Wylding Hall (10 page)

At first I thought she was a young boy. Very slim and fine-boned, white-blonde hair. A real towhead. She was so pale, I mistook her for light reflecting on the mirror behind her. Took a minute for my eyes to focus and see it was a girl.

I’d put her at fifteen, sixteen. She looked younger because she was so thin, but when you got a better look, her face wasn’t young. Not old, just—she looked like she knew things. Her skin was the whitest skin I’ve ever seen—you could see where the veins were. It made her skin greenish, like a luna moth’s. She was wearing a long, floaty dress, white dress, ragged at the hem. Barefoot, leaves stuck to her feet like she’d been walking in the woods.

I didn’t think she was that unusual—you couldn’t throw a rock in the King’s Road and not hit some Pre-Raphaelite teenybopper. Pale and interesting. Still, I suspect it raised a few eyebrows with the punters in the Wren.

But with her, it wasn’t makeup. I saw that when she walked over, after the set. She was the palest creature I’d ever set eyes on. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, same way I felt about Julian. When the two of them stood beside each other, you didn’t know where to look.

Chapter 13

Patricia Kenyon

There’s an old West Country ballad called “The Lady of Zennor.” Will turned me onto it when I interviewed him for that long piece I did for
Mojo
about Windhollow’s legacy. It’s based on a legend about a mermaid. Zennor’s a fishing village in Cornwall. I visited it after talking to Will; he told me there was a memorial in the village church. I thought he was having me on, but damned if it wasn’t the truth.

The story goes that there was a young man in the village who sang in the church choir. His voice was so beautiful that every Sunday, a mermaid would come out of the sea and walk up to the church and sit in the back just to hear him. I don’t know how she walked with a tail—they didn’t go into that. Eventually she converted to Christianity so she could marry him. The church is ancient, twelfth century, and when you go inside, you can see where she sat—someone made a special little wooden pew for her, with a mermaid carved on each end. I sat in it—no one was there to stop me. The church was empty and I could have walked out with it if I wanted, it was so small. She must have been tiny.

I asked Will why he was telling me about this particular legend and song. Obviously I knew why, but I wanted to hear him say it, even if it was off the record. He wouldn’t.

Lesley

No, I didn’t like her, not that I had time to get to know her. I didn’t trust her. I knew too many male singers, and you didn’t have to be Jimmy Page to get a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls hopping into bed with you.

I also knew that Tom Haring would pitch a fit when he found out. Which he did. The whole point of us being at Wylding Hall was to avoid distractions, and groupies are definitely a distraction. God knows how she knew we were there. Someone must have heard about Ashton and me singing at the pub, and blabbed it around.

She certainly wasn’t from the village—every guy in that place just about keeled over when he saw her, even Jonno.

And yes, of course I was jealous. Anyone would have been. She was like some hippie wet dream: platinum blonde in that slinky white dress. Not even a dress—it was a white slip; it might have been a hundred years old. It was sheer enough you could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

This is all we need, I thought, to get run out of town because some naked teenager shows up at the pub.

But Jonno, god bless him, he had the sense to give her his cape to cover up. And yes, he did wear a cape, a long sky-blue velvet cape that cost a fortune. It looked a lot better on her. What the hell’s a drummer going to do with a freaking cape? Jonno threw it over her and pulled her over to our table. Which, fortunately, was in the back corner. They all just fawned around her like she was the Queen or some such shit—Will and Ashton and Jonno.

And Julian, of course. Soon as he finished that song, he jumped up, grabbed his guitar and—I swear, I never saw him move so fast. He raced over and grabbed her hand, and just stared down at her.

My first thought was they knew each other, like she was an old girlfriend or someone from school. Yet he wasn’t looking at this girl like he knew her. It was more like he was totally amazed. For a second, I even thought she was someone from the press or maybe a rock star, some bigwig he’d invited but hadn’t imagined would really show up.

But it immediately became obvious she wasn’t. I can’t describe it, but she gave off this weird vibe. You know how you’ll see a crazy person in the street, and even though they’re not acting overtly crazy—like, they’re talking to themselves, so maybe they’re on a cellphone. But you just know there’s no cellphone. You just know, that person is nuts.

