(1992) Prophecy

  By now her T-shirt was ripped from inside her jeans and icy air flailed her bare back; her hair beat her face like knotted string.

  A look of guilty panic sheeted over Tristram’s face and he stood up, then backed away. Backed towards the propeller that was looming up on him.

  ‘Tristram! It’s OK, Tristram!’ Frannie called, but her voice was choked and raw, and it came out as a squeak rather than a shout. She stretched forward with her hands, only a few feet away from grabbing him. The propeller closed on the boy like a shadow.

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see the man closing also. Then everything slowed as if suddenly there was all the time in the world. She was aware of strange details: the rubber soles of her trainers compacting on the concrete then expanding, springing her into the air, absorbing her weight as she landed again, compacting, expanding, the wind from the propeller lifting the strands of grey hair from the man’s head, exposing the bald area beneath; the wind billowing his shirt like a sail.

  There was a strange sound that echoed in her head. A chinnggg like a lawnmower blade striking a stone. At first she thought Tristram had been hit by a pillow. Thousands of tiny little shreds hung in the air, like feathers. Then they were gone.

  He’d disappeared.

  The propeller was inches from her own face now, its draught tearing her mouth open, freezing her eyes. She flung herself sideways and the blade scythed over her; the din of the engine drilling out her eardrums, fumes filling her lungs like cotton wool. A wheel struck her in the back and the shadow of the wing passed across her as she lay flattened. Dust, pebbles and grit peppered her face, stinging it like hail.

  Slowly, she climbed to her feet. Through blurred eyes she saw Tristram standing near her. He was fine. He was OK! Relief surged through her. Then she realized it wasn’t Tristram, it was Edward, with fluff in his hair and spots of blood all over him. He was staring at a pair of Bermudas that had legs sticking out of them at one end, the feet in tiny trainers. Out of the other end protruded ragged flesh, unwinding coils of intestine and a few inches of sharp, white backbone like the shaft of a broken spear. A small lake of blood was slowly spreading out across the concrete and draining into the weed-filled cracks.

  Someone was clambering into the cockpit of the plane: the man in the lumberjack shirt, she dimly registered. The roar of the engine ceased suddenly and there was just the shuttering sound of the propeller. Then silence. The plane was no longer moving. The tiny shreds of hair and bone and flesh that hung from the fuselage and wings also lay scattered across the concrete. Later, when she looked in the mirror, she saw that she was covered in them, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Fragments of the afternoon played themselves back to Frannie at random. Moments; segments of moments; details. She could not focus on any one part of what had happened for more than a few seconds without her brain switching channels.

  She stared blankly around the drawing-room, trying to orientate herself. The drawing-room was real time. She was in the drawing-room. Then she was outside on the concrete hard, hurtling herself towards Tristram. Brambles tore at the windscreen of the Range Rover, rattling and shrieking. The roar of the aero-engine drummed through the barn. The Tiger Moth rolled forwards. The propeller came up behind Tristram like a shadow. The Range Rover was returning with Charles and Oliver inside it: the lusty bellow of its engine; the crunch of its tyres on the gravel; the two men emerging, cheery voiced, innocent of what lay ahead, glancing with only mild curiosity at the police car drawn up behind Charles’s battered Toyota Landcruiser and the sign that said PRIVATE. NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT. The policeman approaching Charles and Oliver, Frannie beside him. Edward at that moment coming around the side of the building with his Game Boy, and the ting-tack-tang … ting-tack-tang … that seemed for a brief instant to be the only sound in the world.

  Then the hideous sound Charles had made, a howl of anguish that sounded as if it were drawn from the bowels of the earth.

  Now she sat on a sofa, holding a glass in her hand, in front of an unlit fire. Wind rattled the window-panes. ‘My fault, all my fault.’ She heard herself speaking as if she were somewhere else, in another room, detached.

  There was whisky in the glass: hard, neat Scotch that singed her mouth, burned her stomach. It did not relieve the shock or the pain, but it battened them in another compartment and as long as it did, she would be all right.

