December (2 page)

      
'Stop it!' Moira had marched between them and stamped her foot.
'Tom, you're taking this far too seriously. And Russell, you're not taking
us
seriously enough. Nobody's asking you
to believe in the paranormal, just don't be so damn superior and contemptuous
of people who do, OK?'

      
Oh God, Dave thought, I love her.

      
Everybody had gone quiet. 'Yeah, well, that's all I've got to
say,' Moira said. She came and stood by Dave. He felt her warm breath on his
ear, essence of heathery moors sloping down to long white beaches and a grey, grey
sea, and he thought he was going to pass out with the longing.

      
'Come on then.' Snapping out of it, slapping his thighs with
both hands. 'Let's get rid of the buggers.' Dave padded around the studio,
blowing out the remaining candles, collecting them up. Afterwards his hands
felt like he was wearing slimy rubber gloves. Yuk, horrible! He piled the
candles into a corner, feeling slightly sick.

      
Someone put on the electric lights, and Russell Hornby took
Tom into another corner and talked placatingly at him until, at last, the big
guy shambled to his feet, his brass-studded guitar strap still over his
shoulder like the bridle on a shire horse.

      
'Right, then. Four hours.' Tom jabbed a big, hard finger at
Russell. 'And then I'm out of here, no arguments.' Tom was the only one of them
staying in a hotel, to be with his wife.

      
He stared balefully at the rest of them before stumping off to
the payphone in the passage. They heard him bawling down the phone, telling the
long-suffering Deborah when to pick him up. 'Yeah, main gate, say 'bout half
four, quarter to five ... Yeah, yeah ... Too right.'

      
'Guy's got no consideration whatsoever,' Moira said. 'Eight
months gone, Jesus, she needs all the sleep she can get. I mean, how's he know
what the roads are gonna be like by then?'
      
Dave was wishing
he
was driving back to a hotel ten miles
away. There to lie with Moira, warm and naked in his arms and smelling of
heather and salt-spray and ...

      
He stifled a moan. It was only these little Moira fantasies
that kept him sane. He watched her pick up her guitar, one of the new Ovations with
a curving fibreglass body. She began to sing softly.

      
... the doors are all
barred, the candles are smothered ...

      
Her tune, his lyric. He loved watching her soft lips shape his
words, eyes downcast over the guitar, the black hair swaying like velvet
curtains drawn across an open window.

      
... and nobody wants to
hear Aelwyn ...

      
Moira's lips had touched his own just once, in greeting - Hi,
Dave, mmmph - but a man could hope.

      
When Tom slouched back into the studio and grumpily shouldered
his guitar, they all wandered into their booths and pushed on with it, prisoners
of the small print on their contract.

... this album shall be recorded exclusively and
entirely at the Abbey Studios, North Gwent, between midnight and dawn.

      
The great experiment initiated and financed by Max Goff,
founder and managing director of Epidemic Independent Records UK Ltd and student
of the Unexplained, the man who maintained that
: Music is the only art form that's also a spiritual force.

      
Outside, the wind might have been moaning a little, although you
wouldn't know it in the sealed capsule of the studio, but it was really quite a
mild night. For December.

But it was cold out on the hills, and there was
snow, and he had no cloak; he could feel neither his fingers nor his toes in
his worn-out boots, and the sweat froze on his face as he ran towards the
distant light, a candle in a window slit.

      
At
least the killing wind was with him. The wind blew at his back and speeded his footsteps,
though he stumbled many times and knew his hands and face had been opened and
the blood frozen in the wounds.

      
His
ears always straining for the sound of other footsteps on the icy track, the
clamour of men and horses ... knowing the wind which speeded his flight would
also speed their pursuit, these murdering, damned ewe-fuckers ...

Final track, side-one, live
take: 'The Ballad of Aelwyn Breadwinner.' In which, absorbing the subtle
emanations, we retell the tragic tale of the famous medieval Celtic martyr in
the very place where he was so brutally cut down by Norman soldiers in the year
1175.

      
Let's get this over.

      
In his personal booth, hugging his Martin guitar, eyes closed,
Dave was Aelwyn. But Aelwyn was alone, while Dave could hear Simon on safe,
plodding bass, Tom's low, undulating guitar. And there was Moira's voice in his
cans, soft and low and dark as Guinness. He could feel the closeness of her,
closer than sex; she was in his head, she was with him on the frozen hills, as
he ran from the soldiers and mercenaries, wondering if he would even feel it as
they cut him down with their blades of ice. The cold from the song, the
all-shrouding inevitability of imminent death, the end of everything, was
around him in the booth, his bare arms tingling as he played.

When the cans went funny, Moira
was playing soft, gliding, rhythm guitar and singing counterpoint - an ethereal
voice, distant on the winter wind. The voice from the holy mountain guiding
Aelwyn to safety.

      
Aelwyn had been very tired, tramping through the snow towards the
Abbey. Had known they were coming for him, but simply hadn't the strength to
run any more. But he also knew that when he reached the Abbey he'd be OK. Even
these bastards were not going to smash their way into the house of God,
especially not
this
house of God,
founded upon the site of a famous Holy Vision.

      
This was where the cans went funny. Where other voices came
in, as though, as sometimes happened, a radio signal had got into the system.

