The Magus of Hay (3 page)

4

Needs

B
EREAVEMENT APPARITIONS WERE
the most common and least-alarming of all reported paranormal phenomena. The recently dead husband pottering translucently in his greenhouse, the much-loved cat on the stairs.

Seldom scary. The cats you were inclined to leave alone. They seemed happy enough and didn’t leave gutted mice on the doormat.

Close relatives seeing the ghosts of known people… this was usually comforting, one of the mechanisms of mourning. You would try and explain it, you’d offer comforting prayers. Then you’d do what you could to help it all fade into a warm memory.

More complicated were the guilt-trips, remorse externalized. Perhaps the dead person had been neglected, unvisited or even abused. Usually, the person reporting the sightings was in need of counselling.

Merrily had spoken to other Deliverance ministers who thought virtually all bereavement apparitions were down to psychological projection.

Understandable, but a bit patronizing.

‘You don’t disbelieve me, then,’ Sylvia Merchant said. ‘You don’t think I’m deranged.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘In which case –
two
questions here – do you believe I actually saw what I’ve described to you? And do you believe that what I saw was the spirit of Alys Nott?’

What
was
this?

Merrily tried to sit up straight; the chair wouldn’t let her. It was as if it was pointing her at the depression in the pillow on the empty pale-green bed. A dent which, obviously, might have been made by Sylvia Merchant, reverently lying on her companion’s bed. As anyone might do, at some time, in these circumstances.

‘Well… as we met for the first time less than half an hour ago,’ Merrily said, ‘and I can tell you’re not looking for platitudes, it would probably be irresponsible for me to give you an unequivocal answer. The truth is I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps,’ Ms Merchant said softly, ‘you would want to consult a psychiatrist before forming an opinion?’

This was well out of the box. You listened, you comforted, you explained. You didn’t expect to have to explain
yourself
before you started. The way this was going, she’d be quietly asked for a written estimate.

‘In a case of apparent demonic possession, I’d be
obliged
to consult a psychiatrist. Otherwise, I’d be unlikely to go near one.’ Time to turn it round. ‘What do
you
think you saw?’

‘But I
know
what I saw. I know
who
I saw.’ Said in a calm, explanatory way, no stridency. ‘It was not a dream. It was not an hallucination. It was not some by-product of sleep-paralysis. I am not a stupid woman.’

Merrily nodded.

‘Has it happened since? Anywhere else.’

‘It’s happened twice more. No, three times.’

‘Is there a pattern?’

‘No. Once was in town. I saw her reflection, very clearly, in the window of a restaurant we used to frequent. The third and fourth times were like the first. In the bed.’

When they kept coming back… that was when an unease set in. As an indication of survival, once was enough, maybe twice to make it less easy to dismiss as imagination. But the third time…

‘How clearly did you see her, Ms Merchant?’

Never once had she said, ‘Call me Sylvia’.

‘As clearly as I see you.’

‘And – sorry if this seems a ridiculous question – but was the duvet disturbed? As it would be if someone was lying under it?’

‘I think I’d have noticed if it wasn’t. If it was just a smiling, disembodied head, that would be the stuff of trashy horror films, wouldn’t it?’

‘Mmm… possibly. When you say—’

‘And I feel her presence. That’s most of the time, wherever I am.’

‘That’s… not unusual.’

‘The visual manifestation…’ Sylvia Merchant was still, unblinking ‘… that is clearly harder for her to achieve.’

An expert. Oh dear. It was never a good thing when, instead of feeling sympathy, hand-holding, looking for ways to make it seem less like a haunting, more like a reassurance, you were continually made aware of the surreal nature of the job.

‘Erm… when you said her eyes were without light…’

Did you mean she looked as if she was dead?

Ms Merchant waited. Merrily drew breath.

‘Ms Merchant… why did you want me to come today?’

‘Because I’m a Christian. Because we’re both Christians. Because we’re members of the Hereford Cathedral congregation.’

‘Well, yes…’

‘And because I would expect someone in your position to have had considerable experience of the earthbound dead.’

