Last Days, page 13
‘The luxurious furnishings, the queenly fittings, are long gone. The floor, as you can see, is now bare cement, stained in places by what looks like oil and some water damage.’
In the gloom, he quickly recorded the solitary artefact of her occupation in a close-up, and ad-libbed some narration. ‘I mean, it’s amazing, to find this. Sister Katherine’s bathtub is still here after forty years. Makes you wonder why no one has taken it.’
None of the terrible figures he had seen in the barn were present on the grimy plaster of the fermette’s walls, which made him giddy with relief. But again there was an acute and incongruous stillness.
‘It’s really strange, but in here, there is an atmosphere. Again, just like in the temple. Pregnant. An anticipation almost. It’s like the very moment before the arrival of someone, or something. An event perhaps suspended in a fixed state within the space in which I am standing. When we first arrived here, Brother Gabriel reported feeling something similar. He has since decided to leave the shoot. He’s very upset with coming back here. Dan the cameraman is with him. So I am continuing solo from this point.’
Kyle found the right page of his script and dropped his voice to a softer tone as he read into the mic; he was becoming breathless with excitement at the find. ‘This is a significant place in the history of the cult. In this building, perhaps even inside this very room, Sister Katherine transcribed The Book of One Hundred Chapters: the theological text recited to her by what she called the presences, and Holy Spirits. It’s a thin, almost unreadable book, but it was mandatory for the adepts to quote from it upon command. And this is the very space in which she administered the highest and most personal theological instruction to the brothers of the cross, The Seven. Five of whom tried to wrest control from her at this farm. During the resulting schism that followed the failed coup of 1972, this is also the very building where The Temple of the Last Days was born: the version of the cult that destroyed itself in Arizona. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it was the actual place where Sister Katherine was completely accepted by her last few loyal followers as ‘a living divinity’.
‘She and the two remaining members of The Seven, Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona, were the nucleus from which the diaspora to the new American Temple was launched in 1972, when Sister Katherine declared to what remained of her blessed elect: “Take up the cross and follow me”. Words that were to become notorious in the Sonora desert.’
He would have to come back down for the sound equipment, but took the camera off the tripod and put it on his shoulder, and gingerly tested each stair before rising to the next one. The old steps creaked, even made snapping sounds, but instinct assured him they were firm enough for a careful footfall and an average weight near the sides. He filmed as he moved upstairs. It would look horrible without the Steadicam rig on the second camera that was with Dan, but at least he’d capture something before coming back down for the tripod and sound equipment to get better footage.
Like the ground floor, the second storey was one great room with a ceiling supported by stout timber beams. Little light made it through the one grimy windowpane, but enough to show him the water that had seeped down from the roof and left the plaster and paint in a terrible condition. But even in the gloom, Kyle still gaped in disbelief at what he saw, because Sister Katherine’s bed remained in the upstairs room. How was it that the locals did not disassemble and cart away such a colossal bed, let alone the bath? Great purple curtains, now rotting and sodden with damp, swept from the canopy and suggested the original magnificence of the four-poster.
He’d have to go and find Dan. Where the hell was he? He wanted the fermette shot in its own light, and then again with one of their ensembles of lights. He wasn’t half the cameraman Dan was and this was far too good to mess up. Kyle went back down for the sound equipment and tripod. Quickly checked the levels and then set up as best he could with the boom pole lodged between two soft floorboards for the sound.
‘It’s as if this great bed, still remaining in the middle of her boudoir, attests wholly to the grandeur of an Empress. The Empress she probably always believed herself to be, before she became a Goddess.’
Kyle shot the great fireplace, its brickwork black. ‘She must have been quite comfortable in here. The fireplace would have roared at the foot of her bed on those cold winter nights, while the children shivered with the dogs up in that wooden agricultural structure built for livestock.’
When he came around the foot of the bedframe, his boots scuffed through rotten tendrils of a once luxurious rug, to film the other half of the room. Below the small window, set deep in its stone casement, something caught his eye. The answer to his earlier query as to why the locals had not made off with the bed. Because no one sane would have lingered long in a room with that charred upon the wall.
