THE THING THAT MOST AMAZED HER WAS HER OWN amazement. After all, she had suspected and then been certain that such things went on; she had been prepared to say so in public, and to say that Wesley Baines had not killed himself. Moreover, she had done a good deal of reading on the subject, reading which had sometimes evoked horror and disgust and sometimes amusement, because there were details which were ludicrous in their naïveté. Nevertheless, throughout the early proceedings her most overwhelming emotion was amazement. Then it is true, she thought. And, Can I really be seeing what I am seeing? So might someone who had read about the Sphinx, or the Colosseum, feel when confronted with the real life-size object.
They assembled stealthily; there was a rustle and a whisper, a feeling of motion and occupation in the empty place, and then, quite suddenly, the homely, pleasant smell of roast pork. And Miss Mayfield, who had read of ‘feastings’, was for a moment surprised, and then full of wonder at her own surprise.
She dared not, at first, descend from her hiding place. Someone might arrive who had reason to enter the little room at the base of the tower. And she knew that she must wait for the noise to begin.
It began, and increased steadily, as it does at any party when the first caution, reserve and shyness wear off. She could, in fact, have been listening to any party, except the voices were louder, the laughter a little less inhibited. She realized that she must now leave this place of comparative safety. The moment had come.
She came down the worn stairs in the way small children sometimes do, in a sitting position, lowering herself cautiously from one to another in the darkness. As the stairs turned, she could see the lighted outline of the half-open door; the noise was much louder now, and the roast-pork odour stronger. The door, she was glad to see, stood in the position in which she had left it, far enough open to give her a clear view and yet offer some protection. If anyone had entered the little room, he had left no sign. She crept to the door and looked into the church.
It was then that her first amazement struck her. That she should be so surprised, so shocked. After all, in Africa she had seen plenty of naked bodies. . . .
You could think some very long thoughts in almost no time at all, and in the half-second it took her to raise the camera, she had time to think that black skin was in itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could look as naked as these Walwykians did. And she thought, too, that there was some profound truth in the Bible story – now generally considered to be allegorical – about the nakedness and the fig leaves. Man’s great step forward out of the animal world was not made at the moment when he heaved himself up on to his back legs – apes could do that. No, man’s Rubicon had been crossed when he first covered his nakedness, probably with leaves, as the Bible said. And she thought, too, that there was a difference between a naked stranger and a naked person whom one knew. . . .
And why think about it at all? she asked herself, setting the camera to work. The very heat of the church might have informed her.
The pictures wouldn’t be good. The church was lighted by candles; there were a lot of them, but they gave off almost as much smoke as light. And in the centre of the trestle table upon which the meat and drinks were spread, there was a bowl which smoked like a volcano.
It was a drug. Whoever breathed it long enough could no longer rely upon his senses.
But this – her fingers tightened on the camera – this is a machine which cannot think or feel or be affected by any drug. It can only record. It is recording now! And that was, oddly enough, a very horrid thought when you looked at the fat round haunches of the Postmistress, ordinarily corseted into the decent solid roundness of a tree trunk, or when you looked – at the pendulous breasts, like empty paper bags, of Phoebe Rigby. When you looked . . .
I’m not really looking. I’m just part of this machine, the part that holds it steady, keeps it aimed in the right direction. All that part of me which is capable of being shocked – or amused – is back home, in bed. Let it be so.
But she was looking for Ethel. And Ethel was not there among the naked revellers.
Concern for Ethel began to swell and spread in her mind, like those little objects called – what was it? – Japanese Flowers, which would open when placed in a glass of water. All along, it has been Ethel.
I don’t mind about the others. They’re volunteers. They joined. They chose this. Let them caper about, guzzling and drinking. . . .
But where is Ethel?
Presently. That was the voice in her mind again. This is only a beginning. A warming up. I don’t think I’ll waste any more film on it.
She moved away, behind the door, and indulged in some more swift, profound thoughts. Table manners. There again, you had the conflict between the animal and the human being. To eat was to live, and the primitive instinct was to fall upon food, tear it with claws and teeth, gobble it down. Up the long ladder of the centuries the creature whose destiny was to be man, made in God’s image, the creature who was to be Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, had dragged himself. He had reached the point where, with a plate of food in front of him, he would unfold his table napkin, make conversation, pass the salt.
Out there, they had discarded all such niceties, together with their clothes. They had ripped at the meat with their hands, crammed it into their mouths, laughed, talked, kissed one another with full mouths, with grease-gleaming lips.