Merrily stared at her.

You don’t really want me at all, do you? You want a bloody medium.

‘Ms Merchant, you’re… clearly familiar with a certain terminology.’

‘I’ve read widely. I’ve been head teacher at schools where Christian worship was observed. Something now frowned on. My attitude to this was, I suspect, one reason I was offered early retirement.’

‘Mmm. The way things have been going for quite a while. Look, can I…? You keep referring to Alys in the present tense. As if you’re not sure she’s gone.’

‘Of course she isn’t gone.’ Faint lines of disapproval were deepening either side of Sylvia Merchant’s mouth. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to convey to you.’

‘You… obviously don’t want her to be gone.’

‘She needs me. As I’ve needed her. On a number of levels. She very quickly became the best secretary, the best assistant I’d ever had. And then the best friend.’

Apart from the traffic, silence. Ms Merchant had reached a point beyond which she saw no reason to continue.

‘She died quite suddenly,’ Merrily said.

‘Very suddenly and unexpectedly. Didn’t want to go. Robbed of nearly half a life. She didn’t – and doesn’t – want to go.’

‘I’m sorry, but… it’s not easy for you to know that, is it?’

‘I do know. It’s entirely clear to me.’

‘Although you must also recognize, from your reading, that it’s not… natural.’

‘And how do
you
know
that,
Mrs Watkins?’

God.
Never before, in a bereavement situation, had she faced a theological inquisition.

All she could give was the stock answer.

‘All religions take the view that the spirit, after death, moves on. Wants – and needs – to move on. Sometimes… there might be problems of withdrawal. For example – and I’m not qualified to express an opinion on this – but if Alys thinks your life will be unliveable without her, she might be held back. It could be up to you to help her.’

‘I intend to help her.’

‘And… I can help you to do that. If you like.’

‘And what would you advise?’

‘Well… there are situations – and this is far more common with parents who’ve lost children – where the child’s room is preserved as a shrine. Which is understandable, but not, long
term, a good idea. The shrine should be… in the parent’s mind. Where the nature of it will usually be changed by time. Whereas the bedroom shrine will only come to resemble a museum.’

‘The bed.’

Sylvia Merchant was on her feet. She was very tall.

Merrily said, ‘An empty bed… waking up to an empty bed… keeping an empty bed in the same room…’

‘You’re saying I should get rid of Ms Nott’s bed?’

‘I can help you… if you like… to move it into another room?’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘She didn’t die in it, did she? She died in hospital. You could sell the bed. Or give it away. There are places always looking for good furniture.’

‘It is not an empty bed,’ Ms Merchant said.

Merrily said nothing. The shadow fronds of a willow tree in the garden wavered on the lemon wall above the beds. She felt constricted in the typist’s chair. Had the chair always been here, or had it been brought up after Alys Nott’s death?

‘I don’t understand, Sylvia. Why
did
you want me to come? Why me?’

‘Because I’m a Christian. Because we’re both Christians. Because there was no one to pray for her when she died. I’d like you to pray for her now.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course I will.’

Prayers. She could do that. No formal ritual at this stage. You could devise your own, as mild or as explicit as you felt necessary. The prayers would be for peace. And afterwards you might leave written prayers behind. Simple lines which could be uttered like a mantra. And then there might be further visits. Aftercare. And, gradually, the atmosphere would change.

Or it should.

‘Here?’ Merrily said. ‘Now?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Do you think I could alter the positioning of this chair?’

Sylvia Merchant smiled.

‘It won’t. That’s the position Ms Nott had it for years.’

‘Right.’

For a moment, Merrily found it hard to draw breath and sprang up, too quickly, from the chair.

A moment later, the chair creaked.

God.

Sylvia Merchant’s eyes were alight.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘we are all here. The three of us.’

5

Fix it

T
HAT EVENING
, R
OBIN
read the book, Betty read the tarot.

Outside, kids were yelling and neighbours mowing their tidy, right-angled lawns, the ones that hadn’t been turned into extra parking space for their goddamn people-carriers.

