December (81 page)

      
Which left Tom wearing an aura of flames like St Elmo's fire on
the mast of a sailing ship. And this was the last bright aura Dave ever saw.
After that, all black.

      
He looks up at the tree. Ash? Beech? Horse-chestnut? Sycamore?

      
They've come back to the Abbey, the four of them, with their
eyes open and their senses attuned and all that crap. They've come back because
something from the Abbey has remained, like a virus, inside each of them.
Because every time Dave sees a polluted black haze around somebody's rinsed coiffure
or silky, shampooed tresses, he thinks,
This
is what the
Abbey left.

      
But right now only one sullied aura concerns him.
      
Go
over it again. Ask the question.

      
This is the eighth day of the month of December on a seventh
year. He remembers Prof's news cuttings about Soup Kitchen in 1987. Simon has told
him about this girl in the village and her accident in '73.

      
Now Dave has worked out something probably no one else knows.
For what it's worth.

 
Before walking out here he went into the
little TMM admin office next to Lee Gibson's luxury quarters. The woman in charge,
Michelle, was not there (Lee likes to relax before a session) but her
calculator was.

      
On the calculator, Dave brought up the figure 1994.

      
From it he subtracted 1175.

      
This gave him 819.

      
He stood looking down at this figure for a long time. It was an
awkward-looking number, which was good. Nineteen itself was a number you
couldn't do a thing with - there was a name for the ones you couldn't divide by
any other number without getting a bunch of digits on the wrong side of the
decimal point; 819 looked like it ought to be one of them.
      
What the hell. Just to reassure
himself, because all the odds were against it anyway, Dave took a deep breath
and divided 819 by seven.
      
No.

      
It came to 117.

      
Exactly. No decimal point.

      
No!

      
Dave felt nearly sick and did the calculation again.

It doesn't mean anything,
he tells himself now. It doesn't mean that the seven-year cycle of death began
with Aelwyn in 1175, or that Aelwyn was even part of it. It certainly doesn't
mean that at least 117 people have died at the Abbey. It's a numerical coincidence.
      
Isn't it.

      
And it can't
possibly
mean that someone is destined to die here tonight.
      
Can it.

      
Even if one of those here is someone whose lustrous black hair
- now with its single vein of white - has been seen on two separate occasions,
by Liverpool's very own Angel of Death, to be softly framed by the hideous
bonnet.

      
A night wind is drifting in from the Black Mountains in the west.
It fumbles irritably among the bushes on the edge of the wood.

      
The wind is saying.
Don't
piss about, ask the question?

      
There are two lights high up in the tower, one just below the other.
Simon's room. Moira's room.

      
The lowest of the two lights goes out.

      
In his head, Dave asks the question.

      
Behind the question is the knowledge that, for every single person
he has told about the bonnet since the Black Album's session, it has been too
late.

      
Dave asks the question aloud.

      
'Should I tell her?'

      
Nothing comes to him. After nothing has continued to come to
him for a couple of minutes, he tries to manufacture a reply from his dead
buddy, John Lennon.

      
How the fuck should I
know? What's it to me?

      
That the best you can come up with?

      
Is that the best you can
come up with?

      
Maybe this is the one night Lennon is incommunicado. Maybe he
goes to Strawberry Fields in Central Park to watch the annual influx of
pilgrims, listen to the tuneless chorus of 'Give Peace a Chance'.

      
Dave feels frightened and very, very depressed. He doesn't know
where to turn. He flashes his lamp up into the leafless branches of the tree
which gave him sanctuary precisely fourteen years ago tonight.
      
The glistening smoothness of the
wood tells him at once what kind of tree it is and what's different about it.

      
It's an elm tree, and it's dead now.

They sit clustered like
witches around the small vicarage hearth, a built-up coal fire pumping big
yellow flames under the brass cowl, and Meryl asks, 'Do you believe in the
power of the Spirit?'

      
'I don't really know what you mean.' Isabel is restless, irritable.
Never has she felt so helpless. 'If you've got the power, I've got the spirit,'
she adds morosely.

      
The little girl, Vanessa, is next to Isabel on the sofa. They must
look like three of the strangest witches of all time.

      
'Look into the fire,' Meryl says. She has switched off the light.
Unearthly, she looks, with that burnished gleam to her long face. Woman's
bloody daft. 'Look at the power there. We created it and we're containing it.
It could burn this place down and us with it, but we're
using
it to warm us."

      
'And how's that supposed to help Simon?'

      
Isabel has telephoned to the Abbey, twice - oh yes, they have
a phone number again - using her most authoritative, clipped, accountant's
voice. A sugary female tells her that Mr St John is in session in the studio
all day and cannot be disturbed.

      
But it's urgent.

      
She's sorry; she has her instructions.

      
They could, of course, go along there and demand to be let in.
An old man, a cripple, a mentally handicapped kid and a loony.
      
They could storm the gates.

