Friends of the Dusk (22 page)

She looked up, and Jane’s eyes were glassy with tears.

‘It’s weird, Mum. I don’t want… change any more. Suddenly, I’m frightened of it. I bought those e-cigs for you and Gomer because I wanted you to, you know, live forever? Like, I realize I’m going to have to leave here at some stage, but I always want to think I can come back and it’ll be just like it was.’

Merrily blinked.

‘God’s sake, Jane, tell me about Kindley-Pryce.’

Jane was pouring herself more tea.

She’d started with Wikipedia.

‘A lot of pretty dry stuff there. Like his books. He called himself an anthropologist, which I guess is not as boring as it sounds. But that’s, like, the story of his life. The first part of it was boring, but when he came back from America he was a different man.’

‘When was this?’

‘Nineteen nineties? His wife had died – his second wife, older than him. His first marriage in England ended in divorce. One son. The second wife was from a wealthy Californian family and she’d financed his studies. He collected quite a lot when she went, and he seemed to have decided to make a new start and came back to England and bought Cwmarrow Court… which was falling down, is that right?’

‘Close to derelict.’

‘Described in Wikipedia as Pryce’s folly. He’d just, like, fallen in love with it, and most of his money went on making it fit to live in. When the cash began to run out, he started holding events there. Music and lectures. Kind of upmarket – string quartet stuff. And also traditional folk-singers and fiddlers and all that. And they’d play and he’d tell his stories. There was an article about him in the
Guardian
, which had a quote about him that said…’ Jane consulted the printouts and notes in her clipboard. ‘Kindley-Pryce claims his discovery of oral traditions has liberated him from the straitjacket of academia. “It’s brought me alive,” he says. “Even in my advancing years.”’

‘Sounds like a bucolic idyll.’

‘This is him.’

Jane opened up the iPad, brought up a photograph of a man with a face like a brown egg. Either shaven-headed or completely bald. Eyes heavy-lidded as if they were looking down at his own minuscule smile.

‘So he had this new girlfriend,’ Jane said. ‘Caroline Goddard, children’s writer, and they created Foxy Rowlestone. I haven’t downloaded any of the books yet. I thought I’d see if the bookshop had any.’

‘You never know. I’ll give you some money.’

‘They did OK, those books. A cult following, according to Wiki. But there were only a couple before Pryce and Goddard split. I found some pictures of her. Much younger than him. And then she goes and leaves him, and things are like downhill all the way.’

‘Dementia?’

‘Horrible,’ Jane said.

‘Mmm. With the demented, they say that the oldest memories are the last to die. But how can anyone really know? No cure. They don’t come back to talk about it.’

Jane said, ‘You think his mind, like, vanished into… not so much his own past as the place’s past?’

Merrily shook her head, non-committal.

‘Can a storyteller’s mind disappear into a world of his own imagination?

‘Creepy, Mum.’

‘Yes.’

Jane pulled a smile together.

‘And while we’re talking creepy… the other thing you asked me to look up. Strokes?’

‘Oh, yeah. I forgot.’

‘You won’t now,’ Jane said. ‘Not ever. Stay there.’

She went upstairs, came down with a very old paperback, flopped open on its much-split spine.

‘This is just in case you think I’m making it up.’

Pushing the book in front of Merrily. The print was tiny. In this light, she could make out about every third word.

‘I keep putting it off, flower. The sin of vanity.’

‘New reading glasses?’

‘I’ll pick up a pair at a chemist’s tomorrow. Today. Can’t afford—’ She bit off the rest about not being able to afford a proper session with an optician and pushed the book back to Jane. ‘Would you mind reading it out? Feel free to paraphrase.’

Jane lifted up the book. The cover print was easier:
Katharine Briggs. A Dictionary of Fairies.
Merrily looked at Jane.

‘Really?’

‘Just a medical term now, for a seizure that leaves part of you paralysed. There’s probably a long name for it somewhere, but nobody uses it.’ Jane sat down. ‘Funny thing, I’ve started to envy you lately. Who else has a job which allows them to delve into this stuff with a real sense of purpose?’

‘Go on.’

‘The word ‘stroke’ actually derives directly from British and Irish folklore and means exactly what it sounds like.
Fairy-stroke? Elf-stroke?
’

‘Never heard that.’

‘Basically, some unsuspecting human being wanders into a fairy realm – fairy glade, whatever – and the fairies don’t like it. Bastards never do. They despise us. So a miffed fairy might put out a glowing finger and stroke the intruder on the side of the head – or anywhere else – and that part of the body immediately becomes like numbed?’

