December (83 page)

      
'Like the shamans,' Lee saw suddenly.
      
'What?'

      
'One of them, Dave or Moira ... was saying shamans used to use
drums to drive spirits away.'

      
Yeah,' Prof says. 'That makes sense. Out, spirits, out! Bom! Bom!
Maybe it explains why you were the one who
didn't
do away with himself rather than come back.'
      
A bulb blows in one of the
spotlamps, the way bulbs seem to at the Abbey, and Lee springs up from his
stool with a cry of alarm. 'Fuck's sake, man, you're supposed to be the
producer. You're supposed to make us feel relaxed!'
      
Prof smiles. 'I was actually set up
to be the engineer, working under Russell. Even for that I had to be conditioned.
They sent another thick-skinned bastard, Steve Case, to kind of ... initiate
me.'

      
Lee moves towards the door. 'I need a coffee.'
      
'Siddown. You'll need a coff
in
, you don't take some of this on
board. I'm trying to help you, son.'
      
'You're trying to screw me up,
man.'
      
'If that's what it takes,' Prof says.
'Listen, they set me up to "discover" the tapes and get them
processed - baked, you know? Case pretended he didn't know about baking tapes
and I bought it. Stupid. The idea was I'd listen to them. And not forget. Never
forget. Not waking, not sleeping. Now you go and ask Case if
he's
heard those tapes right the way
through, 'specially the stuff that begins with Aelwyn. No
way
. I should've realised earlier. He didn't know what I was on about
when I was begging him not to release the album. And I thought that was an
act.'
      
'Shit,' says Lee. 'What is it
about
those tapes?'
      
'I don't know, mate. That's why I'm
here, God help me. I'm just giving you a friendly warning. Because you might not
be a Little Innocent, but you could be playing way out of your league. And you
might just be considered expendable, know what I mean?' Prof stands up and
strolls back towards the control room door. He turns once and taps his nose.
'Word to the wise, eh?'

      
Lee swallows. 'Can I go for that coffee now?'
      
'Yeah. Or two coffees. Or make it
three. And a bun. And a work-out with Michelle. You get what I'm saying?'

      
'Don't come back for a couple of hours?'
      
'Good boy,' says Prof.

      
It's me, isn't it?' Dave lights up a Silk Cut. 'I can't get to
it. Just haven't got the balls.'

      
All this Don't Worry Tom stuff. It was never Tom. Tom just
carried the can. Tom might have driven away in too much of a hurry afterwards
but at least he didn't run out on the session, which Dave is scared he's going
to do again.

      
It's gone nine. The four of them are still in the canteen.
It's a nice place, for a mobile unit. Tables with cloths on them, lamps in
bottles, a cook and a waitress somewhere out of sight. All for them, the
Philosopher's Stone, the cult band that never lasted long enough to
become
a cult.

      
Simon, particularly, is looking tired tonight, and pale. Dave thinks
last night's reworking of the Richard Walden story must have taken more out of
him that he's admitting. He wonders
 
what
he's
going to feel like tomorrow.
After Aelwyn.

      
'Davey,' Moira says. 'Think back. Last time, you seemed to forge
an immediate link with Aelwyn. You
were
Aelwyn.
You were scared. You were running like hell, all these guys after you, the
clamour of men and horses, and then ...'

      
'And then I lost it. Suddenly I wasn't scared any more. I'm thinking,
this is wrong. But it wasn't wrong. I felt very confident, fairly relaxed. I had
no thoughts of being pursued, no fear of death. And that was when it happened,
the scene-shift.'

      
'I saw the candles light up,' Moira says. The black candles -
OK, dark brown, but probably blacker inside than even Tom suspected - the black
candles flared up by themselves, all together in a pile, higgledy piggledy.'

      
'I didn't see them.' Dave shakes his head, 'I must have been in
New York by then. Maybe that was the point of transition. Like a cut in a film ...
fade out, a moment of black and then fade up ... to what turned out to be the
Dakota building. It was so out of context, it threw me completely. I had to get
out.'

      
'And you were relaxed, presumably, because Lennon was relaxed,'
Moira says, if I've got this right, he was coming home from a mixing session or
something. Everything was fine, happier than he'd been in ages; he was working again
after a long time of no inspiration; he doesn't seem to have had any kind of
premonition, even though this little bastard had been hanging round him for a couple
of days. OK, why were you getting this; where's the link?'

      
'Between Lennon and Aelwyn? Quite a few. Both singers and
musicians, songwriters. And the peace thing. I've become quite a student of the
Aelwyn myth. He wrote poems and he sang about peace, which didn't make him too
popular with the establishment.'

      
'So we've got ourselves a rough parallel,' Moira says, 'with Lennon
- as peace campaigner - and the American conservative establishment.'

      
'We know the FBI was watching him. We know he was expected to
be a thorn in the side of the incoming Reagan regime. We know that Government
agencies were determined to prevent him becoming an American citizen. And when
he did get his green card, the people who were happiest were the ones the FBI
saw as dangerous radicals.'

      
Dave opens out his hands 'And yet he saw New York as a sanctuary.
It was the one place he felt safe - ironically.'

      
Like Aelwyn and the Abbey.' Moira helps herself to one of Dave's
cigarettes. 'The place he thought he was safest was the place that killed him.
And also ... Have I said something?'

      
Simon is staring at her.

      
'Monks,' Tom says suddenly, 'I seen monks. Either side the gate.
While you and Simon was out looking for Dave.'