The very moment he glimpsed it, he quickly backed away. The thick mattress, still wrapped in the wretched bedding, indented the back of his knees and made him sit down upon the wet bedclothes and whatever it was that oozed outwards on either side of his sodden buttocks.
He leaped to his feet. Swatted the back of his jeans. Turned and noticed the head of the bed in greater detail; saw the remnants of one long dark pillow, with vestiges of pale tassels at either end. If he wasn’t mistaken, the middle of the roll was indented, as if with the recent memory of a head at rest upon it. And when the bedclothes moved around the hollow his backside had made in the mattress, his breath sealed itself inside his chest and his teeth clamped down on the shriek that gathered in his throat.
He gripped the sodden bedspread, perhaps once satin or velvet, but mostly just matter now. And tore it upwards to see what writhed beneath.
There was nothing in Levine’s true-crime classic, nor in Susan White’s fretful eulogies or Gabriel’s nervous testimony to prepare him for the sight beneath the rotten eiderdown. As the ancient bedding rose in his fist, then came apart as lumps of mulch, he looked into the hole he had made and saw a murk of black and yellow flesh, twisting wetly in its own brine.
‘Oh God.’
Kyle aimed the camera at it. ‘This is incredible. I can’t believe I am seeing this. There’s . . . snakes . . . I think . . . a terrible smell too.’ But before he could embellish his narration, the light in the room faded like his sight dimmed, or a great curtain had fallen over the solitary window. In a panic, he looked to where the light had been, but only received a strong impression of the thin scorched figure beneath the stone casement.
A sudden stench of decay filled the room in one tremendous gust. And into his mind grew an image, so clear, so crisp, of a flock of lifeless birds, their dusty wings at rest on dry bodies, before a lake of fetid water, greened with flotsam. Upon the shore an indistinct figure wrapped in tatty cloth raised its face to see him.
Kyle mewled like a lost and frightened child. Crouched down, dropped the camera onto the bed. Clutched at his eyes to rub away the vision of the figure and the terrible water: superimposed by that bony upright shape burned into the wall.
Huddled into himself, he turned his body away from the window. Needed to escape the hallucination, the things in the bed, everything . . . couldn’t bring himself to even look over his shoulder again. Closed his eyes to see if the vision had gone. It had. He was dizzy, disoriented by the smell, the bed . . .
A door slammed shut. Downstairs. The one he came through.
‘Christ almighty. Dan! That you?’
There was no answer. He thought of the thin figure, running through the dark of the Clarendon Road house.
‘Dan!’ Then quieter, his tone pleading, ‘Dan? Mate?’
And Kyle remained bent over, a man reduced to a thing all shaky with moist unblinking eyes that peered across the stinking bed, at the doorway. That opened to the stairs. That descended to the ground floor. A space now indistinct at dusk; its door shut against the dying light. Shut behind someone that had come inside.
Below him in the building, he heard a sound not dissimilar to the one outside the rooms of Sister Katherine’s empty penthouse in London: the noise of ungainly feet. A thud and shuffle amongst the detritus, in the pattern unsteady legs make as a search commences through the dark. A search for something, or someone.
When Kyle came out of Sister Katherine’s fermette, his mouth was a tight crease in a wide-eyed and bloodless face. He could barely feel his legs, let alone the camera and equipment he clutched with shaking hands.
Paralysed with fear, he had waited for twenty minutes after the noises of intrusion had abruptly stopped downstairs. But the sudden silence left an image in his mind, of a small thin figure stood at the foot of the staircase, that looked up and waited for him to come down.
Heartbeat paused, he eventually emerged from the room and began his descent from the bed chamber, deciding that one more moment in the horrid room beside the reeking bed, that still twitched with the movements of its small burrowing occupants, was still less preferable to a confrontation with a visitor in the shadows below.
