Gethsemane Hall (9 page)

His family had roots as deep as Roseminster’s. The Domesday Book placed his ancestors here. When it had been decided that a church would rise in honour of St. Rose, the Grays had financed a large part of the original construction, and they had been involved in its growth and transformations all the way down the line to him, the terminus. Somewhere in the dusty, unvisited attic of his finances, he knew, there was an endowment that had made the scaffolding he saw possible. He was the church’s lifeblood, but he felt disconnected enough to be its cancer.
Where were You?
he thought, eyes on the cross, so small and remote
. I believed in You. I worked for You. I loved You. What did I do that needed punishment? What did my wife and daughter do? I sent them on an errand to facilitate Your work, so we could help the starving and the persecuted and the bereaved and others who, by Your great love, have been left screaming on the rack. For that, they should be smashed and burned? Is that more of Your love? It passeth all understanding, all right, it bloody well goddamn does.

The questions felt pointless, stones thrown in a hollow echo chamber. They were silly gestures, meaningless as a genuflection. The crucifix was an abstract widget on a mount. Gray tried to reach back to his anger and resentment at the funeral. There was nothing to grasp. Even his rage from the day before, when he had lain on the floor in the Old Chapel, seemed, if not ludicrous, misdirected.
Hello?
he thought
. Is there anybody there?

No answer. He was on the verge of thinking that there never had been, that he had devoted a good chunk of his life and unintentionally sacrificed his family to Hudson’s imaginary friend, but he hesitated. That wasn’t right, either. Gethsemane Hall was a rebuke to rationalism. He had been brought low last night. He was being propelled down a road that did not lead to Damascus.

He tried to open himself up to the church. He could remember when that was easy, though the memories were remote and unclear.
Last chance
, he thought.
If You’re there, help me.
He waited. The cold in his blood spread. He began to be afraid he might, after all, receive an answer. He stood up. There was nothing here. The place was empty. On his way out, he paused beside a table at the rear of the pews. He ran his eyes over the church literature and yellowing postcards. He flipped through the parish magazine, scanning White Elephant announcements, vague but spiritually unobjectionable editorials, calendars of church events, and Biblical crossword puzzles. He felt angry again. The rage had a bit more focus, now. He could identify a target. It wasn’t a deity who was, at best, AWOL. It was faith itself, the belief in the benevolence of an absence or worse. He was pissed at blindness. He felt an almost evangelical need to make people see.

He left the church, fit to shake its foundations.

They caught the train to Roseminster at Waterloo. The trip would take the best part of three hours, and they were barely out of London when Kristine Sturghill fell asleep. James Crawford knew other people who responded to train travel like infants in cars, lulled to unconsciousness by the rhythm and motion within minutes. He used to be one of those, but that was years ago, when the trains still rattled and clanked and there was a pronounced, constant
ka-chunk-ka-chunk, ka-chunk-ka-chunk
lullaby. Over the last couple of decades, the trains had become too silent, the beat surfacing only every so often. If he tried to close his eyes, he would listen too hard, on the edge until the next iteration.

He spent the time sorting notes, trying to organize his thoughts. He’d left instructions for the shipping of his equipment. He expected it to arrive at Roseminster in the morning. Not much left to do in the meantime, really. He had his investigation procedures down to a routine, and the only variables would be site-specific, adaptations mandated by the geography of the house. He wouldn’t know what those would be until he saw the location. He tried to find something productive to do, anyway. He was trying to keep his mind off the previous night.

No such luck. The screen of his laptop turned into a collection of blurry runes. He circled around the nightmare, trying to find solid ground on which to dismiss it. It wouldn’t let him. It hag-rode him, digging up questions that he had thought buried for good and all a long time ago. They were rotting, but still potent. He had lost his faith over thirty years ago. He’d been raised nominally C of E, his family going to Easter services and the occasional carol ceremony. His religion had been a thing of background noise, unquestioned because he’d never thought about it. He’d been confirmed because it was the done thing, an exercise in trivia memorization that he had found enjoyable for the pomp but no more meaningful than a good television show. Still, there had been a certain comfort to his belief. It was part of life’s solid bedrock. It would always be there. It didn’t occur to him that the foundations might crack.

