The Matrix (24 page)

He led us to a larger room, a sparsely furnished sitting room where, I imagine, he saw his parishioners or held conversations with his fellow priests. A red light burned steadily in front of a picture of the Sacred Heart. On one wall, a wooden crucifix hung heavily from a brass hook.

‘Where shall I begin?’ I asked.

‘At the beginning.’

When I came to a halt, Silvestri said nothing, but got up and crossed to a cupboard. He brought back a plain wooden box, a container for sacred wafers.

‘These are not as yet consecrated,’ he said, lifting the lid. ‘But in due course they will be. During the Mass, they will undergo a process known as transubstantiation. I am sure you are familiar with the term. They will be transformed into the body of Christ. While retaining the appearance and taste and smell of bread, they will become flesh in substance.

‘Your friend Iain, of course, did not believe that the host actually becomes flesh. For him it was a spiritual process, a symbol, nothing more tangible. And for you, I expect it means even less. It is merely a charade, a performance put on for the gullible.

‘That is why Duncan Mylne was so hard for Iain to understand, and why it was so easy for him to win you over. Iain, because he believed in the spirit, but not the flesh; you, because you believed only in the flesh.’

He looked at Harriet.

‘My church has never abandoned the miraculous. We still have our saints, our relics, our moving statues, our bleeding images. In doing away with all that, your husband closed his eyes to the magic inherent in faith. I do not blame him. There have been serious abuses on account of miracles. Dr Macleod is right to think that the gullible are sometimes cheated. But there is more depth in the miraculous than you may think.’

He paused, then turned back to me.

‘Whenever I perform the Mass, am I not a little like a magician who makes bread into flesh and wine into blood? That is why the worshippers of the devil imitate what we do, that is why they invert the sacraments as symbols of their rejection of God. Did Mylne not teach you that?’

I nodded. Inversion of the sacraments was a subject Duncan and I had touched on more than once.

Silvestri closed the box and put it back in the cupboard. When he returned to his seat, he seemed shrunken, troubled in spirit.

‘I wish you to understand that, in showing you what I am about to, I take a very great risk. Duncan Mylne is well aware of my existence, but not even he knows just how much information I possess. You have been his subordinate. Even now, he is trying to find you and bring you back to his side. In confiding in you, I shall be placing my life in your hands. Is that a responsibility you are willing to accept?’

I hesitated.

‘Surely you’re better equipped than I am to protect yourself against Mylne. But if you mean, will I reveal anything I learn here to him, the simple answer is no. Not under any circumstances.’

He looked sharply at me.

‘Be very careful how you phrase things. “Any circumstances” is a very broad promise to make. It would be unwise to underestimate Duncan Mylne. He is very dangerous indeed. I have outwitted and outmanoeuvred him more than once, but I have yet to defeat him. His powers are considerable, and I could not guarantee that, in open conflict, he would not destroy me.’

He stood, moving slowly and deliberately, and for a moment I could see pain swallow his eyes.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘There are things I have to show you.’

We followed him next door. This was a small but well-stocked library, the door to which was shut and bolted by a massive lock. I noticed that the windows were barred and that all the books were behind glass doors, each with a lock and strong bolts.

‘I’m sorry if my security measures seem excessive,’ he said as we entered. ‘But I did not have all these locks installed merely for effect. There are books in here which no one may read without the express sanction of the church. I hope you understand. They are kept here by special dispensation and on very strict conditions.’

He crossed to a locked cabinet in one corner and took out a bundle of dark-blue files. When he was satisfied he had all he wanted, he re-locked the cabinet and limped back to where Harriet and I were standing. We sat down at a small table in the centre of the room and he switched on an overhead lamp. Opening the top file, he drew something from it and passed it to me.

It was a photograph of a man of about fifty, dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes, dating from the 1940s, as far as I could tell.

‘Do you recognize him?’ Father Silvestri asked.

I nodded.

‘It’s Duncan Mylne,’ I said. ‘Or his near-double.’

‘That is his father, Stuart Mylne. The photograph was taken in 1943, in London. Now, what about this?’

He passed me a second photograph, this time of a man of about forty, dressed in the clothes of a late Victorian gentleman. Allowing for differences of age and style, this too greatly resembled Duncan.

