Mean Spirit

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.

Oh dear.

The poor boy. Afraid for her. And, of course, besotted, like many before him — Cindy’s view is that the men she’s been with over the years will have fallen generally into two types: the ones who are a little scared of her, who like being scared of her — some Gothic masochism thing — and the ones who want to get into her … sex being only the beginning of the supernaturally enhanced relationship they are going to have.

Cindy, however, is feeling for common ground — yes, the shaman’s role is also to commune with spirits, but in a less claustrophobic sense than the medium. To channel unseen energies, to ride the green ray, to connect people with the spirit of their ancestors and of their place, in a healing way, a connecting way, thus overcoming the acute sense of alienation which so afflicts modern societies. All rather less, shall we say, domestic than the spiritualist. Less domestic and perhaps less — Cindy would never dare say this aloud — mean-spirited.

Which is to say that the Celtic shaman would not normally consider it seemly to communicate with the essences of dead individuals.

Tonight, however … Well, tonight Cindy’s role may be one of interception. If it comes through, he must catch it, hold it within the circle. No pussyfooting. He wants answers.

Debussy has finished. All is silent. Cindy lets it lie for a moment.

‘Persephone?’ he whispers at last.

She nods.

‘When you are ready,’ he says steadily.

She does not respond at once. Cindy glances at Grayle’s soft, candlelit blondeness. She is looking past Persephone at Bobby, half lit by the hurricane lamp behind him. Grayle’s face is solemn. Probably since a night of thunder and lightning and death at the Rollright Stones, little Grayle has been hiding, even from herself, certain feelings for Bobby Maiden. Oh dear, oh dear, so many complications. Such an emotional tapestry is hardly the safest backdrop for the theatre of souls.

‘The …’ Persephone’s voice is cracked ‘the line …’ She swallows.

The calm is fractured, Cindy sensing a sudden acute trepidation in the part of her — the personality — which must now allow itself to be pushed into the back seat. He closes his eyes and opens his hands in his lap, sending her the steel-blue light of fortitude.

She breathes out once, through her mouth, a long and hollow breath, like the sound from a seashell or a cave.

‘Haaaaaaaaaw.’

Cindy opens his eyes, focuses on the middle distance.

‘The lines are open,’ Persephone Callard states. Though it is little more than a croak.

Seconds later the first indication is from the dog. Malcolm howls once, pitifully, far away in Marcus’s study, another world.

Marcus’s eyes flicker up at once, in concern, and Cindy gives him a hard look — stay.

Marcus subsides. Malcolm subsides, but Cindy knows the dog is panting now, in fear, as some animals do during an electric storm. He will crawl under Marcus’s desk and lie there, trembling.

The air in here feels thin — like the air, it is said, on the top of a high mountain. It is a sensation Cindy has experienced — for reasons, of course, other than altitude — upon Cader Idris, the sacred mountain of Snowdonia and, most joyously, on little Carn Ingli, near his home.

It is not so joyous here. The candle flame grows longer and, under the whine of the wind, there is a scratching, like rats, at the wall, from outside.

Next to him the sixth chair creaks. ‘Oh God,’ Grayle whispers.

Marcus frowns. Cindy’s eyes meet Grayle’s and he sends a shushing across the space between them. Don’t look at the sixth chair.

But Bobby it is who stirs. Standing up quickly. Looking confused, glancing from side to side. He walks out of the circle.

Stop him?

Wait a moment.

A tiny chittering voice in the corner of the room becomes louder, passes through the chair circle, is gone like a breath of wind. Perhaps only Cindy has heard it. But, no … there’s a sharp glance from Marcus; he has picked up the sound and Cindy can almost read his growling thoughts.

You and your bastard ventriloquism.

Marcus will always be the first to suspect Cindy, but Cindy knows that the little, chittering voice was the voice of the spirit which draws back the curtain.

And that the lines are indeed open now.

He sees that Bobby has returned. The boy has on his knees one of the office jotters. He’s watching Miss Callard most keenly, his hand moving on the pad.

The rain beats on the long window. Reminds Grayle how, one time — the only time — she saw what might have been a ghost. Or something.

Not so very long ago, on an autumn day, she was alone in the rain up on High Knoll and she saw this little girl, who could not have been there. A little girl in blue who ran in the rain, was part of the rain — ran and ran in the same patch of crystal rain, getting nowhere. Not existing outside of the rain. And Grayle ran, too, terrified, all the way down the hill, to where Bobby Maiden found her and brought her to Marcus and Marcus’s whisky. A day of destiny, though she couldn’t have known it, her future being shaped around her as she shivered in the rural rain.

Through the rain noise, she’s heard Callard say,

The lines are open.

Well, sure, big deal.

The candle flame is, like, two inches long. Grayle looks away from it, down at her sneakers. Though she feels safe with these people — with most of these people — one thing she isn’t gonna do is look at that goddamn sixth chair, get into some stupid hallucination trip, like no way.

Marcus ponders. Those small voices, meaningless as twittering birds … certainly possible that Lewis could have been doing that; in this light he needn’t even worry about being seen to move his lips. Equally — there was a radio, wasn’t there, in that ghetto-blaster thing of Underhill’s? Perhaps it had activated itself when the CD ended. Or perhaps Lewis himself … Yes, it was Lewis who turned the music down. The creature was a conjuror for a while wasn’t he … devious bastard.