This bungalow – Robin despised it – was attached to another one and built on an estate near Kington, fifteen or so miles from Hay. Pink-brick suburbia made all the worse for having empty hills tantalizingly on the horizon.

After supper, the sky reddening, they lit a fire in the small woodstove they’d installed to save on oil, and Betty sat on the rug near the legs of Robin’s chair and felt the excitement around him like ground mist.

‘See, this guy… a legitimate hero.’

‘Another one?’

‘This is the real thing,’ Robin said. ‘This matters.’

He hadn’t been sure if the man he’d talked to in the King of Hay shop – older than the man on the front of the book – had actually been the King of Hay and hadn’t dared ask. Robin was strangely shy with people he thought he might admire. But now he was halfway into the autobiography and sure on both counts.

‘I just didn’t know the half of this. You hear about the King, you think it’s a pisstake. Which, OK it was. Until it became
majorly serious.’

He stared into the stove, the flames still yellow. Robin saw the stove as an essential energy source, like all the books on their shelves, soon to be turned into a different kind of energy.

Betty thought the King of Hay had just looked like some overweight, ageing bloke, detecting no obvious charisma, but…

‘OK… tell me.’

Richard Booth – later Richard Coeur de Livres – had grown up at Cusop, the strung-out village just on the English side of Hay. Back in the early 1960s, when Hay was a run-down farmers’ town, sinking into an economic ditch, he’d bought the old town fire station for seven-hundred pounds, opening an antique shop there.

‘But his business took off,’ Robin said. ‘Like
really
took off… when he switched to second-hand books.’

Booth loved books and books seemed to love Booth, and it was a slow explosion. In the years that followed, he opened bookstore after bookstore, building the town an international reputation as the place where you could find a book on anything you wanted, without paying through the nose.

Other book dealers moved in, and Booth bought the castle – part medieval, part mansion house, Jacobean through to Victorian – which also got filled up with books. Pretty soon, Hay had became a unique town with a whole new economic basis, a level of self-sufficiency unknown, not only in these parts, but anywhere in the UK.

‘Books had become like the
currency
of Hay.’

‘Well, yes,’ Betty said. ‘That’s nice, but—’

‘Nice? It was magic! And not in a pretentious way, because he wasn’t some nose-in-air, asshole-scholar type. At one stage, the books that
nobody
wanted, he even sold them as fuel… for burning?’

‘Would Mr Oliver be happy about that, you think?’

‘Oliver didn’t fit. Kapoor said that. Oliver was too Establishment. Booth’s Hay was
outside
all of that. He’d kick-started the economy of a town that was stagnating, and it was pulling visitors again – book tourists. OK, in a small way at first. Calls it
trickle-tourism
. The town doesn’t get swamped, it just builds steadily. But then the big guys get interested – the national
chains, the Welsh development agencies, the Wales Tourist Board. Offering the kind of big money grants which your average entrepreneurs just grab and run with, milk the agencies for all they can get then move on when the grants dry up. But that…’

Robin was on the edge of his chair cushion, his hair in spikes.

‘…was precisely what Booth did not do. Sees these agency guys with their chequebooks and their government support and their big shit-eating smiles, and he’s like,
FUCK OFF!’

Betty grinned. It was at times like this that Robin was able to forget his smashed pelvis, his wonky spine. She laid her head against his knees as he described how, as part of a battle to keep the town entirely local, beat off the national chains and the government agencies, Richard Booth and his supporters had decided that Hay, this ancient once-walled town which sat right on the border of Wales and England, should declare itself independent of both.

And that he should be its king.

Sure, it had started out as a kind of joke. There were Hay passports and HAY car-plates, and King Richard was bestowing honours on supporters, giving them Hay titles. Attracting the kind of free worldwide publicity that his powerful enemies on the tourist and development boards would’ve had to pay out millions for.

A sharp elbow in the ribs of the Establishment. A defiant finger in the face of the organized politics.

‘Guy’s a goddamn genius.’

