Mean Spirit

LIII

By the time they reached the castle, there were possibly sixty of them. Gentle, peace-loving New Age people: astrologers, dowsers, palmists, Tarot-readers; practitioners of acupuncture, reflexology and reiki; regulators of auras and biorhythms; experts on earth mysteries, geomancy and feng shui; members of the New Order of the Golden Dawn, the Aetherius Society and the Subud Brotherhood; followers of Wicca, Rosicrucians and Scientologists. Seers and mystics and healers in suits and saris, patched jeans and ceremonial robes. They carried lamps, they carried candles in glass holders. They held Celtic crosses and wooden staves with archaic symbols carved into them.

At the head of the procession, with the militant Maurice and the edgy etheric therapist Lorna Crane, were Cindy Mars-Lewis, Celtic shaman, and Mr Harry Douglas Oakley, whose great-grandfather was said to haunt the grounds.

Overcross Castle, where the dead had been formally invited to walk, was now floodlit from the parapet, its stone walls gauntly splendid, its tower swollen with the dark charisma of the forbidden.

It had begun to snow very lightly again, out of only a part of the sky, a strange, gritty dust over the cloud-locked crescent moon. Cindy looked up at the high turrets with an anxiety for the most part unrelated to the Forcefield personnel awaiting them at the main entrance.

The Forcefield personnel numbering precisely seven.

None of whom — this was evident — had expected an invasion. Who now assembled on the parapet, exchanging uncertain glances, knowing that if they behaved in a fashion deemed less than formally polite there would be a riot, the real police would be called, and their jobs and conceivably their short-term freedom would be on the line.

‘Look, lads,’ Maurice Gooch said reasonably, from the bottom step. ‘I don’t know whether I’m addressing trade unionists at all, but this is a legitimate, peaceful protest relating to conditions on the site, and we would like to put our grievances directly before Mr Kurt Campbell or one of his associates.’

A Forcefield man who, absurdly, wore an armband with three stripes, pulled at the peak of his cap and beckoned Maurice to the top of the steps. Cindy followed. The Forcefield man said quietly, ‘Come back tomorrow morning, between nine and ten, no more than three of you, and we’ll see what can be arranged.’

Maurice smiled at him and turned to the assembly. ‘This gentleman would like us to come back tomorrow between nine and ten. How would you feel about that?’

There was a great roar, which in no way could be interpreted as assent.

‘Nice try, man,’ Maurice said. ‘Now go get Kurt.’

Behind the four uniformed men, the conservatory extension was deserted. A small security lamp burned. Carried from inside the house, a full-blown theatrical voice related a story.

‘In 1866, I spent some time for my health’s sake at Malvern Spa, where I fasted for several days, partaking only of the mineral waters. It was on this visit that I made the acquaintance of Mr Barnaby Crole and a fellow spiritist, Dr Abblow. And so I came to Overcross …’

One of the Forcefield officers had pulled a mobile phone from a pocket of his uniform and was swiftly tapping out a number when Maurice leapt up the remaining steps and snatched the instrument from his hands, smiling grimly. ‘On second thoughts, lads, we’ll come in and find him ourselves.’ He cancelled the call and handed back the phone. ‘Now don’t you even-’

Which was when, above — or, in fact, below — the actor’s commentary, they heard what could have been nothing but a muffled gunshot.

Maurice stopped. ‘What the bloody hell’s that, Cindy? A sound-effect?’

‘I rather doubt it, boy.’ Cindy saw one of the Forcefield employees close his eyes upon an intake of breath which suggested the man had a suspicion of what or who this was about — and a fervent wish that he was no longer a part of it.

Maurice, also, now appeared less ebullient. ‘What do we do, Cindy?’

In reply — while holding in his inner vision the glory of the sunrise over High Knoll and praying incoherently to the Lady of the Dawn — Cindy ran up the steps and thrust himself urgently between the uniforms.

It went on echoing massively in Bobby Maiden’s head long after it had died away, repeating itself over the ulp ulp of Grayle throwing up.

Maiden fought to swallow his own nausea, to hold his handcuffed wrist steady against the drag. He heard the efficient clack of the sawn-off as Gary Seward finished reloading, came briskly around to the front, not a stain on his suit, not a blotch on his white dress shirt.

‘Twice I warned him, yeah?’ Seward said. ‘You heard me warn him twice.’

Now that the solitary bulb had turned crimson, it was much darker in the cellar, but the reddened glow imposed an illusion of warmth. Three walls were blotched with dark blood, brains, splintered bone, nuggets of foam rubber. Also one side of Grayle’s face and her hair. Which she didn’t yet know.

Maiden looked away, numb with shock, as Ron Foxworth’s stout copper’s heart went on pumping arterial blood through the borehole of his neck. He saw Seffi Callard pulling frantically at the door handle before turning back into the room with both hands over her face.

‘Come and sit down, love.’ Seward hooked a foot around the chair next to Grayle’s as Maiden worked out that he and Grayle and Seffi were still alive and uninjured because Seward had confined the blast by shoving both barrels hard into the fabric of the armchair, where it was plumped out into a headrest, the instant before he fired.

