Last Days (8 page)

Recalling her life at the house in Clarendon Road had drained her. Watching her swing from elation to despair to grief to a final sad resignation had exhausted Kyle too. She’d 61

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been a part of something extraordinary, no doubt, but the damage it had wreaked upon her was evidently permanent.

‘I thought we were going to have to blow this off,’ Dan said. ‘I mean, she shows up looking like Barbara Cartland fused with Mystic Meg, and then collapses outside. She was good though. Lot of colour in that woman. Literally.’

Kyle sat down and sniggered, looked around the chic shell of what would probably soon become a bedroom for an American financier and his impeccably courteous wife. ‘What did you make of it?’

Smiling, Dan shook his head. ‘Pretty incredible. This keeps up we might just get a good film out of it.’

‘You believe her?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Why wouldn’t you? That shit was going down all through the sixties. False messiahs, con-artist gurus, shaking their followers down for all of their money. While the great leaders cruised round in Limos with the Beatles, Rolexes on their wrists. She was a piece of work, that Sister Katherine. I mean, the adepts were like
Big Issue
sellers in Hammer Horror robes, and she was stepping out to Annabel’s.’

Kyle smiled. Lay down on the bare floorboards with a sigh and formed a star shape with his limbs to stretch his spine after holding the boom all day. ‘What about the presences?

That’s what Max wanted me to concentrate on.’

‘Horseshit.’

Kyle laughed. ‘Still steaming?’

‘Oh yeah. Ripe.’

‘I liked it. It was weird. Real weird.’

‘Still horseshit. I bet they were smoking canons the size of Cuban cigars. Eating Quaaludes like Smarties back in the day, maaan.’

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Not here. That came later
. Irvine Levine claimed the cult never discovered drugs until California, after the second diaspora, when they changed their name to The Temple of the Last Days. But Levine had no time in his book for the mystical angle either, the
presences
; only the criminal activity interested him, in which Sister Katherine and her devout would come to wallow.

Dan shut the monitor off. ‘So what now, chief?’

‘Pub. Food.’

‘Fucking A.’

‘There’s a place called The Prince of Wales two streets down. Googled it.’

‘I’m there, dude. Then back here to finish up?’

Kyle frowned, turned his head to Dan. ‘You sure? We have this place for another day.’

‘Do as much as we can today. I got that christening tomorrow. Might take all day. And a few days’ work for Reel Store next week so I gotta get my head down tomorrow night.

Few other things to catch up on too before we go to France.’

‘I got the ferry tickets.’

Dan nodded. ‘This Brother Gabriel all set?’

‘Yep. Doesn’t have email. Or a mobile.’

‘This is my surprised face. The presences tell him everything he needs to know.’

‘But I called his landline and told him we’d pick him up on Thursday.’

‘Did you tell him I don’t want any presences in the van?’

Kyle laughed. ‘Forgot to mention it.’

Walking back to the red house on Clarendon Road, the sun was gone and the city was coming alive with Saturday-night 63

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excitement. Well-groomed human traffic headed to dinner parties and restaurants in Notting Hill and Holland Park and transformed the slow grey afternoon into flashes of short skirts, explosions of feminine laughter, the powerful hum of performance cars and the throaty trundle of Hackney cabs.

‘Poshos,’ Dan said.

‘Ponces,’ Kyle said.

‘Not much sign of an economic downturn around here.’

‘The Big Society stopped at Shepherds Bush, mate.’

Clarendon Road deepened in shadow at the foot of Notting Hill. As they put distance between themselves and the pub, the noise became urban-ambient, far off: sirens, raised voices, an incongruous burst of Bollywood music as the hush and elegance of Clarendon Road’s expensive facades and ancient trees deflected the noise elsewhere.

Dan burped. ‘How much do you reckon these places go for?’

‘Saw one listed for five million in the estate agents by the Tube station.’

‘Must have sold a lot of
Gospels
to pay the rent.’

‘She thought big.’

The building was in darkness. Kyle fumbled with the keys.

‘Third pint was a mistake.’

Dan started to laugh. ‘My footage is going to make you seasick.’

Giggling, they stumbled into the building, their movements uncoordinated by drink and the absence of light. The lack of curtains allowed some pale street light into the front of the building, but it didn’t penetrate far.

