December (77 page)

OK, he'd engineered some pretty
wild sessions in his time, hadn't everybody? Whole bands on acid. Occupational
hazard.

      
But this was the Abbey. Simon had said to him that if there was
one lesson to learn at the Abbey it was never to allow yourself to relax.

      
Prof tore off his cans. He couldn't bear to hear this
any more
.

      
whatdoldo, whatdoldo?

      
He turned his back on the glass panel between the control room
and the studio floor and watched the metal spools turning, getting it all down
for posterity, for some poor bastard in a listening-studio to hear and dream
and wake up screaming,
We can't release
this!

      
And the spools went on turning, the tape slithering past the heads.

      
gottastopit,
gottastopit, gottastopit

      
He didn't need cans to hear it. The panel was only glass. He was
surprised it hadn't shattered.

      
They'd all come out of their booths. Simon wanting the studio
ambience. Wanting to fill the entire space until the music was absorbed by the
stones in the walls and the vaulted ceiling which supported the tower's mass,
so that it would be like the whole structure was held up by the music.

      
Simon's bid to establish control.

      
And Prof was frightened as he watched ...

      
... Simon, stripped to the waist, droplets of sweat actually
flying from his body as his bow slashed at the cello's strings and his face
stretched in agony like something painted by Goya, the bow in ribbons, strands
of it flying free.

      
Tom Storey, steady, legs apart, pacing him with long, loping,
measured chords, potent as the strokes of a cut-throat razor.

      
While Dave had put down his golden-hued Martin guitar and
rushed to where Moira lay, cradling her head in his lap, tears from both of
them on Moira's cheeks.

      
Prof watched Moira's breast heaving. The sounds coming out of
her before she fell had been the sick, soured Gregorian chant of his recurring
dream.

      
Which had not been audible on the Black Album tape, he'd swear
it, and yet ... ... had been introduced into his subconscious mind
by
the tape.

      
He knew that Moira, in
her
mind, had been running in terror along the ruined nave, under the Abbey's
gaunt, black ribcage guarding its diseased lungs, the ground quaking as the Abbey
breathed.

      
Alive. They were inside an ancient, living, sentient organism.
He could see a fire burning in the deepest woodland, yellow and pink, below an
ancient, lumpen tree with twisted, swollen branches and chattering twigs, the
tree reaching out its branch-arms like a deformed man. Rough nails projected
from the tree's tendrils, thick and glistening reddened strings looped around them
and the rich, succulent smell of roasting meat.

      
Someone must have opened the door and let in the night mist,
swirling now around the silent drums and cymbals.

      
The mist formed against the glass screen, full of stricken
Goya faces

           
(as Simon sweated over the cello, sawing savagely at the
quivering strings)

                                               
and then collected
out on the studio floor, above where Moira lay weeping with her head in Dave's
lap, Dave crying, too, and maybe it was the mingling, evaporating tears which
turned the mist into a little cloud of throbbing blackness which settled around
her face like a soft helmet.

      
And, oh, God, God, God, God, how he wanted a drink ...
      
Prof scuttling around the control
room, hands over his ears, the Abbey alive all around him, walls expanding and
contracting, the sick, stone organism pulsing with soured, curdled energy,
Prof's brain swollen inside his skull, the bones straining and cracking.

      
Stopitstopitstopit
stopitstopitSTOPITSTOPITSTOPITSTOPITSTOP

'It's over, Prof.'

      
'Go away. I never want to see any of you bastards again.'
      
'You can take the tape. You can
take it out on the bloody hill and burn it now. I'm not Russell, I'm not gonna
con you. See, there it is, still turning. Rip it off, take it away, soak it in petrol...'

      
Their faces above him, with lights, like a surgical team over an
operating table.

      
'It was necessary. Prof,' Moira said.

      
Prof sat up. 'How can anything like that ever be necessary?
What happened to you, why'd you pass out, why was the black ...?'

      
'I was seeing, Prof. Simon was showing us. Making a point.'
      
She shook herself. 'Whole thing was
very exhausting.'

      
Simon was kneeling by Profs chair. 'That piece wouldn't work
the first time, because I was trying to make it into the kind of vision which
it wasn't. This abbey was never dedicated to the Light. It used to be in the
middle of a forest, now it just gathers mist.'

      
'A black abbey?' Prof croaked.

      
'A black abbot, and he's still around, the essence of him.
That was to let him know that we knew. That
I
knew. Me particularly, because he had me. Nearly.'

      
Simon stood up, his back to the tape deck. The needles on
several of the twenty four illuminated level-meters were still moving as if the
tape was recording the ambient sounds from the studio floor.

      
Simon said loudly, 'If you're listening, Richard, I just want
to say it's nearly over. You're fucked, man.'

      
Prof, feeling like a very old producer, sat up in his chair
and swallowed bile as the black needles on more than half the level-meters whipped
over to the red area and stopped there for all of three seconds, as though they
were recording a spasm of rage.

XI

Bart Simpson

THURSDAY,
8 DECEMBER

The first of the screams pierced
the skin of Moira's sleep like a syringe.
      