Seffi began to scream through her hands. Maiden wrenched in anguish at the hand locked to the dead hand of Ron Foxworth. Seffi bared her stricken face. ‘Christ, Bobby, what have I-?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Maiden murmured. ‘Just do what he says.’

‘Bobby.’ Seward smiled again. ‘She called you Bobby. So you do know each other. Well, that helps no end, Seffi, because if you don’t come and sit down and do the business, the next one to go is Bobby hisself.’ He levelled his shotgun at Maiden, whose head snapped back instinctively. ‘Pffft!’ Seward raised the barrel, made like he was blowing away tendrils of drifting smoke. The cocktail of stenches in the room was foul. He didn’t seem to notice.

Daniel Dunglas-Home bent and pulled three feet of glowing ectoplasm from the mouth of Lady Colwall.

The cello music swelled to a shivering climax. Dunglas-Home held up the ectoplasm to applause.

It was a farce, a travesty. Dunglas-Home, as Cindy understood it, was slender and a touch camp. He was also very probably a genuine psychic, whose reputation had survived considerable scientific scrutiny.

This man was large and black-whiskered, a vulgar showman, and it was ridiculous and insulting to imagine that Dunglas-Home had done anything as cheap as producing ectoplasm tape from the orifices of a woman assistant, mediumistic or fake.

Tonight’s performance was clearly a cynical satire aimed at convincing the potential donors of tourism grants that the new Overcross enterprise was far from sinister and that Kurt Campbell and his associates remained untainted by the mystical gobbledegook purveyed by the stallholders in the grounds.

To genteel applause, Lady Colwall, middle-aged, attractive, endowed with an impressively Victorian decolletage, was assisted back into the audience.

From the doorway of the banqueting hall, with the New Age warriors behind him in the passage and the Great Hall, Cindy observed the more formal candlelit gathering.

Two long tables at right angles. The performance taking place in a dark space between and beyond them.

Here, there stood a leather chair and an octagonal table bearing a brass oil lamp, a bottle, a wineglass. The actor, the conjuror, sat down in the chair, laughed lightly as though to himself, poured himself a glass of red wine.

‘I was to make seven further appearances at Overcross, under the patronage of the hospitable, enthusiastic and — fortunately — wonderfully gullible Mr Barnaby Crole. And would have made many more had it not been for the arrival of’, the performer scowled, ‘the uncannily perceptive Dr Anthony Abblow.’

Kurt Campbell was at the head of the nearest of the two tables, his back to the doorway and to Cindy, his golden hair luxuriant over the collar of his white dinner jacket. His glass of after-dinner port half-full. There were about twenty other guests, some in Victorian costume, some in ordinary evening dress, two women in cocktail dresses. Neither of them — a last vain hope — was Grayle.

All right, then. Holding up a hand to restrain Maurice and the others, Cindy fluffed up his hair and padded across to tap Kurt lightly upon the shoulder.

Kurt turned, at first impatient and then exhibiting a delicious, slow-dawning shock.

Cindy smiled in the glow of five bright candles in a silver holder.

‘A quiet word, I think, boy,’ he said.

In wiping her mouth with her free hand, Grayle inadvertently touched something else on the side of her face and she howled in revulsion and vomited again, while aware of Seward moving silently, purposefully and taking her free hand. And when it was all gone, and her stomach felt sore and she was dry-retching, she looked up into a blurry image of Persephone Callard in the chair next to her and found that this hand was free no longer but handcuffed to Callard’s right hand and Callard’s left hand was linked to Bobby’s right.

And they were a complete circle now. Including the horrific corpse of Ron Foxworth. She couldn’t look at him, but she could feel the small hairs on the back of his hand against the back of her own.

This was a nightmare beyond all imaginable nightmares.

‘God forgive me, Grayle,’ Callard whispered. ‘I’m so very sorry. All this, I could’ve …’

‘Well, I apologize for that!’ Seward boomed. ‘It was for Clarence, really. I owed him. Gary Seward promised. You ladies can close your eyes if you want.’

The way he kept referring to himself in the third person. Like putting distance between himself and his actions — as if what Gary Seward had promised was already set in stone, out of his hands.

Seward stood outside the circle, his back to the door. Grayle heard Bobby say, ‘So you’re not joining us, then, Gary.’

‘Impractical, Bobby. Plus, Gary Seward, for all his many abilities, is not psychic. Went for these psychic lessons once, but it din’t work. This guru geezer, he says I “lacked the requisite humility”. Which was a load of old toffee. I mean, you look at Miss Persephone Callard here, how much humility’s she bleedin’ got?’

Grayle screamed, ‘Why don’t you just swallow both barrels now? ‘Cause you’re never, never, never gonna cover this one up. This is-’

England, she was going to say.

Seward ignored her anyway, addressed Callard. ‘Listen, you’d know about this. Don’t they say that lifeblood’s the great materializing agent, don’t they say that? This is gonna help even more, innit? I ain’t psychic but I can feel him coming, pushing at the curtain, know wha’ mean?’

Bobby said, ‘Why isn’t Campbell here?’