Building on the fame, a father and son team from a neigh-bouring village, Norman and Peter Florence, had started a small festival of literature which, at first, Richard Booth opposed on the basis that it was promoting new rather than second-hand books. But within a few years – because things
happened
here – it was pulling in the best part of a hundred thousand people to hear the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Finally winning Booth’s blessing around the time Bill Clinton had arrived in a
smoke-glassed limo to address the world from a huge marquee in the grounds of Hay Castle, calling the festival the Woodstock of the Mind.

And when the crowds went home and the tents came down, it was still this small, once-walled medieval town that sold cattle feed and local honey between the second-hand books.

‘But now something’s slipping away?’ Betty said.

‘Like everyplace. Greedy bankers, idiots in government, the Internet collapsing high streets. Then the King’s health breaks down and he doesn’t get to spend as much time here. The castle goes on the market, and now it’s in the hands of a trust which may or may not pull it together. And the ideas that took the town on to a new level are just… running down.’

‘So it needs… us?’

Oh God. Robin was viewing his possible encounter with the King as a sign of converging destinies.

‘Needs people with commitment to more than their own bank accounts. Needs reconnecting to its energy-source.’

This was Robin, seeing everything in mystical terms. Betty thought it would have been so much easier if they’d come here a few years ago, before they’d bought a farmhouse with a ruined church on it and Robin’s body had been smashed by falling masonry.

‘We should go back,’ Robin said. ‘Gotta be some other place for rent.’

‘Let’s wait awhile, see what happens.’

‘That’s what you had from the tarot?’

Betty said nothing. Although the tarot was just points of reference, a way of seeing what, deep down, you already knew, it still scared Robin.

‘Could be like old times,’ he said. ‘Like the first apartment.’

The first apartment was when he’d followed her home to the UK after they’d met at a Wiccan international moot in Salem, Mass. Robin attending as an exhibitor of artwork for pulp fantasy novels, Betty as… well, as a witch. A sublime witch,
Robin used to say, with hair like a cornfield in the warm days before the harvest, telling her how he’d felt his whole being drawn into a vortex of obsessive love… and something more, something epic and mythological that he could evoke in gouache and coloured inks but would never understand.

The way Betty saw it, him following her home to England, embracing paganism, had been like going to live in his own artwork. Which was fine, until the lucrative Lord Madoc series had suddenly been terminated and the other cover-artwork it had brought in began to tail off in the wake of a betrayal that made you realize that no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.

‘Of course, we were young, then,’ Betty said.

‘We’re still young.’

‘What’s left of us.’

‘OK,’ Robin said angrily, ‘we’ll stay here. You can aspire to three days a week on the checkout and I can sit on my sorry ass trying to paint over the sound of lawnmowers and… and life grinds on.’

It was a matter of supreme irony to Robin that he now had an actual sorry ass.

‘OK, we’ll go tomorrow,’ Betty said.

The entry to Back Fold was facing them next morning as they came out of the parking lot, but they ignored it, heading up an adjacent short track that led around the castle and accessed stone steps leading down through its grounds to the marketplace.

At the bottom of the castle hill, there were unattended open-air bookshelves full of cheap books they relied on visitors’ honesty to pay for. Used to be books all over the castle itself, Robin told Betty – at least the parts you were allowed into without a hard hat. And down in the town even the shops that weren’t bookstores – the antique shops, the jeweller’s – all sold a few books as well.

Books had become the town’s circulation system. Carrying the energy, the mojo.

‘You take out books,’ Robin said, ‘you’re weakening the system. You’re inviting, like, entropy. So whatever they do to this castle, books need to be part of it. Crucial.’

Betty looked up at the castle. They were under the heavy medieval tower, with massive oak doors in the portcullis opening. Doors so huge and damaged they could even be original. A shudder took Betty by surprise; a voice from the square stopped her thinking about it.

‘Mr and Mrs Thorogood.’

A very dry, very Home Counties voice. Betty turned slowly.

‘Mr Oliver.’

‘So you’re back.’ He was in an Edwardian-length jacket, a suede hat with a turned down brim. ‘Still looking for a shop? I confess I didn’t think you were particularly serious about acquiring a lease on mine.’