But he was alone in the fermette. Inexplicably, it seemed he had been the only occupant all along. Though he was certain someone had come in. He’d heard footsteps, hadn’t he? The mic might have picked them up too, in between his whimpers. He would check later. Maybe the front door had been closed by a wind of which there was now no trace.
He stumbled back through the long grass to the farm buildings. There was still no sign of Dan or Gabriel. He called out for them, albeit weakly. When he received no reply, he located the remainder of their equipment bags outside the temple’s empty doorway, that he could not even bear to glance inside now, before dragging the bags to the edge of the courtyard. Talking to himself in a hurried whisper, with the first tranche of their gear, he set off across the meadow towards the copse of trees.
Only once he was back amongst the bracken and spindly boughs of the copse with the second load of equipment did he see a tall distant figure, beneath a darkening sky, stood upright with its head down. It approached from the direction of the road they had parked upon.
And, for a while, too frightened to move or breathe, Kyle remained rigid. Could do nothing but stare, trapped between the horrid farm and the barely moving figure. He thought he might scream. Until he realized the figure in the meadow was Dan. But something wasn’t right. Because Dan was walking so slowly he was hardly moving. His face never rose from his feet as if he were studying the ground intently.
‘Dan! Dan!’
The distant shape of his friend looked up. Stopped moving. And what he shouted to Kyle slowed the blood cold and thick inside his veins. ‘Don’t move! Stay there! Traps!’ It sounded like Dan was crying, or trying not to. ‘Gabriel stepped in a fucking trap!’
NINE
CAEN, NORMANDY. 16 JUNE 2011. 2 A.M.
When Kyle came out of the bathroom with a towel tied around his waist, one half of the rum in the Sailor Jerry bottle was gone. Wrapped in the other bath sheet, Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, a coffee cup by his huge knee. He was playing back Kyle’s footage in the temple barn. Kyle heard his own tiny voice rise from the laptop speakers: ‘Not sure what I am seeing here. But it’s inside the Gathering’s temple. On the wall, here. What looks like a figure . . .’
In one corner of the room a plastic supermarket bag bulged with bloodstained clothes. Like the bag was a revenant nothing dared go near, it sagged alone on the only bit of floor space not littered with equipment and the dross that spilled from their rucksacks.
Kyle sat on the foot of the bed, cupped his cheeks in his hands. ‘Jesus.’
‘Bit shaky, mate. Dark too.’
‘You surprised?’
‘We can use some of it.’
Kyle knew Dan only inspected the footage to keep his mind preoccupied with technical matters, to evade scrutiny of what ranked as the worst day of their lives. Since the return to the hotel in Caen, they had not been able to speak to each other, let alone discuss what they’d endured for the previous five hours.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ Kyle said. ‘I didn’t hear you. Back there. At the farm. If I had, I would have come straight away. You must have been with him for ages.’
‘Over an hour. Trying to get it off his leg. Shouted myself hoarse. He could have bled to death.’
When Kyle reached Dan in the meadow, the first thing he noticed about his friend were his arms; they were wet to the elbow. It looked like he had been pressing grapes.
Dan sat back from the camera, rubbed his eyes. ‘Couldn’t get it apart. Off his leg. I still feel sick, mate. It was the sound more than anything. The sound of the trap closing on his leg made me feel sick. Right to the tips of my fingers. I can’t get the sound out of my head.’
Kyle nodded. The events of the night were held in a series of haphazardly edited images that jolted him, then turned his stomach, each time his recalcitrant memory replayed fragments. The rum, half of a pizza, the hot shower, the basic comfort of their hotel room, had all been unable to penetrate through his shock for more than a few minutes.
Kyle stared between his bare feet. Saw again his ungainly movements through the field towards Dan; the prod of the stick at the hidden meadow floor; the clench of terror in his stomach at the certainty of more traps still hidden in the long grass; Dan’s wild white face in the silent twilight; his friend’s eyes tearing up as he drew closer, and he’d never seen Dan cry before; Dan’s dark hands; the horizon a thin line of fire; the distant bray of a goat they never saw.