‘No need. He’s done his bit.’

‘Nothing to do with him being squeamish. Nothing to do with what he doesn’t know won’t-’

‘Shut up,’ Seward said. ‘First warning.’

‘Oh God.’ Grayle set her teeth, fighting for control.

‘You surely realize I can’t possibly do this now,’ Callard said.

Seward broke his shotgun, snapped it back together decisively. ‘You fucking will, my dear. Especially as all you got to do is say the words. You know the words. You say the words … and he’ll come.’

Except he won’t, Grayle thought. He won’t come at all. She’ll just think he’s come. This is what happens. She thinks he’s come. Kurt hypnotized her so that whenever she says that famous sentence, The lines are open, she believes he’s there. Clarence Judge.

Post-hypnotic suggestion, this was the term. And the rest of it, the smells, the cold air, the breakages were the physical results of what that suggestion triggered in Callard’s volatile psychic metabolism.

‘And because you are the best there is, you’ll make it so I can see him,’ Seward said.

Except you won’t. You can’t.

‘And when I get tired of waiting, I blow Bobby into the spirit world. Which don’t worry him greatly — he knows the way. All right. Hands on the table. Ron, too. Palms down, little fingers touching.’

Resting the gun barrel on Bobby Maiden’s shoulder, the mouth against his cheek, Seward began to separate Ron Foxworth’s fingers.

Seffi Callard shook her head. ‘You’re-’

‘And the next person here calls me insane, just to make it that little bit different, I’ll blow a hole the size of a football in Bobby’s stomach.’

He took a step back so that he could see them all. Opened the gun, peered at the cartridges, snapped it shut. Clack.

‘Persephone … don’t disappoint me.’

Seffi Callard’s mouth tightened. She looked despairingly at Bobby, then closed her eyes. In the silence, under the bloodied bulb, she drew in a long, long breath.

And let it out: ‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.’

‘OK,’ she said after a while. ‘The lines are open.’

Kurt Campbell propelled Cindy out of the room, through a black velvet curtain, beyond which a young man at a mixing desk was making scaled-down son et lumiere. Out through another doorway, and into a small stone hallway, where a spiral staircase began.

And where Kurt spun at Cindy, his mouth in a snarl, his forefinger rigid. ‘I don’t know how you got in here, you bastard, but if you think you can-’

‘Listen to me, Kurt.’

‘If you think-’

‘Of course, you could try to mesmerize me again,’ Cindy brazenly sought out Kurt’s eyes, ‘or you could engage me in conversation, and we could talk at length. We could talk of the National Lottery and the Sherwin family of Banbury and the celebrated fitting up of the unfortunate Billy Spindler.’

Kurt’s hand dropped to his side. ‘Get out.’

‘We could talk about the time you went whingeing to Gary about how the Welsh poof had done you out of a job then made a fool of you. Knowing how much Gary hates poofs, isn’t it? Deviants and cross-dressers. All Welshmen, too, probably on principle.’

‘You’re fucking mad.’

‘But what I would very much prefer to discuss is the location of the real seance. Where is it, Kurt? Where is Gary Seward?’

‘Get out of my house.’

‘As distinct from Mr Gary Seward’s house?’

‘This is my house.’ Kurt seized Cindy’s arms, beginning to shake him, thrusting him back against the stone wall.

‘And where … is Grayle … Underhill?’

‘I’ve never heard of a Grayle Und-’

‘Before you hurt me, Kurt, let me make it … clear to you … that it will not happen. Miss Callard will not … be — you must believe me — will not be able to do what you require. Do you … understand me? When she refused it was because she could not…’

Kurt stopped shaking him.

‘It may already be too late,’ Cindy said. ‘There was a shot, as you heard. From the cellars? Where are the cellars, Kurt? Don’t fool about, boy, we have to stop this abomination.’

‘There are no cellars. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you’re pushing me too far.’

‘Oh Kurt, you’ve already gone too far, lovely. Further than you would have ever imagined before you entered dear Gary’s social circle and began letting him do all those favours for you. And then-’

Kurt slapped him hard across the face with his left hand and then punched him savagely in the left breast with his right. Cindy went down on his knees. He did not stop talking.

‘… those deaths. The poor pilot and the man who took on a blonde too big for him. Pure coincidence, of course. But what if there was a third, more appalling, more devastating? A beautiful, multiple death? Well … a piece of-’

Kurt slammed an elegant foot into Cindy’s face. Cindy collapsed.

‘… piece of cake for Gary and the boys from …’ he found his face against a cold stone flag, blood oozing from his mouth ‘… Forcefield.’ He coughed feebly, spat out a tooth. Heard footsteps, voices, people calling for him.

‘But who should it be?’ His words thickened by blood. ‘Who should it be, Kurt? Must move now … while the story’s hot … don’t delay, don’t miss the opportunity …’

‘Cindy? CINDY!’

Hands. Many hands.

Cindy back on his knees. A blur of faces. Could not focus, could not think quite where he was.

‘Who should it be?’ he murmured. ‘Who were those stupid people … with the fleet of BMWs? They deserve it, the crass … crass idiots.’