December (87 page)

      
'Bastards economising on the heating or what?'

      
'It's cold on those hills,' Moira says enigmatically.

      
Prof leans over to the radiator pipe. To his surprise, it's
hot. Does she mean the cold is coming through
Dave
?

      
The idea gives Prof the jitters, even though he knows it isn't
possible. 'What's going on, Moira? I mean, is he having some kind of
extra-sensory experience? Are people gonna listen to this in fifteen years and
go like, wow, that was really ahead of its time?'

      
'Nobody's gonna hear ii in fifteen years' time. Nobody's gonna
hear it tomorrow. We won't make the same mistake again, will we, Prof?'

      
'That's why you've come in? You think I'm gonna do a Russell?'

      
She touches his hand. 'I'm sorry. No, I don't.'
      
Dave's still ripping weird, wounded
chords from the guitar; it shouldn't happen to a Martin. They can hear his
breathing: irregular, snorting.

      
'I really don't like this,' Moira says. 'I'm scared to leave
him in there and I'm scared to pull him out. He ran out himself on the session
... last time. You know?'

      
'Yeah, and it's been preying on his mind ever since. Hang on,
what's this?'

      
A long, deep sigh is issuing from the speakers like steam.

      
'deathhhhhhhhhh'

      
'Turn it up!' Moira hisses urgently.

      
'ooooooooOOOOOAKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...'

In an instant of bizarre
surrealism, Martin thinks he's looking at a strange, gliding dwarf, a male
dwarf with a high voice and a silly Welsh accent.

      
'I don't want to interfere, but I hate to see you so anxious, see.'

      
Only when the searchlight swings round does Martin realise
he's being addressed by a woman in a wheelchair. Questions like: Who the hell
are you? Where did you spring from? are pre-empted by Shelley, who practically
pounces on the chair.
      
'Calm down, come on,' the woman
says. 'She's all right, she's fine.'

      
'Just one moment.' Martin gently eases Shelley's hand from the
arm of the wheelchair. 'What's the name of the girl we're talking about?'

      
The woman in the chair inspects him candidly. 'Vanessa.
Satisfied?'

      
Shelley lifts her head, eyes closed, and clenches both fists
by her sides in relief.

      
Martin says, 'I'm terribly sorry, Mrs ...'
      
'Isabel Pugh. Not Mrs.'

      
'I'm Martin Broadbank. Friend of the family. I'm very sorry I
doubted you but things have been ... well, pretty difficult actually. Where,
er, where exactly is Vanessa now?' Looking round, half-expecting the child to have
materialised from the mist.

      
Isabel Pugh hesitates, produces a wry expression. 'Ah, sod
it,' she says. 'You should find her at the new vicarage in Ystrad Ddu. Directly
opposite the church. You can be there in a couple of minutes.'

      
'Thank you.' Martin smiles. 'That sounds safe enough.'
      
'Well, yes.' Isabel Pugh looks to
be in two minds about this. 'It should be. All the same, I should get over
there pronto.'

      
'But she's being looked after?' Shelley stiffens.
      
'Yes, but I should ... get her
away.'

      
Martin looks at the Pugh woman with curiosity. She's wearing
make-up, her hair well-groomed. She's pretty, soft-eyed. She seems intelligent.
She seems frightfully apprehensive.
      
'Just don't ask too many
questions,' she says. 'You'll only regret it.'

The fog curls and eddies in
strands around her.
      
Her.

      
Vanessa has talked of guardian angels; this is Meryl's. Now she
knows.

      
And she's waited so long
      
to see her.

      
The crisp rustle of silk. Or taffeta.
Swishhhh.
Peremptory, a little haughty. The mist parts to let her through.
Meryl was wrong. Ghosts
can
travel.
If they sense a kinship with the living.

      
'We've been through so much together,' Meryl whispers. 'Please
let me see your face.'

      
The frost gleams pale blue on the tumbled stones where she shimmers.

      
'See, Vanessa. See my friend.'

      
'
No
.' Vanessa backs
way, the blue light cold in her glasses.

'Not long now.' Moira breathes
out smoke. Her body is stiff with tension. 'You got an ashtray?'

      
'Just chuck it on the floor and stamp on it. What d'you mean,
not long?'

      
'He said Deathoak. This is where it all ends. For Aelwyn, at least.
Deathoak's the place of execution.'

      
'Deathoak's The Dakota,' Prof says. 'Or something. With a spare
T.'

      
'Or a cross,' Moira says suddenly. 'Listen.'

      
There's a moment of silence, the needles on the meter quivering.
Impenetrable darkness beyond the glass panel.

      
And then, bizarrely, Dave as Lennon comes scything from the
speakers.

      
'... way things are go-win'...' A cackle of crazy laughter.
      
I'm out of here, Prof thinks, not
moving. I'm going to engineer a couple of regular albums made by normal,
vicious crack-heads and then I'm gonna retire.

      
'They'll crucify him,' Moira says breathlessly, fumbling in her
bag. 'Oh, God, get him through this.' Prof hears the friction of a match, sees
her face in the flaring, anxiety bringing a twitch to her cheek. She pulls her
black anorak from the floor, drags it around her shoulders. She's shivering,
Prof can feel the vibration from her.

      
Yeah. It's freezing, all right. He touches the heating pipe
again. It's still very hot. This is all wrong; you'd think the water in here
would be frozen solid.