‘I take it this is his grandfather.’

‘You’re perfectly right. That is Angus Mylne. He was born in Edinburgh in 1846 and died in 1908. His son Stuart was born in 1890 and died in 1961. Duncan was born in 1943 and is still living.’

He paused and took the photographs from me, passing them to Harriet.

‘Those, ‘Father Silvestri continued, ‘are the basic facts concerning the last three generations of the Mylne family. Except that almost none of it is true. Angus certainly was born in 1846: I have seen the entry in the parish register for that year. I have also seen birth certificates for Stuart and Duncan. Angus did indeed set up the cloth export company which still bears the family name, and of which Duncan is now a non-executive director.

‘But many years ago I began to grow suspicious about the Mylne history. I discovered quite by accident that Stuart Mylne, Duncan’s father, lived in London between 1929 and 1940. He owned a house in Lowndes Square which was destroyed in the Blitz. He vanished soon after that, only to pop up here in Scotland again when Duncan was born in 1943.

‘I heard unpleasant rumours about Mylne’s time in London. There was, in particular, a story that, when the fire brigade went through the ruins of his house after the bombing, they discovered some rather gruesome things in the cellar. There was something of a scandal, but it was quickly hushed up: stories of that kind were reckoned to be bad for morale while the war was on.

‘I thought there was something odd about the fact that all three Mylnes travelled as widely as they did, often staying away from home for years at a time. The more I asked around, the more I found that things did not fit together. In the end, I analysed what I knew and discovered something very curious: no one seemed to have seen Angus Mylne with his son Stuart after the boy was about ten; and no one had ever seen Stuart with Duncan after about the same age. Stuart appears to have made his first appearance in public around the age of twenty, Duncan when he studied law here at the age of eighteen.’

He paused.

‘It is my firm belief, ‘he went on ‘that Angus, Stuart, and Duncan Mylne are one and the same person. He has never died, and he means to go on living, reappearing every so often as his own son.’

‘Do you mean he is reborn in some way as a child?’ asked Harriet.

Silvestri shook his head.

‘No, I do not mean that. I am not speaking of reincarnation in any shape or form. Mylne is simply rejuvenated, if we may put it that way. The children will have been orphans procured for the purpose of registering the birth and lending substance to the imposture for a while. I fear they will have met their end as soon as they outlived their usefulness.’

He went on to explain how Angus Mylne, devastated by the death of his first wife, Constance, took to the study of the magical arts. After years of getting nowhere, he stumbled on a book that seemed to offer him everything he sought.

‘You’ve seen it,’ he said to me. ‘You have Angus’s own copy with you in that briefcase.’

‘The
Matrix Aeternitatis?
But surely . . .’

I opened my briefcase and took out the copy of the
Matrix.
Silvestri took it from me and opened it at the flyleaf. Rummaging in his files, he found an old letter.

‘That’s Angus Mylne’s signature at the bottom,’ he said. He passed both book and letter to me. I compared the signature on the flyleaf with that at the foot of the letter. They were by one and the same hand.

‘On the strength of what he read in this book,’ Silvestri continued, ‘Angus Mylne travelled to Morocco. He went there ostensibly to engage in trade, but in reality it was to seek help in his studies. He spent seven years there, and found what he was looking for in the person of an occult master in Fez. From this man he learned how to defy death, and it’s said he continues to visit him each year in order to deepen his knowledge and to take whatever action is necessary to prevent his own death.’

‘Sheikh Ahmad, ‘I whispered.

‘Precisely. An old man then, and much older now. It’s also reported that, on returning from Africa, Mylne spent a year and more locked in his private rooms at Penshiel House, along with the remains of his wife, trying to bring her back to life. Whether he succeeded or not isn’t clear.’

I shuddered. I had read the chapters in the
Matrix
devoted to the resurrection of corpses, and very unpleasant they had been. It was all too easy to imagine Angus Mylne shut up in a room somewhere with his wife’s corpse, willing her to return, performing again and again the rituals he hoped would bring her back to life.

‘What about Duncan?’ I asked. ‘If he was really his father grown young again, didn’t anyone find the resemblance strange?’