Presently the quality of the noise changed, warning her to take up her station again. Once more, despite all that she had read, she was amazed, and shocked, and revolted. The books said ‘sexual orgies’, and ‘debauchery’ and ‘perversion’, but to her these had been mere arrangements of certain letters which formed certain words. They had no more prepared her for what, on this All Hallowse’en, was following the feasting and the drinking in Walwyk church than the words ‘red’ and ‘scented’ would prepare a person for the beauty of the rose he had never seen. Even to look upon this scene was to be soiled. To call it bestial was to insult every animal in creation, for this was deliberate obscenity.
Grotesque, insane, she thought, forcing herself to hold the camera steady and listening to its gentle clicking.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Let the camera do its work. Abstract your mind. Notice that Harold Thorby has no part or lot in this; repent the fact that since your accident you have held him suspect. Notice that in no case are both husband and wife involved. Up at Puddler Pond on Midsummer Eve, Wesley Baines must have broken one of the inviolable rules. Eric Frisby is here, but not Edith; Freda Tharkell, but not John. Miss Benson is not here; you could have trusted her. The Mavericks are innocent. Berta Creek is here, and Baxter, and Juliet Reeve – oh dear, so young, so pretty and so clever, tragic beyond all words. Worse, far worse, than I ever dreamed. . . .
In a moment she would be crying. I must take a more academic view, she thought. Is it the drug which renders them capable of such sustained and varied performance? One has always known about prostitutes . . . but theirs is the passive role. What aphrodisiac can make men . . . And if one were not seeing it with one’s own eyes, could one believe that old Granny Rigby . . .?
I’ve had enough of this, she thought sickly. It could, in any case, be only a prelude. She tried to recall the figures the kind young man in the shop had given her; so many feet of film which ran for so many minutes. Did he mean in the taking or in the screening? Best to be on the safe side anyway.
She lowered the camera, wondering as she did so whether the rutting mob out there would mind, would be ashamed to know that their . . . antics had been recorded. Or would they have the courage of their convictions, and say, This is our ritual. We don’t criticize yours. Nobody compelled you to watch!
She was oddly, almost comically, aware for the first time of the ambiguity of her own position. They had so far done no harm to anyone but themselves. They were adulterers and fornicators, but the worst you could say about them, really, was that they were nudists who practised a form of free love. And she was Peeping Tom, whose motives could be very suspect. Ethel, her chief concern, wasn’t even here. But she will come, the voice in her mind assured her. This, too, is a preliminary.
That brought to her mind an awareness of her own physical exhaustion. Moving very softly, she went to the stairs and sat down.
After an incredible space of time the nature of the noise without changed again. Prominent in it was the sound of shod feet on the stone floor. She stole back to her position and was, once again, surprised. All signs of the feasting had been removed; the revellers were clothed again. They and the church presented the ordinary Sunday-morning scene. Even as she looked, they all went down on their knees, not quite in the manner of churchgoers, though; they knelt with their hands and heads lowered to the floor and their rumps in the air. She remembered suddenly another word she had read, ‘parody’.
The door through which, every Sunday, Canon Thorby emerged from his vestry opened, and two figures stepped into the church. One was Ethel Rigby, clad from neck to heels in a scarlet cloak embroidered all over with cabalistic symbols in black and white. A circlet of red flowers rested on her head, and below it her fawn-coloured hair streamed softly down. She had a wide-eyed, tranced look. Sleepwalking? Doped? Drunk? Beaten into a state where the last possible resistance lay in a deliberating absenting of the self? Even as she asked these questions in her mind, another, far more vital question occurred to Miss Mayfield, and suddenly she was shaking as though stricken with palsy, sweating at every pore.
What am I going to do?
You silly, silly, blundering, bumbling daft old fool! There’s no excuse for you. You knew. You’d read about it. How could you be so plumb crazy as to think that you could save this girl? How, in God’s name? With a cine-camera? You guessed, you suspected, you knew. You were going to save Ethel. And you took no sensible, practical measure at all.
The shattering realization of her madness and inefficiency coincided with her recognition of the other figure. Seven feet tall – but that was an illusion lent by the high silver headdress, the long white-silver girt robe. Very tall, very proud, dominant. And she had never seen Isabel Thorby except as limp and drooping, negative and retreating. But it was Isabel Thorby who held Ethel’s hand and brought her forward and said in Latin:
‘I bring the bride.’
And in the corrupt dog Latin that had come down to them by word of mouth through who knew how many ages, they replied solemnly:
‘May she find favour in his sight.’
