Last Days (7 page)

‘Did it begin a revolt here?’

Susan shook her tired head. ‘No. Not really. It just confirmed what those of us who were fed up believed about Katherine. People had started leaving around that time anyway. In droves. She’d had threatening letters from the parents of Sister Urania. A powerful, wealthy family. Her inheritance was being paid to Katherine every month from a trust fund. I heard that Sister Hannah’s lawyers were constantly writing to Katherine too. It was all starting to go wrong. Very wrong. Attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Especially after what Charles Manson had done in California.

But I’d say the majority of the people just accepted what I had found in the newspaper. They were too in love with her.

53

ADAM NEVILL

Devoted to her. Nothing could change that. Even I gave the Gathering another chance, despite what my intuition was telling me.’

‘What happened to you for bringing the papers here? Were you punished?’

‘No. Katherine sent me a gift instead. Pearl earrings. We were forbidden jewellery. I didn’t understand. How could I?

But then . . . then something else came here that winter. We called it the holy dread. And that really was the final straw for me.’

Kyle’s gut tightened inside; this was what Max wanted.

‘Can you tell us how it began, Susan? What form it took?’

She nodded, visibly uncomfortable again, and tired. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d seen anyone look so fucked before.

‘It wasn’t just the nature of the sessions that changed under The Seven. The atmosphere changed. Everything changed.

The ideals of our group changed. Significantly. That’s what brought it about.’

‘How so?’

‘It wasn’t about self-discovery any more, like in the days of the renunciation. We weren’t exploring ourselves in the same way. It was no longer about equality in the group, or honesty with yourself. Instead, the emphasis was on being
chosen
. We’d always thought ourselves special. Different, you know. But now we were taught to feel superior to anyone not a part of our Gathering. We were encouraged to feel contempt. It was a contempt that was being cultivated. For the world outside of our walls. And for the first time, people started using the name “Crude” to describe anyone who wasn’t part of our little family here.

‘I remember being told that taking anything to support the 54

LAST DAYS

Gathering was now justified. In the service of Sister Katherine, we could be free of guilt. We were to be free of conscience and compassion. It was all about self-belief now.

Our will was to be focused on the interests of the Gathering.

“Empowerment through enrichment” was one of our new mottos. We were taught to use people, and encouraged to practise on each other.

‘And sex was used to control the men more and more.

You would have to sleep with any man if The Seven ordered it. I can’t remember there being any favourable matches. But that was the point. We were paired off with people who we weren’t attracted to. If two people fell in love naturally, and people were falling in love all the time, The Seven would break the couple apart by making the woman go with an -

other guy. Our only attachment could be to Katherine, and Katherine alone. It seemed to me that the worst part of ourselves was being groomed. And that the most cunning among us were better off in the new regime.’ Susan stopped speaking and looked at the floor, if he weren’t mistaken, in shame.

Kyle exchanged glances with Dan, who raised his eyebrows questioningly. Kyle shook his head, mouthed
keep rolling
.

‘You never saw her once. You never heard her speak at all in the last year. But it seems the more removed she was from you, the worse her behaviour became.’

Susan raised her weary face. ‘Yes. Through The Seven, she was becoming more and more despotic. We were all given lockets filled with
mana.
Locks of her hair. We had to carry them around our necks. Like talismans. We were told they had power. And gifts from her were called holy relics. They were always expensive and seemed unworldly to us, because we had nothing. Just our uniforms. We were living like 55

ADAM NEVILL

beggars and she was buying expensive jewellery for her favourites. I don’t think anyone wanted to admit we had all been taken in. But we’d been fooled by some streetwise madam. Who’d learned Scientology techniques for mind control in a woman’s prison. Who’d been sent there for running a bloody brothel!’

Susan closed her eyes and let out another long sigh of frustration and fatigue. Kyle let her sit like that in silence for a minute. She was the real deal, authentic.