Sometimes this happened. Like being
a radio, picking up distress signals you couldn't do a thing about, maybe ships
out there in the Atlantic. Best to shut them out, roll over, bury your head in
the pillow, pull the bedclothes over.

      
Metaphorically speaking. Because burrowing in the bed would
only seal you off from the sounds in the room - a ticking clock, gargling water-pipes,
birdsong. The distress calls, coming from some inner space would, in fact, be
that much louder.

      
But still you did it, instinctively, sometimes - like now -
bending the pillow around your head. 'Go 'way, huh, lemme get some sleep, didny
get to bed till gone four.'

      
And this time - the pillow around her head, the sheets and blankets
over the pillow, the eiderdown on top of everything - it worked, thank God, the
screams dwindling to feeble twitters.

      
'Fine, I can handle that, just let me have a few more ...'
      
'… minutes.'

      
Moira struggled frantically through the jungle of bedclothes, breaking
surface with a gasp.
      
The scream was real.

      
It had stopped, but its memory hung around like a kick in the
stomach.

      
This had been a long, tremulous scream, beginning in mere pain
and rising to an agony of high-pitched terror.

      
Moira sat up for a moment, pulling hair out of her eyes. The
scream did not recur. A dark mauveness hazed from the high, uncurtained window.
She groped on the floor for her watch. It was 7.30 a.m.

      
She slid her legs to the floor, calf-muscles aching. She was
wearing the Bart Simpson nightshirt. It was up around her waist, revealing that
one of the blisters on her thighs had burst in the night. She pulled a tissue
from the box on the floor and dabbed away the yellowy matter, then sat on the
edge of the bed, gathering her emotions, not ready yet to take on the scream.
How did she
feel
about this - the
climax of last night's session, Simon's shout of defiance?

      
Simon.

      
The scream.

      
The scream, a real scream, had come from above. There was only
one room between hers and the roof.
      
Moira was up and running for the
door.

Eddie fumbled his way to the
phone with shaving foam over half his face.

      
'I'll see you in the church in twenty minutes,' she snapped before
he could even remember his own exchange and number ...

      
'Heaven's sake, Isabel, you know what time it is?'
      
'You want to hear this or not?'
      
'What about my breakfast?'
      
Isabel hung up, the bossy bitch.

Vanessa was missing, her
single bed empty.
      
Meryl panicked at once ...

      
Flinging on her dressing-gown, she raced downstairs. The only
open door was the one to the living-room, but the room was empty.

      
'Vanessa!'

      
She ran to the front door to find it still locked and barred.
She dashed through to the kitchen; it too was empty, the back door firmly fastened.
Meryl hugged her breasts, convinced the child had disappeared as mysteriously
as she had arrived.

      
She was not natural. She was like a spirit, a fairy, a
changeling.

      
Oh, don't be so stupid, Meryl! Stop. Think.

      
She went back into the hall and opened the front door,
stepping out into the bitter air, clutching her dressing-gown to her throat.

      
Nothing. No one.

      
She hurried back into the living-room. Through the
picture-window, sheep grazed contentedly on the damp and misted hills. She was
furious with them: did they have no aspirations beyond the food chain?

      
Trembling with anxiety and cold, she made herself sit down
next to the fireplace, where the cinders of last night's coal fire lay brown
and dead. It was a mean little grate, far removed from the deep inglenooks at
Martin's place. Meryl felt horribly lonely remembering the roaring fires of
Hall Farm, the long, velvet curtains, the unseen, perfumed essence of the Lady Bluefoot.

      
Oh my lady, if only you were here with me.
      
But she wasn't. She was the house
ghost of Hall Farm. Nice ghosts were like good wine and didn't travel.
      
Meryl stood up. She needed help.
Quickly.
      
The village?

      
Although naturally, she believed, gregarious, she hadn't made
herself known to any of the villagers here. This was on Simon's advice. He'd
thought it best for her to keep a low profile. As, indeed, he told her, did
most of the locals. Except, that was, for a man called Eddie Edwards. If this man
ever showed his face at the vicarage, she should clam up at once, Simon had
decreed. She should have nothing whatsoever to do with Mr Eddie Edwards ... or,
even more important, with a certain Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones. If
he
were ever to turn up, she could say
she was the vicar's aunt (aunt indeed, how old did he think she was?), looking
after the place while the vicar took a short holiday with friends in Oxford or somewhere.

      
What a tangled web. After her years with Martin, Meryl was tired
of tangled webs.

      
Martin! She'd telephone Martin, at once, before he left for work.
It was the fair and honest thing to do, having promised Vanessa only that she
would not involve Shelley.
      
Now. Phone. Office.

      
This was the room across the hall from which she'd borrowed
books. And there, on a plain mahogany desk, sat the phone, and also ...

      
'Vanessa!'

      
Wearing the pretty cotton nightdress Meryl had bought her in
Abergavenny, the child was sitting calmly on a leather-frame blotter, gazing
out of the window, across the street towards the disappointing village church.
She didn't even turn around at Meryl's cry.