Miss Thorby said:
‘Behold the bride,’ and as she spoke, she twitched away the cloak. Ethel’s nakedness had a classic beauty because of her unawareness. Smooth and white and slim as a statue, and as unknowing.
Holding her hand, Miss Thorby led her to the altar, and Ethel lay down, her hands clasped behind her head, one knee raised.
‘We are met,’ Miss Thorby said.
‘We are met. We await his coming.’
Then, in solemn parody of the action which her brother performed on this spot each Sunday, Miss Thorby took the wafer and the silver Communion cup. The wafer she laid upon Ethel’s body, just below the breasts; the cup she set in the arch of her lifted knee.
If it stops at this, Miss Mayfield thought, there is still no great harm done. It’s blasphemous and wrong and silly, but she doesn’t know it’s happening, and if it stops here . . . Miss Thorby lifted the wafer.
‘This is the flesh of the Usurper. Let it be food for dogs!’
From somewhere, Mr Frisby’s good cattle dog Lassie came forward, moving as a dog does when moving against its will, head low and tail tucked down. It sniffed at the offering, hesitated and backed away.
‘Even the dog spurns it,’ Miss Thorby cried triumphantly. She dropped it and ground it under her heel.
Then she lifted the cup and, saying, ‘Here is his blood,’ offered it to Granny Rigby, who did with it something so degrading that Miss Mayfield shut her eyes and released her finger’s pressure on the camera, hoping that she had been in time. Not even for purposes of evidence did she want a picture of that!
And now Miss Thorby was praying – if you could call it that. She said that all was ready; that all those present had given proof of their faith and devotion. She mentioned the bride again, going into details about Ethel’s tender virginity as the madam of a brothel might speak enticingly to a reluctant customer about the newest recruit to her trade. She ended, ‘Great Master, we await you.’ Everyone repeated the words.
Then they rose. Miss Thorby reached over Ethel’s supine body and produced a bowl. She held it in her right hand and dipped into it with her left, and each member of the congregation, forming into line, approached her and was touched, by her left hand, in the palm of each of their hands, on the forehead, each cheek, chin and throat. Seven little dabs made with the swiftness of a snake bite. When they had been anointed and had passed on, they rubbed their hands together, rubbed their necks and faces, turned and pressed their palms to their neighbours’, rubbed one another’s faces and necks. Now and then, when the light caught it, Miss Mayfield could see the greasy gleam of the unguent. She remembered what she had read about preparations of deadly nightshade which could lead to frenzy and hallucination.
They were now in a circle, moving round and chanting, at first quietly, and then more and more excitedly. They began to leap and to scream. Miss Thorby took Ethel by the hand, jerked her upright and into the ring, which was moving anticlockwise. Miss Mayfield remembered another of the words which had not meant very much. ‘Widdershins’.
All at once Miss Thorby cried, ‘Stop!’ and like automatons they stood still.
‘There is a barrier. Are we all of one mind? Has any been unfaithful?’
This was no part of the ritual, for she spoke in English and with some agitation.
Miss Mayfield thought, washed over with a wave of fear, Can it be my presence that is preventing whatever it is they wait for? If they can smell me out, then this isn’t just nasty nonsense. She knew again the fear she had felt at Puddler Pond – the fear of the manifestation of evil, which had turned out to be a frightened flock of sheep. She remembered her feelings about the cat.
Dear God, she prayed from her heart, forgive me. I’m a very weak adherent; I keep over-estimating the power of the enemy, which is a form of treachery.
‘It is the font,’ Miss Thorby said. ‘I sense resistance from that direction. Used and blessed and not emptied since, I suspect.’ She spoke as a housewife might of a saucepan put away unwashed, and she said ‘blessed’ as any normal person might say ‘thrice-accursed’.
The font stood at the tower end of the church, within a few feet of the doorway where Miss Mayfield was. So nearly right. Her mind wavered again. They had power. She remembered that Lucifer, Ahriman, the Devil, name him how you would, had, before his fall, been an angel, powerful enough to be jealous of God. And it was possible – it was logical, in fact – to see in all this parody, this business of the wafer and the sacramental wine, a continuance of the age-old defiance. Like rebels tearing down a flag and stamping and spitting on it.
They surged towards the font.
I must hide the camera. I’m going to be caught. I’ve been a fool and must pay the price of my folly. But I’ll try first. I’ll say I wanted to join. It might even work. Minorities always welcome a convert. I’ll lie and lie. But I must hide this camera.