      
Oh yes, there are gates now. The track terminates at big metal
gates. Eddie has been and rattled them, demanding his rights of access to an
ancient monument.

      
Sorry, a big, leathered man from a security firm told him. Closed
for structural repairs. Eddie stumping off, mumbling about complaining to his
MP.

      
There is another way, of course, he's told them. But it's a narrow
little path, not much more than a sheep track. And totally impossible, Eddie is
afraid, for a wheelchair. Especially as, with the security arrangements, they
would have to go at night.
Oh yes
,
Meryl said, and Isabel glowered.

      
'There's so much power around us.' Now Meryl clasps her hands
together, shaking them like a cocktail. 'If only we knew how to use it. This
was a very blessed landscape once, with the Skirrid and all the churches built
on holy soil. Once upon a time, we'd have known how to direct it.'

      
Isabel is unimpressed. 'Prefer a flame-thrower, I would.'

      
Meryl smiles at her. 'I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I
can tell how you feel about Simon.'

      
'Unfortunately,' Isabel says, 'it's only from the waist up. And
he doesn't like women anyway.'

      
'I wouldn't have said that.'

      
'What would you know?'

      
'Perhaps a bit more about men than you, my dear.'

      
There was no answer to that. She looks as if she knows a
lot
more about men than Isabel.

      
'Is it always like this,' Meryl asks, 'in December of the seventh
year? A tension in the air in this village?'

      
'Not so's you'd notice. I'm trying to remember what it was like
in '87. I don't remember anything happening then, that's the problem.' She
sighs. 'What if all this is nonsense and we are all overreacting?'

      
'It's very far from nonsense. And you know it. And this child
knows it.'

      
Vanessa has her hands folded on the lap. She looks up, blinking
behind her enormous glasses.

      
'Where's the soil?' she demands.

      
Isabel looks blank. 'The soil?'

      
'It's in the shed,' Meryl says. 'In a couple of plastic bin sacks.'
      
'What soil?'

      
'Vanessa and I bought a spade in Abergavenny and went up on
the Skirrid to collect some of the holy earth. You know ... where it was shaken
up by the earthquake on the first Good Friday.'

      
'Personally, no. You can't climb many mountains in a wheelchair.'

      
'It's not a mountain really. It's just a funny-shaped hill.
But strange.'

      
'Everything's strange to you, isn't it?' Isabel said disparagingly
'I bet you go to fortune-tellers and séances and stuff like that.'

      
Meryl stiffened. 'Certainly not.'

      
'I'm sorry,' Isabel said. 'Just a whingeing cripple, I am, and
a sour old maid. All I've ever done is sit in this chair and moan.'

      
'And build up the most lucrative business in the village, according
to Eddie,' said Meryl. 'Don't sell yourself short. You
have
got the spirit.'

      
'I don't even know what I want to do.'

      
'But you know what you want,' Meryl says. 'That's a start.'

A woman dying.

      
Waxen face,
dwindling
tendrils of mist from parted lips, eyelids fluttering as feeble as a moth in
winter.

      
Hunched over his mixing desk, lights low, Prof remembers this
as clearly as if he were hearing the music now. Not actually
hearing
the music again - he can't even
remember the basic melody - but seeing the images it conveyed.

      
He's thinking. Am I a bit psychic too, or was the music really
that
powerful?

      
Music he has to re-record tonight, and Prof is ... well, nervous
is not the word. He's seen and learned and experienced too much in the past
weeks or so. At the age of sixty-four, his mind has been blown apart.

      
And he's supposed to know how to piece it together again?
      
Far more sensible, Prof thinks, to
have a few drinks and let all these experiences and revelations sink into the
general mush.

      
Now
that's
a first -
first time that drink has seemed like the
sensible
option.

      
So far - last night, anyway - it's been quite a satisfying experience,
producing this album. That last piece of Simon's recorded out on the studio
floor, with the ambience of the stone very definitely captured, that was dynamite.
Will
be dynamite when Prof has mixed
it, with the bass and drums on. These tracks were supposed to have been
recorded today, but Simon hasn't shown his face in the studio all day, like
last night really took it out of him. Lee Gibson keeps sticking his head around
the door to see if he's wanted yet, getting increasingly pissed off, muttering
about temperamental half-assed wankers.

      
Lee isn't used to this, being kept waiting. Not for the first time,
Prof wonders how the hell they persuaded a heavy-earner like Lee to fly over
from the States, for
this.

      
He saw Steve Case briefly this afternoon over at the canteen. This
is as far as Steve comes, he won't set foot in the studio. 'A deal is a deal,
Prof. How's it going, am I allowed to ask?'

      
'Not bad,' Prof told him. 'Had a few false starts and, er, minor
setbacks, but it's shaping up OK. We're having a go at the number which should
give us half of side two.'

      
'Aelwyn.'

      
'Yeah. The heavy one. The one that fucks people up, Steve.'
      
'Do
I
look fucked up, Prof?'

      
'I can't believe you heard it. I can't believe you heard the same
music as me.'