‘Susan, it’s been claimed she thought she was a saint. Did any of you really think she was actually holy?’

‘I never. It was another reason I left. I don’t know where it started exactly, but people began to say all kinds of things about her. I remember Brother Ethan calling her a “living saint”. And a terrible argument broke out because I laughed.

You see, the Gathering was never about God in that way. The whole point was not to be like an organized religion, and here we were with high priests and a bloody living saint controlling us. It was so disappointing for a lot of us. But I had given so much to the Gathering, part of me just kept refusing to give up on it all. A lot of us felt the same way.

‘But in the sessions we were being told by The Seven that Katherine was so advanced in her rebirth that she was transforming back to the original holy spirit. Her lifelong search for the divine in herself had succeeded. So all of her actions were now divine and allowable. Whatever her nature suggested to her was justifiable. We were told that she was evolving beyond the mortal stage and by following her we were becoming an elect. The
blessed
. Because we were so innocent. Under her guidance we had unravelled ourselves 56

LAST DAYS

all the way back to original innocence. Like angels. And anyone could be exploited by the blessed elect in the pursuit of their goals, because of our purity. And because she had been through something she called the seven stages of the soul, she would be capable of achieving what we were told was called “complete divinity”. The Seven once told us that she could not be with us, because she was incarnating. She was ascending.

‘And her holiness had attracted the company of others.

Presences
. Who had imparted the power of prophecy to her.

We were told that she had been in direct contact with these

“presences”. That was when the atmosphere really changed.’

‘The holy dread?’

Susan nodded.

‘How did it change? Was it a physical change?’

‘Yes. Yes it was. In the early hours of the morning, the sessions would reach their peak. People would be exhausted. Weak.

Worn out from crying, and from confessing, and from withstanding the terrible bullying. And it was at those times that we were told that “beings” or “presences” were amongst us.’

Kyle knew it was time to ask another of Max’s questions.

‘Did you see anything materialize? Or was this a sense of an atmospheric change?’

‘I think, the air was different. Maybe colder. Fuller. Like people had entered the room, and added themselves to it, but behind us. All in my imagination you think. I can tell by your face. And I don’t blame you. I did too. God knows what we were all susceptible to by then. We were exhausted and hungry and nervous, and frightened. But I do remember that there were strange smells too. Horrible smells. Like stagnant water. Like damp clothes that have not been aired. Around 57

ADAM NEVILL

us. Down there with us.’ Susan pointed at the floor. ‘In the sessions, always. And then in our rooms where we slept. I would say it was worse there.

‘We were told the “presences” were here to communicate their wishes to the chosen amongst us. And that we were to analyse the dreams and the visions and to recount them in the sessions.’

‘What did people claim these visions were like?’

‘Some people said they had sudden insights into each other.

Could suddenly see themselves through the eyes of another person, or find themselves in another room. Others said they definitely heard voices beside them, behind them. Some said they travelled.’

‘Travelled?’

‘Out of their bodies while they slept. And they all acted like it was some kind of holy experience. But I couldn’t believe there was anything holy about it. Quite the opposite.

To me, it felt like an infestation.’

‘Did
you
have one of these experiences?’

‘No. I never heard a thing, or travelled outside of myself or saw through anyone else’s eyes. Nothing like that. I didn’t believe any of it either. People were making it all up to please The Seven and to contribute to Katherine’s delusions, that she was deifying and had these special spirits as compan -

ions, as guides. People would believe anything, or pretend to believe anything she said, so that she would like them more.

That’s how it was at the end.’ Susan paused to compose herself. ‘But the only thing I experienced that I still can’t account for was a participation in a shared vision.’

‘Will you share it with us?’ Kyle heard Dan snigger behind the viewfinder, and threw him a warning glance.

58

LAST DAYS

‘We all dreamed of the same place. The refuge. The new temple. That’s what we were told it was. Katherine had been seeing this place too. The Seven told us.’

‘What did it look like?’