      
She couldn't hear what the voices were saying. She carried on
playing and singing but looked out of the glass panel in the partition around the
booth. Nobody came out on to the studio floor waving his hands. In the booth
opposite, Dave played on. Maybe - she didn't understand too much technical
stuff - Russell and Barney, the engineer, were not picking up the extraneous
voices on their tape.
      
So Moira played on, too.

      
The band had rehearsed the song several times today. She
figured she was pretty much immune to the ending by now, but she'd still been
feeling tension on Dave's behalf. Dave was not what you'd call a great singer
but he sure could get himself into a role. For now, for the duration of this
song, Dave was Aelwyn and Aelwyn was Dave, and the last sound she'd heard
before the voices intruded was his breath coming harder, and she'd felt the
fatigue and the creeping sense of cold despair as Aelwyn realized he wasn't
going to make it.

      
But surely ... he
could
have
made it.

      
This strange thought came to Moira just as the lights dimmed outside
the booth.

      
She leaned forward on her stool, still playing, and peered out
through the glass. All was indistinct: rumbling shadows, the snaking flex and rubber
leads were like roots and vines, the amplifier stacks like black rocks. As she
watched there were three small explosions in the sky, lightbulbs blowing
silently in the ceiling, like the dying of distant worlds.

      
Under her fingers, the guitar strings felt cold and sharp like
the edges of blades. As the bulbs went out, several small, blue-white spearpoint
flames flared in the middle distance.

      
This would be the corner where Dave had laid the candles, some
still upright in trays and holders. All of them snuffed.

      
All of them
snuffed
.

      
Oh
no
...

II

Electric Grief

He saw
...

      
... a fortress: massive, dark, forbidding, ungiving - a
Bastille
of a place. It rose in billows,
a towering mushroom of smoke, lighted windows appearing, and peaks and gables forming
out of the smog. Overpowering. Dizzying. And warped, like through a fisheye lens.
Like it was swaying before it toppled on to him. Or somebody.

      
He heard a roaring, shot through with vivid screams, like
thunderclouds speared by lightning forks.
      
And more.

Through the glass side of
his booth, he'd seen the dead candles flickering, triumphant.

      
Heard the voices hissing,

      
deathoak

      
Still hearing, from somewhere, Moira's voice against the
elements, but the words were inaudible, the only words he could make out were
death oak
suspended in the tight studio
acoustic, and he was sure that if he looked hard enough, he would see the words
light up, blinking in the smoky space Like neon, like the cold fingernails of
fire at the tips of the candles.

      
And he was so cold.

      
And then an explosion of lights and he was looking up at the
fortress. Monster of a building. Bit like one of those French whatsits,
chateaux
. But too big to be an original
and not so delicate. Overwhelming. Forbidding - kind of Victorian Gothic.

      
And then blackness. Deep, throbbing blackness.
      
And someone saying,
      
this
guy is dying.

Outside now, clinging to the
tree, Dave vaguely remembers unslinging the Martin, letting it fall, bolting
out of his booth.

      
Still hearing it,
death
oak
, as he rushed at the rear door, seeing Russell and his engineer,
Barney, on their feet in the control room, behind the glass panel, mouths
moving, no sound. Passing the booth containing Tom, hunched, red-faced, doubled
up over the Telecaster, as if his appendix was bursting or something, the
guitar bansheeing from the amp.

      
Plunging through the rear door into the stone passage, his
legs weak and cold, like poor bloody Aelwyn's. Dashing across the lawn towards
the trees, for shelter.

      
Sanctuary.

      
Realizing now how perishing cold he is, slumped under the
dripping tree in his T-shirt, canvas shoes soaked through. But not cold like
Aelwyn and not cold like ... who?

      
Now, out here on the edge of the wood, comes another voice, the
only voice he ever wants to hear.

      
'Tell me about it. Davey, for God's sake ...'

      
He mumbles, 'I love vou.'

      
'Davey...!'

      
He opens his eyes, sees concern furrowing her forehead. She's
edged with gold from the lights in the house, and he's starting to cry, just
wanting to hold her and lose himself in the dark wildwood of her hair. Drunk
with relief, he's burbling through the tears, 'Oh God, I love you, Moira, I
really love you.'

      
'Davey, listen, something awful bad's going down.'

      
'Can we go away together? I really do love you, Moira. Can we ...?'

      
'Sure. Oh, Davey, please, you have to tell me what you saw.'
      
'If I tell you, can we go away?'

      
'Oh Jesus, Davey,' Moira says ruefully. 'I think we'll all be going
away soon.'

Ten minutes later, she's
saying, 'Where? Where was this?'

      
'I couldn't tell you. I'm sorry. How long have I been out here?'

      
'An hour. Maybe more. We couldny find you. Davey, think yourself
back. Come on now.'

      
Moira is standing on the edge of the lawn, shivering in her
stupid black velvet frock, the kind of frock fortune tellers wear at the
village fete. The session broken up into chaos and recriminations, Russell
throwing up his hands, Lee hurling his drumsticks at the wall. Not everybody
wanting even to look for Dave.

      
Dave says, 'What about you?'

      
'I ... I can't remember, Davey,' Moira lies. 'Like a bad dream
after you wake up. and, like, all you recall is the atmosphere.'