The Babylon rite

29

Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

Hannah McLintock scrolled through the page on her laptop. The room was getting dark, as afternoon declined into twilight; her blonde Celtic hair was illuminated by the glow of the screen. Adam sat back and watched as the two sisters leaned nearer to the computer on the kitchen table.

The older sister spoke. ‘So the porch at the church was covered with these Green Men? Like tiny gargoyles?’

Adam nodded. ‘Yes, and there were about fifty of them. And it’s the only chunk of the ancient Temple left, on the exterior. We know your father went there to look at the church. But he couldn’t get inside. So that’s what he must have come to see. The Green Men in the porch. There are, of course, Green Men at Rosslyn too.’

Hannah nodded, distracted. And scrolled down her screen a little more. Then she sat back, with an air of et voila! ‘Here it is, in Wikipedia. The Green Man.’

‘Read it out,’ suggested Adam.

Hannah obliged. As she did Adam glanced around the dimly-lit kitchen. The fridge was large and brushed and steel. Fashionable cookbooks filled a shelf, next to tall glass vessels full of obscure pasta. The selection of olive oils was intense. A glamorous party invitation was stuck by magnets to the fridge door.

It was all very eloquent, and it said: this is a nice prosperous house. The home of a young, attractive, privileged metropolitan London couple, a couple doing well, a couple maybe thinking of having children.

And where did Nina fit into all this? The unmarried unattached younger daughter, with her drinking and her dark, dark hair.

Adam could discern the dynamic between the sisters. There was a strong bond there, but also perhaps a tiny bit of resentment. Nina was the prettier one: she was certainly the more damaged and neurotic, the more fragile.

Hannah was attractive but more stolid, more sensible perhaps; yet she had already made a slight and apparently jesting remark about Nina being ‘Dad’s favourite’. Adam had also noticed a definite bickering underlying their mutual sadness at their father’s death, Hannah apparently feeling that their father’s final illness, the cancer he had kept quiet, entirely explained his suicide.

The older sister finished her recitative from Wikipedia. ‘So we know the Green Man is a common architectural motif. Originally pagan. We know that they represent, probably, a wild man of the woods, a fertility figure, or even a pre-Christian heathen god like Woden. Commonly they have leaves for hair and beards, and sometimes shoots growing from their mouths, eyes, and noses. They are found-’ she checked the screen, ‘-across Europe. They date from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Some of the earliest can be seen in Templar sites in the Holy Land.’

Nina sat back on the kitchen stool. ‘What does that tell us? Cube root of fuck all.’

Adam gazed at the dark black rectangle of kitchen window, smeared with snowmelt. Who was out there, pursuing them? The serious anxiety was actually a flavour in his mouth: as if he was sucking a key. Sour and metallic. And the winter night was so dark.

‘Can we have a light on?’

‘Sorry,’ Hannah said. ‘I got carried away, I didn’t realize, yes of course.’ Her accent was almost perfectly English, the Scottishness long since departed. There was a stark contrast with Nina: blonde and brunette, English and Scottish. But he could also sense the sincere love between the sisters as well: their hugs and kisses on meeting had been unabashed.

Soft bright light flooded the kitchen; Adam gazed at a photo perched on top of a breadmaker: a recent holiday photo of Hannah and her boyfriend with palm trees behind them. He was as blonde as her.

‘Where is… ah…’

Hannah followed his gaze to the photo. ‘My fiance? Nick? In Paris working, but he’s back tomorrow.’

Adam felt the barometer of risk twitching further towards danger. The fiance was away. So he was the only man in the house. If anything happened he would have to defend them. Follow the notebooks to the daughter.

But this was absurd; he chided himself; what was really going to ‘happen’? They were in an agreeable house in an agreeable Georgian suburb of north London, a fashionable district with delis and restaurants and gastropubs serving Portuguese custard tarts. The idea of brutal violence erupting into this nice kitchen with its different kinds of balsamic vinegar was purely surreal.

Yet so was the notion of an academic being killed because of what he discovered about the Templars.

Nina was using Hannah’s laptop now, pointing at the screen, and going through it all again. ‘So. The Templars were obsessed with Green Men. And Dad was aware of this. But what did the Green Man mean to the Templars?’

Adam gave the obvious answer. ‘That they worshipped something pagan, pre-Christian? Or at least elements of this? Maybe that is the big secret?’

‘Something like that,’ Nina agreed.

Hannah was making coffee. She voiced her thoughts with her back to them as she filled the cafetiere with grounds. ‘The Templars were accused, of course, of worshipping the devil, in their trials, weren’t they?’

‘Yes. Baphomet,’ Nina said. ‘Baphomet. That was the name of the god they were meant to idolize. A head. A grotesque wee head. Wasn’t it? I’ll have mine black, Han.’

‘Wait,’ said Adam. He took out his notebook. ‘Let’s write down everything that links the Templars to pagan worship, in a proper list.’ He clicked his pen. As he did so, a shadow passed across the window. Adam stared — alarmed. But it was just people coming home from work, momentarily blocking the streetlight.