Susan closed her eyes. ‘It was dark. But I remember seeing some stone buildings with wooden roofs in the rain, in fields of long grass. And the sky above them was strange. It was wavy. But wavy the wrong way. Like heat. But coming downwards. Or like the sky wasn’t properly formed. But what was extraordinary was that every person in that session saw the same thing. We couldn’t have suggested it to each other.

Someone cried out that they could see buildings. Another per -

son said yes, they could see them too, and counted them.

And then people began calling out and describing details and features that we could all see inside our minds. Someone said that the place was empty. It was. You could tell. One building was long and white with four sets of long doors. Another was all made of brown wood, like a barn. Roof tiles were missing in the third building.

‘I never spoke up, but I could see every single thing in my head. Everything the people in that room were calling out and describing to each other, I’d had in my mind before anyone spoke.’

‘What was interpreted from this?’

‘That we had shared Katherine’s premonition. That the apocalypse was coming. And the place in the vision was our refuge.

‘We were told that everything had been leading to this.

The long sessions of self-discovery, the removal of our egos.

The tests of our faith, and of our devotion to Katherine, had succeeded. And those of us left in the Gathering were chosen.

59

ADAM NEVILL

We all now had a clear channel of communication with the

“presences”. A time of ascent was coming.’

‘But you weren’t convinced?’

‘No. Not by any of it. But I still can’t explain the vision.

Maybe it was suggested to us before, somehow. I don’t know.

But the plans for the relocation to France began right after that night.’

‘And you decided not to go with them to France?’

Susan shook her head. ‘The Gathering was paranoid and too poisoned with anger and jealousy by then. I didn’t want to be a part of it any more. It didn’t make sense to me.’

‘Did anyone else leave the group before they moved to France?’

‘A few. About ten of us, I think. But the divisions and the rivalries settled down for a while. The arrival of the “presences” seemed to make things better again. Gave people hope that we were important after all. That it had all been worth-while and that the Gathering would survive. And we were all shown a photo of the farm that Katherine had bought for us with the Gathering’s money. Our money. It was the very place we had seen in the vision. No doubt about it. And that was like a miracle in here. A lot of people forgave Katherine everything after that. But I couldn’t. Neither could Max. So we left on the same day. One week before the first diaspora.’

‘Sorry. Did you say Max? Our Max? Maximillian

Solomon?’

Susan looked at Kyle and winced. ‘Please don’t tell him I told you. But, yes. He was here from the beginning.’

‘She was freaky,’ Dan said. He kneeled before the monitor where Kyle had left him to show Susan out and hail her a 60

LAST DAYS

cab. In the street-facing room of the penthouse, Dan had stayed with the gear to label the last SDHD 8GB memory cards; all of the card boxes were labelled the same as their camera tapes used to be, by title and date, and were then backed up in a notebook so they’d know what footage was on which card. He’d not done this on his first film and wasted weeks logging each tape after the final shoot.
Never
again.

And once he had laid his rough cut, he would wipe the rushes from his laptop to make space for the next shoot.

Finger Mouse had the hard-disc space on the machines in his South London flat to take on all the rushes from a feature-length documentary. Finger Mouse would make two copies of the master reels as backup; Kyle would keep one, Dan another, Finger Mouse would keep the masters. The chance of all three flats burning down on the same night was un -

likely. They all lived like seagulls at their respective domestic landfills, but their organization of the footage had become flawless during the documentaries they’d made together.

Because, as Kyle often mused, nothing else mattered.

‘You don’t say. But not without good reason. An experience like that? She was great material.’ He wasn’t kidding himself either. But he still fidgeted with puzzlement and disappointment. Max not disclosing his involvement in the Gathering cast a shadow over the end of the interview. Kyle’s disenchantment was further augmented by Susan White’s eagerness to leave. ‘What’s the time? Seven! I never want to be here at night again. I’ll have to go. I’m tired.’