‘I tend not to do things for laughs.’ Robin leaned on his stick. ‘Any more.’

‘Then I apologize. As you can imagine, there are passing tourists who just get it into their heads that they’d like to be booksellers.’

‘Time wasters,’ Betty said bluntly. ‘We’re not.’

‘I looked you up on the Internet,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I didn’t realize you designed book covers.’

‘Just did the paintings for them,’ Robin said.

This was before publishers discovered Photoshop and no longer wanted to pay artists. He didn’t talk much about that.

‘Your designs for the Waugh reissues,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘Coincidentally, we sold one a few weeks ago. Alec, not Evelyn.’

Betty smiled, recalling how, when Robin had first been offered these Waugh covers, he’d asked her if Alec and Evelyn were husband and wife.

Mr Oliver said. ‘We… began by specializing in literary first editions but, sadly, there are not as many collectors as there used to be. Nor, indeed, as many bestselling literary writers.’

Betty saw Robin’s mouth opening, probably to say something
like,
fuck literary, just go with the flow
, and shot him a warning glance. Robin shut his mouth, went loose.

‘Look,’ Mr Oliver said. ‘I don’t know how much time you have, but… ah… there may be a basis for discussion.’

All right, it wasn’t in totally great condition. There was some damp in the walls, and damp wasn’t good for books. Caused foxing – was that the term for the brown marks on the edges of pages? But damp could be dealt with… eventually.

Betty said. ‘If we decided to go ahead, how long would it take to draw up a lease?’

Mr Oliver’s hands opened out.

‘Drawn up already, Mrs Thorogood. Just a question of your agreeing to the terms.’

Interesting. When did that happen – before or since he’d checked them out on the Net? Robin was trying to catch Betty’s eye, but she kept looking at Mr Oliver, choosing the best time to hit him with Kapoor’s suggestions about rent and repairs. She pointed to the stairs.

‘Perhaps one more look at the living accommodation before we go away and think about it?’

Upstairs, it looked…
OK
. The rooms were not huge and the windows were small, but it was clean and the taps worked. The whole building had evidently been a barn at one time, and the upstairs was the loft. Must have been converted to living accommodation quite some while ago; there was a small fireplace, probably early twentieth century, another upstairs, now sealed off. Pity, it was cold up here.

Too cold? She went still, slowed her breathing. Robin must have seen her arms drop to her sides; he raised an eyebrow.

Betty shook herself.

‘So has this ever actually been living accommodation for you, Mr Oliver?’

Mr Oliver said he and his wife had a house on the outskirts of the town. Clearly it
had
provided living accommodation for
someone in the not-too-distant past – note the replaced wiring, the extra power points, the TV aerial socket.

‘It’s a bit… compact, isn’t it?’ Betty said. ‘We’d have to put some of our furniture in store. Or sell it.’

‘I will admit,’ Mr Oliver said, ‘that I never thought of anyone actually living here. Wouldn’t deny that life could be a trifle cramped.’

‘For a while, anyway,’ Robin said. ‘Until we make enough money to turn upstairs into more book rooms. You ever think of that?’

‘As I say, Mr Thorogood, our original plan to pursue what you might call a literary purity proved to be incompatible with the times. And the business tended to consume too much of
our
time.’

‘It’ll come back,’ Robin said unconvincingly. ‘Quality always prevails.’

‘One hopes. I could have sold the shop last month as a… body-piercing establishment.’

Mr Oliver smiled grimly, letting them out. In the alley, an old lady turned round.

‘You smelled him yet?’

She was in one of those ankle-length stockman’s coats, unwaxed and worn back to the webbing. Mr Oliver sighed.

‘Good morning, Mrs Villiers.’

It was the tweed cap she had on that ID’d her – the little old lady he’d seen last time they were here, walking up the alley whistling, making him feel good. She jerked a thumb at Mr Oliver.

‘Reckons he don’t smell nothin’.’

‘Like what?’ Robin said.

But she just walked away, looking back over her shoulder, leaving them with a cracked grin with black gaps.