And then the small huddled figure of Gabriel, buried in the long grass; the terrible wetness of the black trousers about his thin leg; the horrible rattle of the iron trap in the grass; raising the frail body from the earth, the face so white, the tiny mouth flecked with spittle, the keening sound that came out of him like he was a dying animal. They never found his glasses. All followed by the uprooting of the iron stake and chain attached to the trap, and the lifting of that broken-doll body over the gate, where Gabriel was sick onto the arm Kyle had fixed under the little man’s hot armpit. Then Gabriel fainted, and they believed he had died. There was the throwing of the bags that Kyle had dragged to the point of total exhaustion through the meadow, into the boot of the minivan; Dan being sick too, over the passenger-side door; them getting lost in the lanes around the farm; Gabriel waking and his cries of pain on the back seat at every bump in the road they traversed; the trap and the smashed shin bone covered in Dan’s coat. There was the not knowing about hospitals, or doctors; the crushing, confounding ignorance of first aid, of what to do or where to go; the banging on the doors of the grey village buildings; the failure to communicate with the man who came to the only door that opened in that desolate cluster of miserable houses, while Dan sat in the road, silent; the whispers in French between the bald man and Gabriel, who had begun to shiver on the back seat, and whose face went the grey of the landscape’s chalky stone. Then came the fetching of tools, and the unshackling of those rusted iron scythes from the little leg; the flopping of the small foot in the tatty sports shoe, black with old blood.
‘Ambulance?’
‘Non.’
‘Why?’
‘Non.’
The hopeless asking for directions, the cries of Gabriel drowning them out; their following of the rusted Citroën to the hospital, driven by the bald Frenchman who spoke no English; the eternity of the drive under a dark sky, and then just more of it, on and on, under a black sky. Was the journey ever going to end? Where was he taking them?
But then there was the hospital with its green and yellow lights and he and Dan began the chant of panic-talk and gibberish, fired at little Gabriel. ‘Hospital. Hold on, mate. Hospital, mate. Nearly there. You’re gonna be fine. Here we go.’
Kyle sighed, cradled his ribs. Poured himself a generous measure of Sailor Jerry and gulped at it like it was water. Gasped at the after-burn as the taste of Christmas and the Caribbean filled his body with warmth. ‘Finish the pizza, Dan.’
‘Can’t face it.’ Dan closed his eyes, groaned. ‘I couldn’t do anything. Didn’t know whether to move him to the car. But you had the keys. And . . . I thought . . . I was convinced there were traps, everywhere, all around us. I couldn’t move. Just kept calling for you, mate.’
‘I never heard a word. How was that possible? I should have heard you.’
At the hospital there had been a long heated exchange between the doctor and the Frenchman from the village. Kyle and Dan had no French. They had nothing but a minivan full of film equipment and blood.
He remembered his relief at hearing that Gabriel would live: the news delivered in nonchalant broken English from a black nurse at the hospital.
‘But ze leg. Gone. From . . .’ A doctor had then indicated a cutting motion at his own knee. ‘Amputation.’
What will happen to that tiny foot in the white running shoe, Kyle had thought in his shock, his horror, his cold stupefaction at the news. And then he and Dan had waited in the hospital for another three hours, still bloodied, faint with hunger and shock.
Pacing the tarmac, insensible, drifting through rage and shock and exhaustion, Kyle had then called Max from the car park. And Max had been unable to react for a long while to the information Kyle spat into the phone about ‘the bloody traps you had us walk through!’
Eventually, in a faint tired voice, Max had said, ‘The path. I told you to stay on the path.’
‘There was no path, you fuckwit!’
‘Now look, I’ve never been there. How would I know?’
‘Why? Why have you never been there?’
‘Will he live?’
‘Yes, but he’s lost that leg. Lost it! Fucking amputated from the knee.’
‘Oh, dear God, no.’
‘Dear God, yes.’
‘Insurance. You are all insured.’