The stairs – they ran up, hugging the wall, built into it. Below and behind the lowest one was a dark, cavern like space. She pushed the camera into it as far as it would go, and then went and stood by the door, waiting to be pounced on, accused.
But they were all engrossed with the font.
‘It is as I thought. The mark is there. And he is waiting. Defile it, quickly.’
They made their circle around the font; they spat into it; they used it as old Mrs Rigby had used the Communion cup.
And once that is done, thought Miss Mayfield, they will detect the real focus of resistance, the spy in their midst.
Ethel moved with the rest. She did not chant, or leap, or scream. Her arms hung limp and white, her hands in the hot-pawed clutch of her neighbours. She passed Miss Mayfield twice and was almost opposite the tower door on her third round when something happened. All movement, all sound stopped. Then, as suddenly, as silently, as corn falling to the scythe, they all, except Ethel, fell flat to the ground. And through the hot-house air of the church there swept a chill, as though a wind from the ice fields of the Arctic had blown in.
With her hair bristling, and goose-pimpled all over, utterly bemused and frightened almost to death, Miss Mayfield could think only one thing. Save Ethel!
She was out, she had Ethel by her shoulders; the red wreath tilted and fell off. And there they were back in the tower room; and she was pushing the door into place and fixing the iron bar which hung from a ring set in the wall on one side of the doorway, and which, when lifted, fell into an iron socket fixed on the other side. And even as she dropped it into place, she thought, If what I think is out there, a stout door and an iron bar will be no protection at all.
Afterwards she disliked to think about what she feared. She was, in a fashion, the victim of her faith. She acknowledged a Power which had parted the Red Sea, brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down, rent the veil of the Temple, rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb. The almost inevitable concomitant of such belief was to acknowledge another power, responsible for all the bad things, all the lies and cruelties and injustices in the world, a power which might make a stout iron bar break like a rotten stick.
Standing there, like a mother partridge defending one chick, she waited for it to happen.
For several minutes, nothing happened at all. And when, at last, those outside made a move, it was marvellously reassuring. They yelped and howled, they flung themselves against the door, flesh and blood against sound timber and cold iron. And she remembered a phrase, one of Rose’s sayings, ‘God has no hand, but man’s to work with.’ It was equally true of the Devil. Everything else – black magic, white magic, miracles, answered prayers – they were left-overs, dregs, the vestigial remains of primitive man’s bewildered recognition of things beyond his control.
If they had any power other than their own, they wouldn’t throw themselves against that door, she thought, and turned to Ethel.
She said, ‘You’re all right now.’ She said, ‘Ethel, look at me.’ She said, ‘Ethel, you know me – Miss Mayfield.’ Ethel stood, unresponsive as a doll, icy-cold to the touch.
Miss Mayfield unhooked her skirt and stepped out of it. She dropped it over Ethel’s head and hooked it around her waist. She took her spare cardigan and pushed one of the flaccid white arms into a sleeve and then the other; it was exactly like dressing a dummy in a shop window. She buttoned the cardigan, and then put over it the plastic Singing in the Rain coat, thinking that if Ethel’s frigid form ever engendered any warmth, it would at least be kept in. At intervals as she worked, she talked to Ethel, bidding her wake up, begging her to speak, to look. She even shook her once, very gently. But Ethel was beyond the reach of ordinary sound or touch.
Outside, the howling, the inarticulate expression of rage and frustration went on until Miss Thorby’s voice cut through it. Miss Mayfield did not catch the actual word, but it must have been a call for silence. What now, Miss Mayfield wondered, and again she moved between Ethel and the door.
Nothing happened; the silence stretched out achingly, so that presently one’s own breathing, one’s own thudding heartbeat, seemed to affront it. They couldn’t have gone home. . . .
Then in the quietude there was a sound, so small that at no other time, in no other place, could she have heard it – the soft susurration of Ethel’s hair brushing the plastic. Miss Mayfield swung round and was in time to see the last movement of the hair, swaying as Ethel tilted her head into a listening attitude.
Never in all her life had Miss Mayfield seen such complete concentration. Ethel was listening with the whole of herself, down to her very heels. Once, slowly and comprehendingly, she nodded her head; once she smiled. Miss Mayfield, who could hear nothing, again had that feeling of being opposed to something which she could not measure. And again she threw herself against it with the only weapon she had.
‘You’re not to listen, Ethel! Whatever it is, it’s wrong. You’re to listen to me, Ethel, not to them! Not to them!’