      
'The monks killed him,' Simon says quietly, with certainty, 'Richard
Walden knew de Braose wanted Aelwyn dead. When Aelwyn turned up in search of
sanctuary he was invited in, and then …'

      
'Aaaaah!' Dave's chair crashes over as he leaps to his feet, backing
away from the table. The ashtray in front of him is full of bright red, foaming
blood.

      
'Davey!'

      
Moira's holding him. He smells her perfume, essence of long beaches,
grey sea and wide sky.
Please don't let
her die, please don't let her die ...

      
'It's OK, Davey, you've had a shock. You were right all along.
There was nobody following Aelwyn. He was confident of sanctuary and he had a
hell of story to tell. Come on, sit down.'

      
There's only ash in the ashtray. Only ash. Dave closes his eyes.
When he opens them, Moira is exchanging meaningful glances with Simon. 'Sorry,'
Dave says. 'Nothing. Trick of the light.'

      
'I can't explain this,' Simon says. 'I don't suppose we ever will.
But maybe it all went wrong because the vision of Aelwyn was wrong. And the
premonition Dave received was the closest parallel, in a ...a contemporary event,
to what
really
happened to Aelwyn.
There's a theory, isn't there, that Mark Chapman did what he did under some
kind of hypnotic suggestion planted by the CIA or some outfit like that.'

      
Dave says, 'I don't mean to sound apocalyptic or anything, but
wherever Lennon is, maybe he's trying to get something across.'

      
He talks about the Liverpool power failure in the thirteenth minute
of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of December, in the thirteenth
year since ...

      
Simon's shaking his head. 'We could go on all night ...'

      
'One more thing. You remember, "On a Bad Day",
Simon?'

      
'Sure. I've wondered how much that was troubling you. All I
can say is, don't lose any sleep, Dave. It was no more than a normal reaction.
Double Fantasy
really
was
a piece of crap.'

      
Dave stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray that didn't have blood
in it. He has the feeling this has become Don't Worry Dave night.

      
'We can't prove the Aelwyn theory,' Moira says. 'But we can test
it. Can you handle that, Dave? Think about it. Aelwyn as your baby. Whatever
you want, we'll go with it. Excuse me.' Pushing her chair back, 'I'm away to
the girls' room.'

      
When she's gone, Simon says quietly, 'OK, what's wrong, Dave?
Is it Moira? That things haven't worked out how you hoped?'

      
Dave looks up. If only that was all it was.
      
He lights another cigarette, hands
shaking, and he does what he should have done days ago. He tells Simon and Tom
about the black bonnet. Moira's black bonnet.

      
Simon is silent for a long time. So long that Dave's worried Moira's
going to come back from the loo before he can get a reaction. When she doesn't,
he decides this is probably a set-up. She wanted Simon to get out of him
whatever it was he was afraid to tell her.

      
Eventually, Simon says to him, 'Dave, can I put a theory to you?
I mean, shoot me down in flames ...'

      
'Go on.'

      
Simon talks for over ten minutes. Occasionally, Tom makes an
observation. Moira has had time for a complete manicure. Afterwards, Dave says,
'I didn't know. I didn't know any of this.'

      
What Simon has told him is that after he ran out of the studio
that night, whatever had begun did not end. For the rest of them, it was only
just starting to happen.

      
It began with the usual extraneous sounds - voices in the cans,
whispers, vague ribbons of laughter. What some people call spirit-voices and
Simon calls 'psychic fluff'.

      
Simon had already laid down his bass track and was now closeted
with his cello and his viola, double-miked. Soon, it was as if the instruments
were making their own sonorous responses
 
to external stimuli, electrical impulses
by-passing Simon's mental control, taking the music into ever deeper and darker
places.

      
There was foreboding and trepidation ... the rolling thunder
of approaching death.

      
Prof could tell Dave about this, Simon said. About the impact
it made on
him
nearly fourteen years
later, on tape, the death sequence which began with Aelwyn.

      
Moira was at the core of it. There was a moment, Simon says,
when he was afraid Moira was actually going to die, and he couldn't do a thing
about it; he felt like - who was it now Merlin? - a prisoner in a lightless
cavern at the bottom of a very deep pool.

      
In the end, it was Tom who may have saved her. Tom realising
where it was headed ... that subtle forces had been invoked by the combination
of the band and the night and the location - what Moira called the 'toxic cocktail'
- and that it was going way too deep, 'I just let rip,' Tom said modestly,
recalling his blazing, high-pitched electric shriek which Simon said Prof had
described as being like a chainsaw, ripping the fabric of the music and the night
and ... and Moira - Prof had thought it was an attack on Moira. In fact, it
released
Moira; it was an attack on
death.

      
'And I'm wondering,' Simon says now, 'if Moira's been carrying
the memory of that around with her ... you know, the closeness of death? You
say you saw it around her on an old album cover ... I don't know, maybe her mother's
death, too? A premonition of that ? She's full of self-recrimination over her
mother, I know that much. She thinks her mother absorbed … what? The death that
was coming to her?

      
'Nuffink's ever what it seems, Dave,' Tom says. 'That's the only
bleeding certainty in this life.'

On the way back to the
studio, as if it's been arranged, they pass Lee Gibson. 'Just popping over for
a coffee,' Lee says cheerily. 'Good luck, guys.'

      
'Give her one for me,' Dave says crudely. It's become an in-joke.
None of them really knows whether Lee is sleeping with the admin assistant.

      
Dave is looking happier than Moira's seen him since they got
here. She gives his hand a squeeze. He gives her a grin. They're going to do
it. They're going to lay Aelwyn's unhappy ghost and a few of their own. After
tonight, it's downhill all the way.