That’s how I felt about her. Like maybe she was on drugs and might pull a knife, or god knows what. She looked strung out. Didn’t know where she was, didn’t know her name. Ashton kept asking her, “Who are you, who are you?”
until Julian told him to shut the fuck up.

That alone was enough of a warning. Julian never lost his temper. Ever.

Whoever she was, I didn’t want her anywhere near me.

Ashton

Well
, I thought,
where’s Julian been hiding
this
? Still waters run deep!
Here’s this drop-dead gorgeous wisp of a girl comes running up to him. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Also, she was just about starkers. When Jonno wrapped his idiotic cape around her, I wanted to throttle him—doesn’t hurt to look! But I suppose it was for the best.

Clearly, she and Julian knew each other. They clung together like kids; you couldn’t have slid a penny between them. After about five minutes, it got to be a bit much.

“All right,” I said. “Time, gentleman, time.”

I put my hand on Julian’s shoulder, and he jumped like I’d given him an electric shock.

“What did you say?” he demanded. He had actually gone white.

“Just a joke,” I said. I looked over and saw good old Les had been the first to do something sensible. “Look, here’s Les with a round, let’s drink up and head back home, what do you think?”

Julian took the girl by the hand. “She’s coming with me.”

“Of course she is. ” I handed him a pint. Lesley had only brought five, I noted.

“We didn’t get much money,” she said. She looked angry. “I had to buy a round for Reg.”

Just as well, the wee girl didn’t seem like she’d be able to handle her drink. Seemed a bit stunned, deer in the headlamps.

I glanced around to see if anyone in the pub recognized her. She might have been someone’s kid.
That
wouldn’t go over well—rock and rollers coming in to kidnap their women and children.

But no one seemed to know her. If anything, they seemed to be making a point of
not
looking at her. Because of how she was dressed, I thought at the time. Or undressed. There were bits of stuff stuck to her feet. Dead leaves, I thought, but when I looked closer—and I wanted to look closer, believe me—it wasn’t leaves, but feathers.

That’s weird
, I thought.
Someone’s been in the henhouse
.

I assumed she was some local character—you know, local halfwit or drug casualty, a poor thing everyone recognized but never spoke about. Not to her face, anyway. That’s why I thought only a couple quid got tossed in the hat.

It wasn’t because of Julian’s set, I’ll tell you that. He was magnificent. Even the punters were impressed; I heard them talking once they found their voices. They’d never heard the like.
I’d
never heard the like, and I saw Jimi Hendrix at an afterhours once with Jeff Beck and Sandy Denny. That night, Julian fucking blew them out of the water.

Tom Haring

Unsurprisingly, Lesley was the one blew the whistle on that gig. Very early Monday morning I got a phone call from her. Way too early for an ordinary phone call, not that I received many of those from anyone in Windhollow. I thought they’d run out of money again.

But that wasn’t why she rang. She gave me the rundown, said this strange girl had shown up two nights earlier at a pub gig and disappeared with Julian into his room. The two of them hadn’t been seen since.

Let me tell you, I wasn’t happy about Windhollow busking at the pub. But what’s done is done. As for Julian taking up with some little teenybopper, who cares? I certainly didn’t.

“Well, I just thought you should know,” said Lesley. I could hear her pouring something into a glass; she was hitting it pretty hard back then. “I haven’t seen him since Saturday night. Her either.”

“It doesn’t sound like we need to call Scotland Yard, Les. He’s needed a good lay since Arianna died. Go easy on him.”

I’d had no idea Lesley and Julian had been sleeping together, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so blunt. By the long silence that followed, I realized they must have been involved.
Fuck
, I thought,
now Les will fall to pieces
.

She didn’t, though. “My room’s next to theirs and I haven’t heard a peep,” she said. “They could be lying dead in there for all we know. That girl—I think she’s unstable.”

Now I did start to get anxious. Also angry. There’d been rumors of Julian and drugs but I’d tried to ignore them. This sounded like it might be something more serious, like maybe the girl had brought something with her—heroin or cocaine. Hard drugs.

“For Christ’s sakes, Les, why are you ringing me in London? Get Jonno and Ashton to break the door down! Or ring the police. No, wait—”

All I needed was some kind of Redlands drug scandal with musicians and a naked girl. Or an OD.

Or—and I feel guilty even saying this—something worse. Because Julian was the one who’d always struck me as unstable. Not dangerous, but tightly corked, the way upper-middle-class English guys could be.