A year after his confirmation, the seismic tremors began. The distant early warning signs were some puzzling over the nature of Hell, logical inconsistencies in the Bible stories as he knew them, and a vague awareness of pretzel-form rationalizations. The catalyst was religion’s great nemesis. From his first infatuation with dinosaurs at the age of four, he’d loved science, and he hadn’t imagined a conflict between it and his taken-for-granted faith until the earthquake came during his fourth form. He’d been researching a science project on black holes. He couldn’t even recall the name of the book he’d read. It was a general readership text, setting out an equation-free introduction to the subject. All very straightforward, except that in the first chapter, the author went off on a tangent, taking the concept of black holes as a jumping-off point to demonstrate the complete irrationality behind the mere concept of a deity. The questions he had asked on the rare occasions he had thought about God at all became fully formed doubts. Within a year, the doubts had become convictions.

By the time he started university, the nonsensicality of any form of spirituality was, to him, so transparently self-evident that he found any sort of belief that would not or could not subject itself to empirical testing to be frustrating, almost to the point of a personal affront. There had been a time, at the beginning of his twenties, when he thought that a sufficiently well-backed argument should be enough to purge people of their irrational tenets. When he looked back at that younger, activist self, he knew he’d been as naive as the ten-year-old believer. If anything, he’d been worse, possessed by the same fervour as the most dogmatic born-again Christian. He liked to think he had a more jaundiced view of himself and his activities now. He might have begun his debunking odyssey in an effort to show the faithful the errors of their ways. He didn’t for a moment believe that he was rolling back superstition in the minds of the true believers anymore. If somewhere out there was a mind that was just questioning enough to be touched by his work, well and good, but he didn’t look for that. He was still a creature of his convictions. He was old enough to know that, now. What interested him was not so much curing people of bizarre beliefs, but why they held the beliefs in the first place. He’d loved true ghost stories as a child. He still did. He found what was behind them even more fascinating. The thrill of discovering that stories of haunting were not just the products of overheated imaginations, but could be attributed to actual, physical, measurable phenomena, was evergreen. He hoped there was something at Gethsemane Hall. It would be too disappointing if the house’s reputation was based entirely on hearsay.

One more effort at self-honesty, now.
Go just a little deeper
.
Aren’t you going to derive just a little, eensy-weensy bit of satisfaction in publishing a complete demystification of the Hall? Aren’t you imagining the faces of the place’s most fervent and ill-informed propagandists? Well, yes. Just a bit. Just one small bit
.

The purity of his motives wasn’t what was bothering him. It was that awful nightmare that had left no memory but much trouble of the spirit.
You are alone
. Of course they were. He hadn’t woken with any new conviction. But it was as if a hammer had come and smashed the nail of his belief all the way home. He knew that there was no all-loving father watching over the world. He knew that dead is dead, and gone is gone, but now he felt those truths in a new way. They hurt. They made him uncomfortable. The full abyss of
gone
was yawning wide. The true coldness of the universe was reaching into him, just at an age when he thought he had long-since come to terms with the idea. He didn’t appreciate what felt like fresh, visceral knowledge. His unwelcome reactions to it included a half-formed hope, shut down and demolished as soon as it appeared, that maybe he had been wrong for the last three decades.

He was going down paths that weren’t productive. He gave up trying to channel his thoughts into something that passed for work. He shut down the word processor and opened a game of solitaire.

Sturghill woke up just after the train stopped at Yeovil Junction. Meacham had introduced him to the magician just before heading down to Roseminster. Crawford had been impressed by the breadth of her knowledge. “You know a lot more about science than I do about magic,” he had told her.

“Don’t worry, I won’t pretend to tread on your turf,” she had replied.

“Please, feel free to do so. Any extra insight will be a huge help. I’m not one of those scientists so arrogant he believes he can see through magic tricks just because he knows the laws of physics.”