  The pills helped too, helped to dull everything a little, delay reality by a few more hours. Oliver had given them to her. The doctor had given them to Oliver. The doctor who had made her stings better last weekend, who had come and taken Charles away. Oliver’s face seemed to get bigger and smaller. It stretched out sideways then shrank. The doctor had told Oliver she should not drink with the pills.

  The channel changed. Tiny scraps clung to the silver fuselage and to the engine cowling. The propeller still spun but the sound had gone mute. Then she was back in the drawing-room again. Bands of tension etched like scratches across her scalp.

  ‘My fault,’ she repeated.

  Oliver sat beside her. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Kids have to be watched all the time. No one understands that until they have kids of their own. It’s not your fault.’

  His voice sounded strange as if she were hearing it through glass. She wondered if she had died. Oliver was looking at her oddly. Maybe I was killed by the plane and no one told me. She reached out to touch his hand but closed on air. She tried again, took his wrist, felt the hairs and the firm muscle, pressed her face into his neck, smelled his ears, his shampoo, his skin, held him tightly.

  There was a picture of the aeroplane on the mantelpiece, and in the kitchen; there seemed to be pictures of it in every room. Oliver, Edward and Edward’s mother standing in front of it, laughing at the camera.

  ‘I should have stayed with them, followed them.’

  ‘I should have padlocked the barn,’ he said.

  ‘Where was the ignition key for the plane?’

  ‘It doesn’t have a key; just a couple of magneto switches on the dash. It never occurred to me that he – they –’ his voice shuttered off, like the propeller, into silence.

  Frannie drank some more, held the glass close to her face, inhaling the fumes. Everything was out of kilter, as if new laws of the universe had been written and nobody had told her. The world was now a place where a group of kids could get killed and maimed just by sitting around a table with an upturned glass; where a small boy could kill and maim just by thinking about it. Maybe it was Oliver who had written the new laws? The stuff on the wall in the library. The hieroglyphics. She closed her eyes. Madness was not very far away; just a glass of whisky or a small blue pill separated her from it.

  Her own turn was not very far away either. And she did not know what separated her from that.

  A crash of breaking glass upstairs startled them both. Oliver jumped up and ran out into the corridor. She followed him into the hall, and up the stairs to the landing where all they could hear was a low moaning sound that Frannie thought at first was the wind.

  It was coming from Edward’s room. She realized it was not moaning but chanting. Oliver gripped the round brass handle; his knuckles were white. For a moment he remained motionless then he slowly opened the door, pushing hard against the draught of cold air that blasted out at them.

  The room was in darkness, the windows were broken. The curtains thrashed, tearing at their rods, the rings sliding and clacking, the fabric hissing. In the midst of it all Edward lay in his bed, asleep on his back, the steady chant coming from his mouth.

  ‘… murotaccep menoissimer ni rutednuffe sitlum orp te sibov orp iuq iedif muiretsym itnematset inretea te ivon iem siniugnas xilac mine tse cih …’

  Frannie felt panicked. A toy car rolled along a shelf and fell at her feet. Oliver ushered her back out of the room and closed the door softly.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ she whispered. ‘What’s g
oing on.

  He raised a hand, motioning her to stay, strode down to his own room and came back moments later with a small ghetto-blaster. He opened Edward’s door a few inches and switched on the red recording light, and the tape revolved with a shuffle. Edward’s flat monotone sounded along the passageway: ‘… muem suproc mine tse coh. Senmo coh xe etacudnam te, etipicca: snecid, sius silupicsid euqtided, tigerf, tixid eneb, snega saitarg metnetopinmo muus mertap mued et da muleac ni siluco sitavele te saus sunam selibarenev ca satcnas ni menap tipecca ruteretap mauq eidirp iuq …’

  Oliver closed the door and stopped the tape, then walked back along the corridor to his room, switched on the light, waited for her to come in and closed the door. The room looked neat and orderly, but it felt very cold. The candles in the two iron holders either side of the bed had been replaced. In the bright light the room felt strange. Oliver’s face was white and lined, had aged twenty years since the morning. He sat on the edge of the four-poster bed and put the recorder down beside him, then looked at her gravely. ‘You didn’t recognize that?’