Lewis says, ‘It’s here, isn’t it, Persephone?’

Marcus stares through the candle at Lewis and then, boldly, angrily, at the sixth chair.

Seeing nothing there but a fucking chair.

The nearness of Seffi Callard. The erotic sound of her breathing in a darkened room. Bobby Maiden can’t stop thinking about Seffi Callard and he wonders if she can feel his longing, rising like the candle flame.

His right hand, tight around the pencil, moves across the pad. Across the space between their chairs, she seems to reach out and touch his hand with one long finger.

Bobby Maiden shudders with a sudden rush of passion for her that’s far more complex than desire. He needs to draw her face, convey the weight of her hair, the dark lamps of her eyes.

And Cindy’s brain pulses with the sudden sense of something violently squalid, poisonously shrivelled.

Assailed now by the stench of a lavatory lust, so strong and physical that he wants to run from the room before it sucks him into that steaming, sordid pit on the edge of which — more than once, to his shame — he has teetered.

Cindy is badly shocked, close to panic, almost wrenches his chair away from it, from whatever monstrosity is forming like a gas in the chair next to his own. It is with enormous difficulty that he keeps his voice low and steady.

‘Talk to it, Persephone.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Try,’ Cindy hisses, teeth clenched.

‘I don’t know what to call him.’

‘Ask for a name.’

Persephone sits with her spine straight, her hands clasped in the lap of her skirt.

She says, her voice robotic, ‘What’s your name?’

Cindy urgently visualizes the seventeen little stones — under the window, at the foot of the shelves, beneath the computer table — and, with a burst of will-power, makes them glow.

Persephone says, stronger now, ‘What’s your name?’

Cindy conjures in his head the sound of a drum beating, his own drum, his painted bodhran (knowing that the drum, lying on the back seat of his car, will now be vibrating).

‘Who are you?’ Persephone cries in anguish. ‘Who are you, who are you, WHO ARE YOU?’

The drum is beating on its own, Cindy thinking rapidly: this business of No Name indicates not so much the absence of a name but that Persephone refuses to hear it. Refuses to confront the possibility — Grayle, it was, suggested this and Grayle might well be right — that she may, in the time-honoured, deliberate formality of the seance, be conjuring a personification of her despised art at its most foetid and contemptible, summoning a spirit of the lowest order, comprised of spittle-like strands of sick longing.

You and I, we are prisoners in the same old, mildewed tower.

‘Ask its name, Persephone!’

‘He won’t … tell me.’

He. Always he. Part of the denial. Giving it maleness, giving it a hard, damaged face.

‘All right. All right then …’

The drum beating louder in his head, the circle of seventeen stones glowing brightly there, Cindy braces himself, aware that what he is about to suggest is not terribly wise. It will bring with it pain and suffering, awaken memories of old, foul dreams.

‘Throw it to me,’ Cindy says lightly, and turns to look directly at the sixth chair. ‘Throw him to me, lovely.’

* * *

His hands, both of them, moving rapidly on the pad, Maiden is becoming aware of a surge of enthusiasm, a sense of violent arousal. His thumb is smudging the freshly laid pencil shading into misted whorls as he sculpts the face.

He’s in Justin’s garage, rich with the smell of oil and fear, and Justin is sobbing, ‘Please … I don’t know … I’ve told you … for fucksake, man, I don’t …’ There’s a silent, gloating presence suspended in the vault of grimy light from the roof.

‘Nice one.’ A low and guttural sigh. A rasp. Rapture.

Seffi Callard screams. ‘He’s touching my face!’

Maiden jerks at once to his feet, the pad and pencil falling to the floor, and moves towards her, but it seems a long way, like swimming through dark, muddy water, his hands clawing at the soup.

Hearing Cindy, sharply, ‘Bobby, sit down.’

Maiden feels frustration. Anger. An old resentment running as deep as a sewer. Hate. Then Seffi-

‘He’s touching me-’

Seffi draws in a huge breath and her body rears back, shuddering, and then it goes still and tight and Maiden waits for her breath to come out, but it doesn’t. She’s frozen, arched and rigid, an abandoned sculpture in bronze.

Maiden throws himself at her, but there’s something in between, something that hones the air, makes it vicious like a blade. Far away, Malcolm’s howl is close to a scream.

‘The smell!’ Grayle blurts. ‘Oh Jesus, it’s coming … it’s coming off of her.’

Maiden tries to touch Seffi but his hands don’t reach, and Seffi, though still rigid, starts to vibrate, as though there’s electricity forking into her, and there’s sweat forming like a second, bubbling skin on her face, and when Maiden’s hands hover over her shoulders he expects the electric charge to go through him like a sizzling knife, and he doesn’t care.

‘Please,’ he whispers.

And they’re all dead, the stupid irresponsible bastards!

‘Not now!’ Cindy shouts. ‘Leave me alone, can’t you?’

The drumming has lost its rhythm and the seventeen small stones from High Knoll have lost their lights, and — despicably — all Cindy can think about is his own predicament, the dissolution of his brilliant career. In a sick, dispiriting moment, he finds himself looking at the sixth chair.

It is empty but, above it, he would swear he sees Kurt Campbell’s sharp face projected into the window, in the light of the oil lamp.

And then the window itself collapses, a waterfall of glass.