      
'...'s going on, Moira? What's happening? Who's gonna crucify
him?' His
teeth
chattering; he
doesn't remember that happening since he was a little kid.

      
The monks. The monks crucified him. Here. On a tree. Deathoak.'

      
'I don't get what you ...'
      
'
Here
. Can't you feel it?'
      
The control room door opens.
      
'Whosat?' Prof yells, nerves
leaping in the darkness.
      
'Bloody hell,' Simon shuts the door
behind him. 'It's no cheerier in here, is it?'

      
'Here?' Prof says to Moira. 'What d'you mean
here
?'

      
'You felt the walls?' Simon asks. 'The walls are like ice. Absolutely
like ice. Where's it bloody well coming from?'

      
'Got to end soon,' Moira whispers. 'Got to.'

      
'Haven't heard a note out of Tom,' Prof says to Simon. 'He
still down there?'

      
'Tom won't leave. In case he's needed.'
      
'Guy's a hero,' Moira says distantly,
and then, 'Ssshh.' Leaning into the speakers. In a thick and sleepy voice,
Dave's repeating one of the old verses, like the image is going around and around
in his head.

...
echoes of slaughter

the
wine turns ... to water
the water to ... blood and
the blood back ... to water ...

      
In the pauses, he's hammering at the bass strings, staccato,
'Nails,' Moira says.

      
Dave sings the same verse again, cracks in his voice, beating the
strings, no rhythm to it. Behind his voice, a swollen roar like the wind, like
blood pounding in your ears.

      
'He's singing to himself,' Moira whispers. 'He's singing to himself
while the nails are going in.'

They wanted her to go back
with them, Mrs Storey and the kind-eyed man, Martin. He wanted to lift her into
the car. They could get the chair in the boot, couldn't they?

      
The car is long and sleek and reassuring. One of those Jaguar XJ-somethings.
These people seem so strong and sane. They could take her away. From the Abbey
and the village and the valley. She has money; her mother has the W.I. She
could set out on her own, somewhere cheerful and busy, even if it's only Abergavenny.

      
'No, thank you.' Isabel sighs. 'I'm waiting for my boyfriend.'
      
Just saying that makes her feel so
emotional she has to turn the chair away. She gets an image of Simon, strands
of pale falling around his sad, cynical eyes.

      
She knows Martin can sense her anxiety, wanting to ask her what
she's doing here alone on a night like this. She wills him not to.

      
'Go on.' Isabel makes little shooing motions with her mittened
hand. 'Go and get Vanessa, poor
dab
.'

      
'Thank you,' Shelley calls back from the car door, 'Thank you
so much.'

      
As the Jaguar rolls away, Isabel returns to the barrier and the
lights. The security man gives her a relieved smile. 'Thanks. I don't know
where you came from, but thanks. Could have been a problem, that.' Women in wheelchairs
are no threat.
      
'Anything I can do for you?'

      
'Well, I don't know, see.' Isabel trying to sound all Welsh and
defenceless. 'Come up from the village, I have. Stupid, really.'

      
'Not wise, night like this.'

      
'Only, a friend of mine, she said Lee Gibson was here, Isabel
wriggles about under her woolly cape. 'Seems daft, it does, to you, probably,
but I've got nearly all his albums, see.'

      
Hoping to God she doesn't have to name any of them. Meryl, it
was, who spotted Lee Gibson in the Dragon while buying a few things from the
shop. All Meryl knew about him was what she'd read in the papers about his
affair with some prominent Hollywood actress.
      
'You want to meet him, eh?'

      
'Do you really think ...? Oh, all embarrassed, I am, now.'
      
There's not enough light, she
knows, for him to see her dimples turning pink. But he smiles. 'Well, he's
around. I've seen him in the canteen. He came out the studio an hour or so ago.
I don't think he's gone back.'
      
The security man opens the gate and
beckons her in.
      
'You stay here, by the lights, and
I'll see if I can find him. You got an album or something for him to sign?'
      
Isabel nods and shrugs, indicating
it's under the cape.
      
'Give me two minutes.'

      
'Terrible kind of you,' Isabel mumbles, as the guy strolls
away, hands in pockets, in the direction of a low, prefabricated building with
warm-looking lamps in its windows. When the door closes behind him, she presses
the green button and steers the chair into the blackness beyond the
intermittent searchlight, and when he returns to find her gone, he'll simply
think she's melted way, overcome by embarrassment.
      
Now.
      
Go.

      
Isabel, breathing faster, brings the bike lamp from under her
cape and steers the chair away from the path, away from the prefabricated
buildings and the artificial lights.
      
Across the turf, towards the ruins.
      
The ruins which ruined her.
      
Doing
it, I am. I'm really doing it.

      
The nave of the Abbey church is a line of skeletal, frost-rimmed
broken arches - less impressive than she remembers. She goes into it,
determined not to stop or to think too hard until she reaches the end. Where
the final arch connects to the two western towers. With Meryl, she's studied
the plan of the Abbey layout in one of Simon's books.

      
She travels directly down the middle, the bike lamp shining up
into the arcade of arches, enfolded in loose, drab drapes of mist.

      
The nave is floored with frosted grass, where pews and stalls
once lined an aisle. Where the high rafters resounded with the gilded echoes of
Gregorian chant.