She’d grinned; they’d shaken hands and forged Reason’s Alliance.

Now she yawned and stretched. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Crawford smiled. “Too excited?”

She shook her head. “Unbelievable nightmare.”

Crawford’s smile went rigid.

Six o’clock. The curtain rose.

Meacham wouldn’t have put Gray down as having a flair for the theatrical. The brooding, hounded widower she had spoken to in the Stag had seemed a long way from irony and fun. The appearance had been misleading. He was getting his own back on all of them. She could see a twinkle, small but present, in his eyes, as if he were a man in the first stages of resurrection. She didn’t blame him for his amusement. The scene was pretty damn funny. She was exhausted after the hell-suite of the night before, but she could still summon a chuckle or two.

They were standing with their backs to the gate, still closed, to the grounds of Gethsemane Hall. Gray was speaking to the reporters, chatting buddy-buddy with the people who’d chased him, swinging pitchforks and torches, into the Stag the day before. They were listening, polite as hell, not interrupting. Meacham and the others were standing behind him. He introduced each of them. Crawford and Pertwee were fun to watch when each realized who the other was. Crawford looked tired, too — they all did — but he was eyeing Pertwee with a humour that was dancing on the edge of contempt. Pertwee was giving him the cold-fish stare. Her sidekick, Edgar Corderman, looked like all he needed was the word from his mistress to leap at Crawford’s throat.

Pertwee’s face sank even further into unhappiness and hostility when Gray introduced Sturghill as a magician. Gray threw some mischief around by playing coy with a couple of the introductions. He left out Corderman completely, as if he hadn’t even noticed he was there. He gave Meacham’s name, but not her profession. There was one more omission. Meacham looked around and spotted Patrick Hudson hanging around just beyond the scrum, on the sidelines with the gathered curious of Roseminster. Meacham had met Hudson on the walk down to the gate. He had told her that he would be at the Hall too, and that he was a friend of Gray’s. He had peeled off from the group as they reached the site of Gray’s theatre. He didn’t want to play, and it looked like Gray was respecting his wishes. The rest weren’t Gray’s friends. They were using him to reach the house. No special consideration for them. Just a little bit of vengeance.

Gray twisted the knife a bit further. “But I shouldn’t presume to answer for the experts,” he said. “I should do them the courtesy of letting them speak for themselves.” And so he threw them to the wolves.

Pertwee jumped in first. She was the fish closest to being in water. She started to blather on about the spiritual fountainhead that the house was, yadda yadda yadda. Meacham found herself tuning out, realizing that she would now be hearing variations on this theme for days on end. The reporters were looking bored, too. They knew the refrain by heart, it had no beat, and they couldn’t dance to it. One of them threw a spanner into Pertwee’s works. “But if you believe there are supernatural forces in this house, isn’t it possible that they caused the death of Peter Adams?”

“
No
.” Pertwee quivered with the force of her denial. “It is simply not credible that the spirits could cause anyone harm.”

“Why not?” another asked. “There are good people and bad people. Why not good and bad ghosts?”

“That isn’t the way the spirit realm works,” Pertwee began.

“What about Hell?”

Meacham realized the questions weren’t serious. They were just giving Pertwee the gears.

Pertwee tried again. “That’s a fundamental misunderstanding. As I hope to show here, the only danger is when people react badly and harm themselves.”

Booooring. They were looking for new juice, not finding it. A couple of questions flew Crawford’s way, but they were half-hearted, pure rote. Did he think Gethsemane Hall was haunted? “I have yet to encounter a single authentic instance of haunting,” he answered. “But I will withhold judgement until I’ve completed my study.”

A bright young thing, clearly pleased beyond measure with the way his shirt looked on him, turned to Meacham. “And is the CIA’s position that the reports of ghosts here are —”

“Fucking horseshit,” she said, and smiled sweetly. Christ, this was fun. To Gray she said, “Can we go in now?”

He must have had his finger on a remote. She still jumped a bit when the gate opened. Before her, the drive descended from the early evening light to a black tunnel of trees. The hollow of dark stared into her, expectant.