The cafetiere filled, Hannah turned back. ‘Wasn’t there something about weird rituals in their initiations?’

Adam wrote a sentence in his notebook. ‘We know the Templar rites were deeply secret. They were held at midnight, or before dawn, which got people intrigued. And your dad mentioned the initiation rites at Rosslyn.’

Nina looked at Adam. ‘So. What did happen? At these rites?’

‘We don’t know for certain. People have been that asking since the Templars emerged. The King of France was so obsessed with finding out that he actually installed a sleeper agent in the Templars, who was meant to report back. But the man went native and refused to tell the King. Which was one reason the French King was so enraged by the Order he finally took vengeance on them. That’s the legend anyway. Could be garbage.’

Hannah plunged the cafetiere. The dark grounds roiled and agitated in the coffee liquor, like tiny trapped living creatures. ‘What about

… the gay sex thing?’

Adam answered again. ‘Yes. That’s also… curious. We know the Templars were accused of committing strange homosexual acts during their rituals. Novice knights supposedly had to kiss the “base of the spine” of the superior knight. They were accused of conducting sexually perverse rituals, almost a Black Mass, drinking wine to get drunk, then… well, fellating each other. Anal sex. Gay orgies basically.’

‘So they were gay, so what?’ Nina accepted her coffee from her sister. ‘Lots of these monastic orders were gay — young men sworn to chastity, living in dormitories in a desert, it would be amazing if they weren’t a bit that way.’

Adam agreed. ‘The sexual angle is interesting, but it’s not necessarily or even remotely pagan. And, besides, many other heretical sects were accused of homosexuality and blasphemy, quite unjustly. It was a standard way of demonizing unwanted communities. What else?’

‘Cats.’ Nina said. ‘The Templars were alleged to worship a cat. There is a cat gargoyle at Temple Bruer.’

Adam wrote. ‘What else?’

‘What about all the blasphemy? Go back to the blasphemy.’ Nina sipped her coffee. Adam wrote down the word blasphemy. ‘You say it’s crap but they confessed, didn’t they? The violent gay knights? At the trials? To spitting on the cross, urinating on it, stamping on it.’

Hannah interrupted. ‘But those confessions were extracted under torture. They are wholly unreliable, Nina. They had their feet roasted over fires; one poor Templar came to the courts with the bones of his feet in a bag, the bones had fallen out, he was tortured so horribly. You would confess to anything in that situation, wouldn’t you?’

‘Dad used to talk about the tortures. The pity and the horror.’ Nina screwed her mouth up in that peculiar way which Adam had come to understand meant she was repressing some deep, conflicted emotion.

A stagey and anxious silence stifled the kitchen. The sisters were staring into their Met Museum coffee mugs, Thinking About Dad. Adam looked around, prickling with nerves. The windows were so dark. Was that someone staring into the house? He yearned for curtains. Why did upper-middle-class English people have an aversion to curtains on the ground floor?

‘What about your father?’ said Adam, just to break the awkward moment. ‘Did he ever talk about anything pagan connected with the Templars?’

‘Not much,’ Hannah answered. She revolved her mug clockwise, then anticlockwise, staring into the black, black coffee. ‘Maybe the head worship. The adoration of this Baphomet idea. He found that intriguing.’

A jarring thought occurred, Adam voiced it. ‘And what about that horrible piece of pottery we saw, in your dad’s study? The one he brought back from South America?’

It was Hannah who responded. ‘I looked into that. It’s from Peru, from a culture called the Moche.’

‘And they were?’

She hesitated. ‘Some kind of strange pre-Inca civilization, a very bloodthirsty people. Sixth century, I think… But we know Dad went to Peru from his receipts, so there might be a link.’

‘It fits with the Green Men,’ Nina said. ‘Yes. A pagan head? A pagan deity? Then that explains the evil skeletons in Temple Bruer! No? Sacrificial victims? Adam, this must be it — the Templars worshipped a pagan deity: they were involved with some violent, evil, pagan religion, for real. It must be this. But what is so terrible about this revelation, that even today…’ She stopped.

It is so terrible that it gets you killed was written in chilling silver letters in the very air between them.

‘It seems an awful long way. From medieval Europe to Peru in the sixth century,’ Adam said dubiously.

‘Sure,’ Nina answered, ‘but if my dad saw a link there must be a link. Otherwise why did all these people steal his notebooks, then come back and burgle his flat afterwards? They wanted what he found!’

‘And they still want it,’ Adam said. ‘They still want it now.’

The atmosphere was as dark as the windows outside. Hannah spoke, over-brightly. ‘Does anyone want supper? I think I’ve got some sea bass. No pud I’m afraid…’

Nina smiled, sadly. ‘I’d love some, Han.’

The doorbell rang.

Hannah got up. ‘That’ll be the delivery guy, Ocado to the rescue. Thought they’d never make it through the snow.’

Adam watched Hannah walk to the door. He drank some more coffee. Hannah opened the front door to the darkness outside.