existed up here in a state of permanent repose, meditating. But that she was with us always. Her presence. That she knew everything about us, all of the time. What each of us thought, and felt. The Seven said she was protecting us. And assessing us for election. For ascent. But of course, we’d already confessed everything about ourselves in the early days of the Gathering, so she knew all of our secrets. She had a pretty good idea of what we were susceptible to. And on her instruction, The Seven used that information to accuse us of dissent. In the sessions.

To weed people out. And they always seemed right about us.

We couldn’t deny what we were accused of, so we just confessed to more and more.’

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‘Why did you do that?’

‘We were desperate to be accepted. Terrified of exclusion.

Of her disapproval if we did not confess something. Her retreat from us just added to the secrecy, the mystery of it all. Of her. Oh, she was clever. And lazy. Being up here only made her more powerful without lifting a finger. Everything she did was strategic.’

‘What did she do, Susan, to people who fell out of favour with her?’

‘There were terrible penalties for disobedience in my second year. Terrible.’

‘Can you tell us? Was this physical punishment?’

‘In a way. But at first you would just be excluded. Which was even worse than what came later. You were mocked by the others in the Gathering, who were told to say the most awful things about you in the sessions. In that room, where we’d re -

noun ced everything. In that place of openness and nurturing and togetherness. It was like a sacrilege. What it turned into.’

‘But is it true there was physical abuse here?’

Susan moved her face into a scowl. ‘Yes, but not like they said in the papers. You had to do it to yourself. With the ropes. You know, beat yourself. I never saw anyone thrashed by anyone else. I don’t think that ever happened here. But they got the idea for it here. For what they did in France and America. Physical humiliation. To degrade a person phys -

ically in front of the whole group. Use them as examples. I only saw it get physical about four times here, when they made some of the adepts beat themselves with the ropes.

What’s it called? A flail.’

‘And all that time, she was up here. Leading a life of luxury.’

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ADAM NEVILL

Susan nodded. ‘I began to feel like a slave. Out there all day, selling that wretched magazine. It was hopeless. Some days you wouldn’t sell a single copy while the best sellers were rewarded. I couldn’t bear it any more. I ended up just begging for money. I hated coming back here. Because they would punish me and the others who fell below their targets, by making us stay out all night until we reached the donations set us each morning. Is that what we had become, pen-niless slaves? Some girls even, you know, exchanged favours for money. On the street.’

‘Was this the catalyst for you? The final straw? Working so hard for no reward, while she enriched herself?’

‘I, I need to sit down. Do you have any more water?’

Kyle walked into shot and helped Susan to the floor, where she sat crumpled into herself. Outside, the sun had lowered; the sky fumed with orange and pink clouds, the sky in between the clouds purpled. He gave her the bottle stained by her lipstick and stared at the little collapsed figure on the floor. Once again, Susan White had been reduced in this place.

No wonder she could barely face looking at it from outside.

When they restarted, she stared into the middle distance, as if forgetting the cameras were even in the same room. It was no longer clear who she spoke to. Three times, Dan asked her to look into the camera.

‘I suppose I made the decision to leave when I was out selling the
Gospel
in the second year. I remember a day when I was feverish and cold and wet. I had a terrible flu and I was somewhere behind the British Museum. I fainted. Then I came to and I was sick. So I went to rest on a bench. That day I was with Sister Hera, but I couldn’t find her. So I just sat on my own, on this bench, soaked to the skin. Without 52

LAST DAYS

a shred of dignity or self-respect left. I was broken. And as I sat alone in the rain on that bench feeling very sorry for myself, I picked up a copy of the
Evening Standard
. Someone had left it on the bench and I went to raise it and keep my head out of the wet, and I saw a headline. You know, like it was a sign. Everything was a sign back then. You have to understand, it’s how we saw the world. And the headline said something like, “London’s Top Spiritualists Revealed”. And I turned the pages and I looked at this article. And there she was. Katherine. In the society pages. Dressed like a film star, at some party. With jewellery and beautiful hair. Surrounded by glamorous people. And there I was, dying in the rain. Well I went straight to the seller and I bought twenty copies. Spent all of the money I’d earned that day. And I brought those papers back here and I gave them out. To show people who it was we were working for. What we were working for, out there in the rain and the cold, day in, day out. I asked them, is this what we have given up everything for?’