  She stayed close to the door, feeling unwelcome. ‘What is it? One of the Arabic languages?’ She observed the cherubs and nudes painted on the walls; the thick rugs, the shirts on their metal hangers hooked on to the wardrobe door. The row of polished shoes with their wooden trees on the floor. Alien. It was all alien.

  ‘I’ll play it backwards,’ he said. ‘You might find that helps.’ He opened the wardrobe, rummaged in the back and pulled out an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. He played back the tape, recording it on to the reel-to-reel, then pressed the machine’s reverse play button. Edward’s voice immediately sounded clearer.

  ‘… Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni testamenti: mysterium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum.’

  She prowled near the door like a caged animal. He watched her with haunted eyes. His worn plimsoles were sunk into the shag rug beside the bed and his head was sunk into his shoulders. She translated, her voice trembling, the words that she knew so well, had memorized since earliest childhood. It had been a long time since she had heard them in Latin.

  ‘For this is the Chalice of my Blood of the new and eternal testament,’ she said falteringly, unable to take her eyes from Oliver. ‘The mystery of the faith; which shall be shed for you and for the multitude of mankind so that sins may be forgiven.’

  He stopped the tape.

  ‘Mass,’ she said. ‘He’s reciting the canon of the mass backwards.’ She walked across the room and put her hand on the cold ribbed radiator beneath the window. The ghost of her face stared back from the glass. She turned and faced Oliver. ‘Mass isn’t – isn’t held in Latin – in this country –’ She faltered. ‘Backwards. I –’ She stopped and suddenly thought of the plants he had reeled off in Latin. And the animals.

  He spoke in Latin to you? Oliver had said when they were in bed in this room last Saturday, sounding surprised, but not commenting further. The way he had not probed deeply when Edward had started reeling off Latin names in the car on Sunday night going back to London.

  ‘Isn’t saying mass backwards something to do with black magic?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘I looked it up after the first time he did it.’

  ‘He’s done it before?’

  ‘He’s been doing it at school for years. Three and a half years, to be precise,’ he said, giving her a strange look.

  ‘And the windows? Did that happen?’

  ‘No.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘That hasn’t happened before. He’ll calm down. And in the morning he won’t remember anything.’

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  Oliver said nothing.

  ‘The doctors and shrinks you’ve taken him to – did you tell them about this?’

  ‘I’ve played them tapes.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘That it’s not uncommon. Apparently, disturbed children often speak strange languages or gibberish in their sleep.’

  Frannie felt trapped between the light of the room and the darkness outside, the darkness that pressed against the glass, trying to push through it and to crush her up against the light. She shuddered, her skin absorbing the coldness like blotting-paper.

  Oliver stopped the machine, then pulled another tape out of the drawer of his bedside table and slotted it into place. ‘Last Saturday when we slept together, Frannie, you began talking in your sleep. It woke me up. I thought you’d stop, but you kept going on, talking complete mumbo-jumbo. I couldn’t work out what the hell you were saying. I recorded a bit of it because I thought it might amuse you; then I realized it might embarrass you so I didn’t say anything about it.’ He stared at the floor, then back at her.

  She remembered now, being woken by a click in the middle of the night and wondering what it was.

  ‘Then I suddenly realized on Sunday night when Edward started his chanting that it was the same sound. I knew there had to be a connection – it couldn’t be coincidence.’ He started the tape.

  ‘Muem suproc mine tse coh senmo coh xe etacudman te etipicca snecid sius silupicsid euqtided tigerf tixid eneb snega saitarg ibit metnetopinmo muus mertap mued et da mulaec ni siluco sitavele te …’

  Frannie listened, transfixed, to the chanting sound of her own voice.

