Mean Spirit

And then … So Lucas, the art dealer, is no longer close to the centre of your world, Morgan had said.

I tell you that?

You didn’t have to. Morgan looking up, through half-closed eyes.

There you go. Just when you start putting them down as phoney, up pops a winning number.

‘Grayle.’

‘Huh?’

‘Are you with us, lovely?’ Cindy said.

‘Sorry, just … a little nervous. Trying to ground myself.’

‘Grayle, I would like you and Marcus to sit on either side of Persephone. But, remember, don’t touch her!’

Like she was gonna be live with electricity or something? Grayle looked at the dark, sombre Callard and compared her with the flitting, Caspar the friendly ghost figure of Morgan Schuster. She thought, I set this whole thing up. What am I, crazy? Am I sick?

‘OK,’ she said.

‘And try not to move, whatever happens.’

‘Sure.’

Cindy lit the wick of a tin oil lamp with a match, lowered the glass and placed the lamp on the low window ledge behind Bobby. Next he lit the candle in the bowl on the table. When he put out the lights, shadows leapt and the room shed centuries.

Grayle heard the normally stoical Malcolm whimpering from the study.

An explosion of glass in Marcus’s head. Young girls’ trilling screams in the dormitory, then the baying of the headmaster, scared even more witless than usual. What the hell are you doing, Bacton? How dare you let her out? The long, dull-panelled corridor, meagrely lit by economy night lamps. Marcus proceeding slowly along it, as though edging down a railway carriage, to where the child was crouching like a small, wild animal … Don’t move … It wasn’t your fault … Do you understand? … Don’t move … Half expecting her to leap up at him with claws out, like a half-grown, feral kitten.

‘Ah, Marcus, my sweet…’

Lewis’s limp paw on Marcus’s shoulder. He jerked back, as though stung, his fists tightening. The whole situation slipping away from him and into the hands of a madman.

‘Try to relax, Marcus,’ Lewis soothed. Like the smarmy, phoney hospital consultant the night his little daughter, Sally, lay dying. ‘Was I not sent here by cunning circumstance?’

Marcus gripped the seat of his chair. ‘Don’t fuck this up, that’s all.’

And then, somewhere on the creature’s person, an electronic ululation began. The fool had brought his mobile phone in here.

Cindy walked quickly out of the room, snatching the phone from his pocket. Forgotten about the thing, he had. Taken it up to High Knoll with him in case there should be a further need to reassure young Jo.

He moved to the end of the stone passage.

‘Lewis here!’

‘Cindy, Christ …’

‘Jo, I must call you back.’

‘Cindy, listen to me … this is like a sick joke … this is the sickest joke you ever heard.’

‘Give me two hours, lovely — two hours.’

‘No, you listen!’ Jo shrilled like a raging child pulling at its father’s knees. ‘Listen, listen, listen … the Sherwins of Banbury. You remember the Sherwins? Started the whole BMW thing when they bought one each, even the old granny? The Sherwins, Cindy — all the news programmes are asking for the tapes of the Sherwins with their BMWs and their top-of-the-range Barrett home. Oh, God almighty, I can’t believe any of this.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Happened around lunchtime today. The Sherwins had been out to dinner last night with loads of guests and freeloaders and hangers on, as usual, and they didn’t get back until late and so they all slept in, in a big way, and it’s thought one of them got up, still half-pissed, wandered into the kitchen for a snack, left something on the posh built-in cooker hob, or the built-in bloody spit …’

‘And?’

‘And they’re all dead, the stupid irresponsible bastards! The Barrett home’s a smoking ruin, the BMWs are reduced to blackened shells in the quadruple garage. You do remember the Sherwins, Cindy? You remember Kelvyn Kite cackling on your arm. It’ll all end in tears, mark my words, it’ll all end in tears!’

Cindy walked out into the treacherous night, through the uncaring wind, the spiteful rain. Crying to the elements.

What was happening?

He pushed his forehead into the cold, wet castle wall, sensing the blood and the flames of its history, the screams and roars of some small medieval massacre mingling with the screams of the burning Sherwins, the roar of the fire. Had they been screaming, trapped, or were they quietly suffocated in their beds, mother and father and daughter and son? And granny, owner of a silver-grey Series Seven BMW that she would never drive.

Above the screams and the blood and the shrivelling, crackling flesh rose the shrieking of the Kite.

End in tears, end in tears.

End in the cardiac unit …

Cindy pulled the mobile phone from his pocket and hurled it high over the smashed castle wall.

Fly … fly like a kite …

He thought could hear the tinny techno-treble of its call as it fell among the ancient ramparts.

XXXIII

Debussy’s sirens call him back.

Oh, he knows Debussy. Poor Claude — now there was a frustrated shaman. Called him an impressionist composer, they did; he hated that, although, yes, his music responded to light.

The light below the surface.

Cindy slides damply, uncomfortably, into the candlelit barn room, where no-one is speaking, the ethereal music wafting from a boom box on which the legend XtraBass is inscribed, silver on black.

Marcus glances suspiciously up at him, twin candles in his glasses. But Marcus, for all his rage, must be calmer here than anywhere, for this is Mrs Willis’s room.

Cindy prays silently for the essence of Mrs Willis to be here with them tonight. Mrs Willis and all her healing. For Cindy knows that the old woman was once Annie Davies, the child who met the Lady who stepped from the sun up on High Knoll on a midsummer morning. Up on the Knoll, Cindy called to Annie to join him on his meditative journey to gather in the last of the light. And then collected seventeen small stones in his case.

The stones are now placed unobtrusively around the room, creating a second, larger circle around the chairs. Going to need all the light they can get tonight, for there’ll be none from Persephone Callard.

Cindy approaches the boom box, turns down the volume until the level of the music is no higher than that of the wind, then seats himself in the chair nearest the door, next to the empty chair which, on his instruction, is directly opposite Persephone Callard’s. Cindy clears his throat.

‘We should have a few more minutes’ quiet, my friends. Then we shall begin. Calling on the Brightness to surround us as we summon, from another place, the presence clinging to Persephone. When we begin, try not to look at one another. Particularly, try not to look at Persephone.’

Who sits, in all her sphinx-like beauty, with her hands upon her knees, so still — and yet he senses a great activity around her, like a cloud of moths around a garden lamp.

Bobby Maiden gives her periodic sidelong glances.