Ethel gave no sign of hearing the actual human voice so close to her ear; she did not move her eyes or betray by look or gesture that Miss Mayfield’s urgent words were even an interruption of her listening. When she moved, it was with the precision of a perfect machine, and so suddenly that Miss Mayfield, who was looking at her, was nevertheless taken completely by surprise. She snatched up the torch which Miss Mayfield had switched on and placed on the floor once the need for concealment had passed; and as her hand closed on it, Miss Mayfield thought, They need darkness. She had only just time to duck her head as Ethel brought the torch down with all the force she could command.
The blow missed her head by the fraction of an inch and fell on her shoulder, sending a paralysing thrust of pain down to her fingertips and across her breast.
And that’s my right arm gone! Now she is stronger than I am. She’ll overmaster me and open the door. She’ll be raped and I shall be killed!
The force with which she had struck had disturbed Ethel’s balance, and as she teetered, stupidly, motivelessly, Miss Mayfield shot out her left hand, grabbed the torch and struck – against Ethel’s fawn-coloured head – the first violent blow she had ever dealt anybody in her life. Ethel crumpled down into a little heap on the floor.
Oh, God, I’ve killed her. I never meant to hit so hard. What got into me? I must be mad. God, don’t let her be dead. It would be such a triumph for Them!
That prayer, anyway, was answered. For when she had set down the torch and redirected the beam, she could see that Ethel was breathing as steadily as a sleeper; and her pulse, though a little slow, was strong and even.
She had hardly satisfied herself that Ethel was not dead, not even bleeding, when Miss Thorby cried:
‘Ethel!’ In some obscure fashion she must have become aware of a break in the contact. ‘Ethel! Do you hear me? Answer me!’
Miss Mayfield looked at Ethel, half expecting her to rise and make an automatic response, but Ethel lay as though asleep.
When Miss Thorby next spoke, there was a hint of hysteria in her voice. ‘Answer me, answer me. Are you afraid of her? She can’t hurt you if you do what I say. Ethel, Ethel, Ethel!’
The high-pitched, almost yelping cry seemed to cut into the little circular room, to rebound from its walls and then die away. There was a moment’s silence.
Then, still sharply but with more control, Miss Thorby called, ‘Miss Mayfield!’
Well, there was nothing uncanny about that. Miss Thorby might have seen her; she would certainly guess.
‘I don’t care whether you answer me or not; I just want to make certain that you can hear me.’
‘I hear you perfectly well,’ Miss Mayfield said.
‘We know you’re mad. Deep down, you must know yourself that you’re mad. Come out now and give yourself up and I promise you shall be treated kindly. If you don’t, it’ll be the public lunatic asylum. Do you know what that will mean?’
By and large, Miss Thorby seemed to have a good deal of first-hand knowledge about lunatic asylums. In a voice growing steadily more shrill, more distraught, and in phrases that became more and more incoherent, she poured out threats and promises, interspersed always with the accusation of madness. ‘You’ve done this kind of thing before. You’ve been locked up. . . .’ In the spate of words pouring from Miss Thorby’s lips there were truths as well as lies. She even mentioned the name of the place where Miss Mayfield had stayed during her breakdown on her return from Africa. Their investigations had been very thorough.
The screaming tirade, with its mingling of fact and fantasy, combined with the steadily increasing agony in her shoulder, beat upon Miss Mayfield’s mind until she was almost overwhelmed. She backed away to the foot of the staircase and sat down, covered her left ear with her hand, bitterly regretting the impossibility of covering the other. She could still hear, however; and slowly the idea that she might indeed be mad began to take possession of her mind. Hadn’t she, earlier in the evening – after asking herself. What am I going to do? – admitted the craziness of her behaviour? Would anybody who was not mad, knowing so much, venture out single-handed to snatch a victim from such a pack of wolves? Even her distrust of Canon Thorby, of Miss Benson, of Mr Freeman, now rose up to challenge her sanity; not to trust anyone was a symptom of some forms of madness. So was the idea that all alone you could overcome anything, an overblown sense of your own importance and power – paranoia. . . .
‘Then if you won’t come out of your own accord, you must be made to come out, made to come out. Do you hear me? You have one more chance. Come out and we’ll do our best for you. Stay there and you will be forced to come out, and you’ll go straight into the asylum.’ There was a slight pause. ‘Then you have only yourself to thank for what happens now. And Ethel’s blood will be on your hands.’
After that, there was a silence which lasted until Ethel began to cry.