Mean Spirit Part 32

One time, while she was with the Courier, Grayle had been given special permission to cover a seance given by the exclusive New York medium, Morgan Schuster.

She was real ghostlike: small, white-haired, wore white woollen dresses. She had an apartment in the Dakota Building, the turreted and gargoyled Central Park chateau where Polanski shot Rosemary's Baby and Mark Chapman shot John Lennon. It was, she said, perhaps the most resonant location in the city, a major spiritual node, a focus of psychic energy, a great amplifier for the inner voice.

Morgan used to operate out of her front parlour in Queens until not too long after Grayle's column broke the story about her psychic contact with the spirit Beatle. Which whatever the likes of Lyndon McAffrey said had seemed genuine enough to Grayle at the time. And, even if it wasn't, where was the harm? Morgan was a wise, good-natured person who helped people find their true selves. Just that she used to help poor people and now she helped mostly rich people, and had a way of making Grayle feel good about what she did.

See, Grayle, to people all across the nation distressed, grief-laden people and those who're just looking for some kind of celestial light in a gloomy world you've become very essential. You are a crucial conduit in a data flow which begins in the unseen world, pa.s.ses to people like me and reaches the material world through your column. What you're doing transcends mere journalism.

Grayle nodding weakly, figuring Lyndon McAffrey might see it from a different perspective, regarding her column as a useful conduit through which large amounts of money were siphoned into the bank accounts of people like Morgan Schuster.

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstance?'

Marcus gripped the seat of his chair. 'Don't f.u.c.k 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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 rea.s.sure young Jo.

He moved to the end of the stone pa.s.sage.

'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, G.o.d 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-p.i.s.sed, wandered into the kitchen for a snack, left something on the posh built-in cooker hob, or the built-in b.l.o.o.d.y spit ...'

'And?'

'And they're all dead, the stupid irresponsible b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! The Barrett home's a smoking ruin, the BMWs are reduced to blackened sh.e.l.ls 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 ma.s.sacre 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.

x.x.xIII.

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 XtraBa.s.s is inscribed, silver on black.

Marcus glances suspiciously up at him, twin candles in his gla.s.ses. 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 un.o.btrusively 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 ... s.e.x being only the beginning of the supernaturally enhanced relations.h.i.+p 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 p.u.s.s.yfooting. 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 fort.i.tude.

She breathes out once, through her mouth, a long and hollow breath, like the sound from a seash.e.l.l 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 alt.i.tude 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 G.o.d,' Grayle whispers.

Marcus frowns. Cindy's eyes meet Grayle's and he sends a shus.h.i.+ng across the s.p.a.ce 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, pa.s.ses 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

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 f.u.c.king 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.