Kyle reached for the reception hall light-switch. It clicked.

No light. ‘Shit.’

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‘Kidding me?’

Kyle shook his head. His feet boomed further down the hall. He tried the lights in one of the front rooms. No light.

‘Fuses for the lights must have gone. How many batteries you have?’

‘Three. It’ll be OK, if you want to get arty. Be a lot of shadows. Or . . .’

Kyle walked back into the hall where the large silhouette of Dan’s body blocked out most of the light that dropped from the window above the front door. ‘Or?’

‘Night shoot. Slow the shutter speed right down. And I can get all
Blair Witch
on your ass?’

Kyle rested against the hall wall, hands on top of the radi-ator, as if warming himself. ‘Not a bad idea. The stuff with Susan is in daylight. So my lines could go over some darker interiors. I was going to suggest we do some footage at night anyway, because it’s all a bit samey.’

‘Cool. Where you wanna start?’

‘Basement. We can use the stuff down there as props. You know, make it look vacant, but full of history. Bit spooky too with a couple of lamps, then a bit in night mode. One camera on the tripod. Maybe some Steadicam too.’

‘You got it. Help me with the gear.’

They left the ground-floor flat and made their way up to the penthouse to collect the gear. As they moved deeper and up into the building, the ambient street light lessened until they were forced to feel their way back into the room containing their bags.

Dan fitted a new battery into each camera and checked the spotlight on top of the first camera, the light from which Kyle found himself ashamedly grateful for. A small round 65

ADAM NEVILL

moon was thrown forward from above the camera lens, and beyond it an umbra of thin whitish light formed a wider, fainter circle. As the radiance neared objects, they glinted: brass door handles, gloss-finish paint on the long wooden door panels. Beyond this light there was either a vagueness to the walls and floor, or total darkness.

On their way back down the staircase to the ground-floor reception, Dan suddenly stopped. Kyle bumped his back and Dan slipped down two steps. ‘Dufus!’

‘Why’d you stop?’

‘Shush.’ Dan turned his head and looked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘You shut the front door when we came back in?’

‘Yes. Locked it.’

‘Listen.’ Dan held up one hand.

Kyle strained his ears. The deep spaces of the lightless building hummed quietly. ‘What?’ he whispered.

‘Thought I heard someone. Downstairs.’

Kyle grinned. ‘Don’t start with that shit.’

‘No, seriously. I heard footsteps.’

‘Next door?’

Dan lowered his hand. ‘Maybe. No, you’re right. Was just worried some bum had followed us in.’

‘Come on.’

Back on the ground, Kyle unlocked the basement door.

‘You go first,’ he said to Dan.

‘Why?’

‘’Coz you have the frigging light on the camera. I don’t want to go arse-over-tit down these stairs.’

‘Chicken shit.’

As he went down, gingerly, behind Dan’s bulk, Kyle wished 66

LAST DAYS

he hadn’t drunk so much Franziskaner Weissbier. But then it was his turn to pause on the bottom stair. ‘Dan?’

‘What?’

Kyle raised his face, sniffed at the air. ‘You smelling that?’

‘What?’

‘Move over.’ Kyle walked further into the basement. Dan wheezed under the weight of the camera and gear as he followed.

Dan sniffed. Shrugged.

The dusty light, which had fallen through the barred window of the basement during the day, was now gone.

But the window still shone with vestiges of street light from outside. It barely distinguished the cardboard boxes, and oddments of discarded furniture from previous tenants, as anything but silhouettes. The spotlight on Dan’s camera contributed another layer of silvery luminance, which almost returned Kyle’s confidence to a normal level.

‘I don’t remember that before,’ Kyle said, and turned about, looking for the source of the smell. It reminded him of sewage: old-egg sulphurous, gassy-pungent. And damp.

There was a harder smell of rank water clothed by something musty, like old wet carpet in a cold room. He thought of what Susan White had said. And then forcibly suppressed his uneasiness.

‘Yeah, I’m getting it now,’ Dan said. ‘Watch where you’re putting your feet.’

Kyle peered about the boxes, but it was too dark to see if anything leaked or dripped or decomposed amongst the shadows. Maybe there was an old bin bag from a former tenant, left down here and forgotten about.

‘Bingo,’ Dan said.