‘Why should they? Anyone who had known his father in the old days would believe he was dead and that Duncan was his double. That would not seem strange in a child. He arrived in Edinburgh in the 1960s, and stayed on in order to practise law. He had a large private income, so it wasn’t hard for him to make his way to the top. And there wasn’t just money – he also possessed age, experience, and the benefit of more years spent in study than his contemporaries had lived. He’d attended trials that were only known to his friends from the pages of books.

‘Not long after he was called to the bar, he started to spend time with some of the occult groups that were thriving here then. I think he’d already set up a circle of his own in London, and it was no trouble to transfer most of its activities to the north. He’d begun to make recruits inside groups like the Fraternity of the Old Path – as I think you already know. You weren’t by any means the first, but I pray you may prove the last. I’ve gone up against Mylne more than once, and so far our struggles have ended in deadlock. I lack the strength and the skill to defeat him utterly. He’s subtle, and his knowledge of the occult is much greater than mine. But now . . . Well, perhaps it’s time for a last trial of strength.’

He paused.

‘There’s something else you should know,’ he said. ‘One of the people who became closely involved with Mylne and his circle was a bookseller called Clement Markham. Markham was an Englishman who’d moved to Edinburgh in the fifties. He ran a second-hand and antiquarian business from a shop somewhere in the Haymarket district.

‘Around 1975, the shop was raided by the obscene publications squad, who’d been given a tip-off that Markham was handling pornography on the side.

‘I don’t know whether they ever found any dirty books, but they did come across the bodies of three small children. Markham was arrested and tried, and in the course of the trial it was suggested that the children had met their fate as sacrifices in rituals conducted by Markham.

‘His connection with Mylne came out, of course, but there was never anything to tie the eminent young advocate to the murders, and nothing ever came out in court. No doubt Mylne was able to use his influence to make sure his name was kept out of the investigation. All the same, people did talk, and since then Mylne has enjoyed a poor reputation in certain circles. Markham died in prison in 1981. His bookshop has remained empty ever since.’

‘Not quite empty,’ I said. My voice sounded hollow to me. I was shivering inside.

While we had been talking, Harriet had been studying the photographs of Mylne, both those that I had looked at and the others in Silvestri’s thick file. In the silence that followed my remark, she picked one out and looked at it for a short time.

‘Look at this, Andrew,’ she said. ‘It shows Angus Mylne with his wife Constance – the one he’s supposed to have tried to bring back to life. How horrible, spending a year shut up with her corpse. Here, take a look.’

I took the photograph from her and glanced at it, first at Mylne, then at his wife. As I did so, the photograph fell from my hand. I felt myself grow giddy. The room seemed to flash in and out, and I wanted to retch.

‘What is it, Andrew? What’s the matter?’ Harriet got up from her chair and put a hand on my arm. Silvestri frowned.

I took several deep breaths. Slowly, I came to myself and was able to sit up straight.

‘What happened, Andrew? You look terrible.’

I pointed numbly at the photograph. It stared up at me.

‘Mylne’s wife,’ I said. ‘She’s the double of Catriona. He must have known. Now I know why he had her remains removed from their grave. He failed once – now he’s trying again.’

We stayed with Silvestri until about three o’clock.

‘I’d like you both to come back this evening,’ he said as we were leaving. ‘There are some enquiries I have to make. What you have told me has been extremely useful. But you must not forget that you are both in mortal danger. You, Andrew, in particular. You have crossed Mylne, and he does not forgive easily. At the moment, you are useful to him, but once you have outlived that usefulness he will not hesitate to destroy you.’

‘I know this may sound stupid,’ I said, ‘but is there any point in our going to the police with what we know?’

Silvestri thought it over.

‘It’s not entirely foolish,’ he said. ‘In spite of his powers, Duncan Mylne is still a human being. Public disgrace would be immensely difficult for him. Imprisonment would be a very real threat to his continued existence, if it stopped him visiting Morocco and having access to the books and papers he needs. He depends greatly on his personal wealth; a poor man could not achieve what he has done. He needs the freedom and the ability to travel, to buy rare books, to keep his church and his home in the country.