  Oliver pressed the stop button. ‘I don’t know what gave me the idea to play it backwards.’ She watched Oliver’s finger hover, hunting for the reverse play button, then push down on it, and she listened to her words again, mechanically translating the Latin into English as she did:

  ‘… and looking up to Heaven to thee, God, his almighty Father, giving thanks to thee, he blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take and eat of this, all of you. For this is my Body –’

  Oliver stopped the tape abruptly, leaving the house in silence. She was numb.

  ‘You asked me where it’s coming from.’ Oliver’s face was tight. ‘The first time it happened was that night after we had seen you at your parents’ café – although we didn’t know you then.’

  The cold air in the room was now burrowing deep into her veins, into her bones. She felt as cold as dead flesh.

  ‘It’s you, Frannie,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s where it’s coming from.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Frannie sat in silence whilst Oliver’s words sank through her, dissolving like chemicals, paralysing her. As long as she did not believe it, she would be all right. She could cope with what he had said as long as she knew he was making it up.

  She stared at the chromium-plated grilles of the speakers at each end of the ghetto-blaster, and the shiny red plastic casing. She wondered, irrelevantly, why he owned such an ugly thing. Perhaps it belonged to Edward. Or to Oliver’s late wife. Perhaps Sarah Henrietta Louise Halkin had liked music blaring wherever she went. Perhaps she had played it loudly to keep out the silence of the house that was now closing around Frannie herself and entering into her.

  She wondered how long she had been talking in her sleep. A few months? A year? Six years? All her life? A memory released itself, rose, like a bubble detaching itself from the floor of the ocean, to the surface of her mind. Her father yesterday morning.

  You scared us, your mama and I … Not like you talking … Like someone else is a talking through you.

  Who else had heard her? The bubble of memory expanded. Tom Dufferin, her last boyfriend, had said she mumbled in her sleep. So had Elliot Dumas before him. And on the dig in Iraq after leaving university, when she had shared a tent with three others, they had commented then that she woke them sometimes with her mumbling. The end of her last year at university. She thought back harder; no one had commented before then; no one at home, where she had shared a bedroom with her kid sister. Maria-Angela would have said something. The many previous occasions when she had shared tents on digs; others would have commented. She had shared a room in her second year at universi
ty with Meredith; she had not said anything. The end of her third year was when it had started. From worry about her exams?

  Or –? She tried to dismiss the thought, but it persisted. The Ouija. They had done the Ouija at the end of that last year. Only days before the end of term. They had all been so happy that night; most of the term’s coursework was over and they were winding down for the breather of the Easter holiday before the onslaught of finals. So innocent then. Unaware of what lay ahead; of the spirit they had attracted, angered, the thing that had come after them, pursued them.

  Possessed her.

  She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Oliver’s gaze. She studied her nails; the tips of the fingers went blue after death; she remembered seeing her grandmother’s fingernails in an open coffin in Naples; almost black.

  Edward in the library came back to her.

  I have this bad thing, Frannie. I don’t want it … It makes things happen when I just think about them.

  Edward influencing people. Surely it was coming from him. She spoke to Oliver. ‘Edward said –’ she stopped.

  He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to continue. But confusion swirled in her brain, because it might begin with herself, not Edward, in which case it was she who was making Edward will bad things on other people. It couldn’t be.

  ‘Why do you say it’s coming from me?’ she said. ‘How do you know that Edward’s picking it up from me, and not the other way round?’

  ‘It’s inconceivable from pure chance that you would both say mass backwards in your sleep, isn’t it?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You told me you’d heard about what Jung called Synchronicity; well, that’s what I believe. That one of the explanations for what people call chance is unconscious telepathy between them. Channelling of thoughts.’

  She watched him blankly.

  ‘I think that one of you is instigating it, the other picking it up.’ He uncrossed his legs, folded his arms and leaned forwards. ‘Edward had never done this before he met you.’