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Kyle turned to look at where Dan shone the camera’s spotlight, on the wall behind a disorderly jumble of broom- and mop-handles, their shadows thin and insect-like against the old plaster. ‘What?’

‘The wall. Something’s leaked. See?’

Upon the murky plaster a dim cloud of damp, as wide and long as a door, was streaked with thicker brown veins of moisture that shone wetly. As Kyle looked at it, the miasma intensified about his face. ‘I better tell Max to call the estate agents. Pipe’s burst. That wasn’t here earlier. I’d have smelled it when I came down this afternoon.’

Dan removed the camera light from it. ‘Let’s get started.’

‘OK. But start over here. By the stairs. There’s an airbrick too. And my face is going to be clamped to it soon. Shoot from here to the window. Try and get it all in. We can use that creepy window with the nursery narration.’

‘Can do.’ As Dan manoeuvred himself and the camera tripod into position, set up the two small lights, and chalked up the clapperboard:
Scene 6: London, indoors, basement,
night
, Kyle read through his script and refamiliarized himself with his narration about the first births of the Gathering.

‘Ready?’ Dan asked.

‘Let’s go.’ Kyle cleared his throat and spoke into his tie mic, out-of-shot.

Dan operated the clapperboard and then stepped back behind the camera.

‘It is no surprise that after a year of enforced celibacy, when Sister Katherine began pairing members of her Gathering into couples in 1969, and allowed limited, but often very public sexual relations between members of the group, these unions would begin to bear fruit. Although most of the 68

LAST DAYS

children born into the Gathering were begat at the farm in Normandy, and later still in the Sonoran desert, at least four children were born at the headquarters of the organization, shortly before the diaspora to France. The babies were kept down here. And their birth mothers’ access to them was limit -

ed. Katherine made it clear to her adepts that any child born into their elect was to be parented by the community. To be raised without the hang-ups of their natural parents. Looking after the infants was seen as a punishment—’

‘Shit,’ Dan said looking up at the ceiling.

‘I heard that,’ Kyle whispered.

And again, there it was; a bumping against a door, somewhere above them in the building. And what sounded like a faint scuffle of feet, unsteady steps, completed the ensemble of muffled noises above their heads.

‘Someone is definitely in here,’ Dan whispered fiercely. ‘You must have left the front door open.’

‘I didn’t. I locked it. I remember.’

Kyle was sure the sound had carried from the first-floor apartment, the door of which was still unlocked and open from the afternoon’s shoot.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Dan whispered.

‘Better go look. Come on. Might be nothing.’

Dan didn’t reply, or lead the way, so Kyle climbed the stairs first. Guided himself upwards by the light that fell between his legs from the camera’s spotlight. ‘Keep it running,’ Kyle whispered. ‘Just in case.’

‘What am I, an amateur?’

‘Hello!’ Kyle shouted up the stairwell from the reception hall, as much to build his confidence as to make contact with an intruder. ‘This is private property!’

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‘Maybe say the police are coming,’ Dan muttered.

But Kyle couldn’t bring himself to; it sounded foolish. He dialled 999 into his mobile and rested his thumb on the CALL

button. ‘Come on,’ he whispered to Dan.

They checked the ground-floor flat. Nothing. Then went upstairs to the first floor and stood in the doorway of each of the four empty rooms. The camera spotlight revealed a stark emptiness. Nothing again.

The only nook they couldn’t see from the main hall that ran the length of the flat was the en-suite bathroom in the master bedroom. ‘Some crack-head weasel might be in there,’

Dan said, his voice tense beside Kyle. They stood together and looked at the doorway to the bathroom, until Kyle became tired of his own anxiety and, in a sudden burst of unexamined confidence, walked across the master bedroom and peered into the bathroom.

Porcelain, wood, chrome: empty.

They went and checked the penthouse: empty. Made their way back to the first floor. Kyle shook his head once the search was complete. ‘Nothing.’

‘Old place. Must be shifting on its foundations.’

‘Could be. No one in here but us.’

Dan peered at him from around the viewfinder. They exchanged glances and after a moment of realizing they were both frowning sternly at each other, they burst into laughter.

And Kyle was reminded again, after so many years of being friends, just how much he enjoyed the sound of Dan’s wheezy chuckle.