Spink, now miraculously cleaned of the mud that had grimed him from head to toe. He was handsome, dark-eyed and black-haired beneath his disguise. Shavi switched on his torch and positioned it so it illuminated the tent.
'Do you mind if we come in?' Carolina said when she was already inside.
Shavi gestured magnanimously; if truth be told, he was keen for company. 'How can I help you?'
Spink seemed awestruck in his presence, so it was Carolina who did all the talking. 'The people out there are talking about you like you're some kind of Messiah.' Her eyes sparkled in the torchlight.
'I am no Messiah.'
'They saw what you did in the wood. You've got powers of some kind. You do things that no ordinary person can do.'
Shavi nodded. 'But inside I am just a man. Flawed, frightened, unable to know what is the right decision.'
She shook her head; her black hair shifted languorously. 'You're not convincing me. You told us yourself, you're a man with a mission. You're here to deliver us all from evil.'
'Not like that.'
'Not a Messiah, then. But a mystic, a wise man. Shaman. You used the word yourself.' This he had to concede. 'Then you could teach us all things-'
'I am not a teacher.'
'Look at us all here!' she protested. 'Why do you think we've opted for this kind of life when we could be living in warm homes where there's always plenty of food on the table, where there's always some nice loving husband or boyfriend there to make sure everything's all right?' There was a sliver of bitterness in her voice; she swallowed it with difficulty and continued. 'We're all searching for something, something better. It was a spiritual choice. You must understand that?' He nodded. 'We've been failed by society, failed by the Church, all the religions. But there's a deep hole inside us that we want filled.' She hit her chest hard. 'You can help fill that.'
Shavi was humbled by her passion and eloquence. 'So you are saying that you want to be my disciples?'
She glanced at Spink, whose eyes brightened. 'That's exactly what we're saying.'
'Let me tell you something,' he began slowly. 'I grew up in West London in a family of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and… too many even to count. As a child, it was quite idyllic. I never wanted for love. I studied hard at school to make my father proud of me, and he was proud, and I was happier than any boy had any right to be. My father… The thing I remember about him sometimes when I am drifting off to sleep is the way his eyes would light up when I would bring him my school books to show him my work. They would crinkle round the edge, and then he would smile and pull me over to him. There was such integrity and honesty in his face, all I wanted was to be like him.'
He closed his eyes, the memories flashed across his mind almost too painful to bear. 'My family was very strictly Muslim. It was the glue that held everything together. The mosque was as much a part of our life as the kitchen. And for my father and mother, for all my relatives, it was the thing that gave them strength to face all the privations the world brought to their door. But it was not right for me. I tried. I tried so hard I could not sleep, I could not eat, because I knew it would make my mother and father proud. But it did not speak to me, here…' he touched his chest, then his forehead '… and here. It did not feel right, or comforting, or secure, or even begin to explain the way the world works. For me. For I still believe, of all the religions, it is one of the strongest. But it did not speak to nze. And so, in all good faith, I could not continue with it.'
Carolina and Spink watched every flicker of his face, his deathly seriousness reflected in their own.
'I told my father. The shock I saw in his features destroyed me. It was as if, for one brief instant, I was a stranger who had washed into his room. And I never saw his eyes light up again. At first he tried to force me to be a good Muslim. And then, when that did not work, at sixteen he drove me out of the house for good. I stood crying on the doorstep, the same good son who had pleased him all his life. And he would not look me in the face. And he would not speak a word. And when the door closed it was plain it would be forever.'
'What a bastard,' Carolina said.
'No. I could never blame my father. He was who he was and always had been. And there is not a night goes by that I do not think of him warmly.'
'Why are you telling us this?'
'Because I have spent all my life since then searching for something which would give me the same feeling of warmth and security I felt as a child, and which would fill that void inside.'
'But you've found-'
'No. I have not. Once you set off along that path to enlightenment it is a very dark road indeed, and I have not seen even the slightest glimmer of light at the end. It is a journey we must all make, alone. What worked for my father did not work for me. What will be right for me, will not be so for you. Do not seek out masters. Look into yourself.'
There was a long pause. Then she said, 'Can't you see? That's just the kind of guidance I was looking for-'
He sighed.
'Okay, okay, I hear what you're saying. But I tell you now, we are going to be your disciples. We'll just do it from a distance.' Her smile was facetious, teasing; he smiled in response.
He could see in her face there was something else. 'What do you want?'
'We want to be with you.'
It took him a second or two to realise what she was truly saying. 'That may not be a good idea.'
'Why? Because you think we're being manipulated somehow? We know what we're doing. This isn't an emotional thing, it's a… it's a…' She searched for the right words.
'A ritual thing,' Spink said suddenly.
Shavi nodded. He understood the transfer of power through the sexual act and he certainly understood the power of directed hedonism. But he was uncomfortable with how they were elevating him to the position of some potent seer and hoping that some of whatever he had would rub off on them during intimacy.
Before he had a chance to order his thoughts, Carolina had stripped off her T-shirt. Her breasts were small and pale in the torchlight. Spink followed suit; his chest was hard and bony, the ribs casting strips of shadow across his skin.
'Spink's bi,' Carolina said. 'Or maybe gay, I don't think he's decided yet.'
She leaned forward and kissed Shavi, her mouth open and wet. Spink moved in and began to nuzzle at Shavi's neck. There was too much sensory stimulation for Shavi to keep his thoughts ordered and eventually he gave in to the pleasures of the moment.
The torch was switched off. His fingers slid over warm flesh. Hands caressed his body, stripping him naked. Their bodies moved over his, both of them hard, at times impossible to tell who was whom. The atmosphere became heightened with energy and for that brief moment he felt renewed.
The scream cut through the early morning stillness, snapping Shavi out of a deep sleep. He untangled himself from draping limbs, only just stirring, before pulling on his clothes and scrambling out on to the dewy ground. The air was chill; it couldn't have been long after dawn.
The first thing he saw brought that cold deep into his veins. There, in the tufted grass by the tent opening, was a slim, pale, severed finger.
All over the campsite people were falling out of camper vans, buses and cars, staggering bleary-eyed into the light. Shavi lurched past the finger, barely able to take his eyes off it, then tried to estimate the direction from which the scream had come. He didn't have to look far. In the no-man's land between the vehicles and the wood, a woman silently dipped down, then rose up, dipped down, rose up, a surreal image until Shavi saw her face was contorted with such grief she couldn't give voice to it. A shapeless mass lay at her feet.
Shavi ran as fast as he could, but several people reached the site before him.
He pushed through them a little too roughly. Lying at the centre of the shocked circle of travellers was Penny, the ground stained in a wide arc around where her finger should have been. She was white with death.
Shavi felt his stomach knot, his mind fizz and spark with the awful realisation that he had brought this horror to the gentle, peaceful travellers. The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet and he had to stagger away where he could no longer see the body.