Arianna’s suicide flashed before me. We only had Julian’s word that she had jumped to her death. There’d been an inquest, but no investigation. Julian’s father was well-placed and had some connections, and the whole tragic event had been dispensed with very quickly.

It hadn’t crossed my mind before, and god forgive me for saying it now. But at that moment I thought that perhaps Julian had killed Arianna. And now he’d killed this second girl.

“No, don’t do anything with the police,” I quickly told Lesley. “I’m coming up there, I’ll be as fast as I can. Just hold tight.”

I don’t know what I imagined I might do if it turned out that Julian really had killed someone. Spirit Les out of the country, at least. She was so young and an American to boot. I could just see the headlines: Innocent Yank seduced by decadent rockers, dead teenager in the room next door …

Of course, in the long term, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.

Lesley

I got off the phone with Tom and I was shaking. Booze was part of it—I needed a couple drinks before I got up the nerve to call him, especially that early on a Monday morning.

Still, it was more than drink made me shake. I
was
jealous, but I was even more frightened. There was something deeply unsettling about that girl. The way she looked and appeared out of nowhere; the way Julian reacted when he first saw her.

But also the way she stuck in my mind—like a song you can’t get out of your head. An earworm. She was like a brainworm. No matter how hard I tried not to think about her, I kept seeing that little white face and hair and those spooky eyes.

That’s what creeped me out the most—her eyes were so pale you couldn’t see what color they were. Not blue and not green, though you’d see flickers of those. Not grey, either. They were like water—they took on whatever color was around them. She’d flick her tongue out to lick her lips over and over, little bit of a tongue like a cat’s. Or a snake’s. There was something wrong about her, something horrible.

I was afraid to go into Julian’s room by myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake up anyone else. It was only six A.M.; they’d be furious.

And what was I going to say? “I’m worried because Julian’s been in there with that girl since Saturday night.” They’d just laugh at me.

So, I went alone. For a long time I stood in front of the door, listening. It was a very still morning, not a breath of wind. Sun shining, but I didn’t hear a bird outside and that seemed odd, too. You’d always hear birds at first light; they’d make such a racket you couldn’t fall back asleep. But that morning, nothing.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Ten minutes at least. Maybe longer. I was thinking maybe I’d go back for another splash of vodka, when I heard a noise from inside Julian’s room. Something soft struck the wall, just once. Not like someone knocking, more like something had been thrown. A kind of muffled sound, like whatever it was had been wrapped in cloth or newspaper.

I held my breath and listened for voices or someone moving around inside, but everything had gone silent. I was starting to think maybe I’d imagined it, when the sound came again, much louder this time.

Whatever it was had been thrown against the door in front of me. I jumped backward, and heard it again.

Whump. Whump. Whump
.

After a minute, the sound stopped. I crept back to the door, and it started up again. Now the noise came from the other end of the room, by the window. I pressed my ear against the door and listened.

“Julian?” I whispered. Then louder, “Julian?”

I took a deep breath, put my hand on the knob, cracked the door open and peered inside. I saw nothing but the usual mess—clothes and books on the floor.

“Julian?”

No answer. I went inside, the door closing behind me.

The room was empty; the bed was empty. I can’t tell you what would have been worse, to see Julian dead or to see him in bed with that girl. But there was no one at all.

I stepped over a pile of books and saw Julian’s guitar leaning against the bed, as though he’d been playing it. The clothes he’d been wearing at the pub were on the floor. So was Jonno’s blue cape. The window was cracked open two or three inches. Everything was utterly still. The bed sheets were tossed around—it was obvious no one could be hiding there, but still I pulled back the coverlet.

Immediately I wished I hadn’t. There was blood on the bottom sheet—not much, just a few large drops, dried now. I yanked the coverlet back. I looked under the pillows—don’t ask me what I was looking for. I even rested my hand on the mattress, testing to see if it was warm.

Of course it wasn’t. Finally, I turned to look at the wall.

At first I thought Julian had scribbled there. It was covered in little dark jots and blots, like musical notes. The walls in our bedrooms were white plaster, and Will liked to write on his: ideas for songs, phone numbers, girl’s names.

But these marks weren’t ink or pencil. They were tiny dots of fresh blood, speckled across the plaster like someone had flicked a paintbrush at it.