‘That is…
really
where it came from?’

‘I didn’t believe it either.’

‘Blimey.’ Merrily recalled Casey Kellow on the phone.
Things you’d dismiss as the sheerest lunacy, they come and live with you.
‘You don’t think, do you?’

‘These old beliefs,’ Jane said, ‘they’re still with us. They’re like burned into our ethos. It’s all there underneath, just mutates into something that thinks of itself as science.’

Jane’s expression was almost one of defiance. Merrily’s mouth was dry. Fairy tales. Invented to send children happily to sleep.

She stood up and walked over to the biggest window. A line of purple made the sky look like a Victorian coffin lining.

What is it, then?
Casey Kellow had said.
What is it if not an act of violence?

The line of purple was in the wrong place. There was no spark of dawn.

Part Three

O you who talk so much, instead of so much talking beat your head and search the secrets…

Farid ud-Din Attar
The Conference of the Birds
(trans. C.S. Nott, 1954)

30

Dark Net stuff

I
T WAS THE
only remaining shop in a cramped little dirty-brick square called, for no apparent reason, Organ Yard, and its contents spilled out like an old-fashioned eviction on the patchwork of concrete and cobbles. The second-hand stuff, this was: rugs and dark-stained furniture from abandoned churches and chapels. Nice and sad on an autumn Sunday morning.

The shop had a wooden sign swinging from a wrought iron bracket, peeling gilt lettering – probably always been peeling – on matt black.

It said,
The Darkest Corner

Made Bliss realize all over again what a small city Hereford was. Small but still secretive. It had surely taken him less than five minutes to walk over here from Gaol Street, down an alleyway from Commercial Road, past some shabby warehouses with a view across to the backstreet ruins of the Blackfriars monastery.

Walking inside, out of the light, Bliss remembered suggesting to Neil Cooper that his missing skull might turn up with a cig in its mouldering teeth at some Hallowe’en party.

Or somewhere like this shithole.

As it happened, a human skull was on the counter. Plastic but realistic. You had to look twice, especially in the dim light from a hanging lamp of dirty glass. Bliss tapped a fingernail on the pitted cranium.

‘Has a look of you, Jerry.’

In the dimness behind the counter, Jerry Soffley smiled his diagonal smile. He hadn’t changed. Long straight hair, eyebrows
pencilled coal-black against his white face. All shamelessly out of date, looked like a roadie for the Spiders from Mars. Must be at least four years since Bliss had nicked him for dealing ecstasy from these very premises. Even then, Es had been sliding down the cool person’s shopping list.

‘Clean as clean, me, now, Mr Bliss,’ Jerry Soffley said in his cindery whisper. ‘Been clean for over two years and anybody tells you otherwise is probably some old fart from the Chamber of Trade.’

‘Yeh, I heard you’d joined the Chamber.’

Soffley sniffed.

‘Seemed the thing to do when I yeard we was one of the six oldest surviving businesses in the city.’

‘That a fact?’

‘I’ll name you the others. There’s Morris’s in Widemarsh Street, there’s… wazzat menswear place—?’

‘I believe you, Jez. Just like I believe what I can smell is only incense sticks.’

‘I’ll show you the packet!’

‘Never mind.’

Bliss’s senses were adjusting to the darkness. To his left was the door to the vinyl room, full of death-metal LPs in gatefold sleeves and a hanging rope with a noose which, if he remembered right, Jerry Soffley used to claim was from a prison in Australia. At the bottom of the vinyl room, he recalled, was a stairwell leading to a small cellar containing an Egyptian stone coffin and part of a guillotine.

Behind Soffley’s counter, there was a rack of dusty robes and dark dresses, stickers for brands like Sinister and Necessary Evil. Above them, shelves of wide hats and masks and display cases containing the vicious rings worn by Hell’s Angels. If nothing had changed, the rubber kit, chains and stuff were in the cellar.

‘Quite quaint in here now, Jerry. You thought of applying for a grant from English Heritage?’

‘You laugh, Mr Bliss, but Gothic culture don’t go away, look. This
is
English heritage. Art, architecture, literature…’

‘Tristram Greenaway,’ Bliss said. ‘Go on… tell me you don’t know who I’m talking about.’

Soffley’s eyebrows narrowed, making a black bridge over his thin nose. Weighing up his options, probably realizing he didn’t have too many.

‘All right, yeah, I yeard. Who en’t? Come on, Sarge, couldn’t be more sorry about what happened to that boy, but I en’t seen him in years. Not since he
was
a boy. Fifteen, sixteen?’

‘It’s “inspector”.’

‘What is?’

‘Me. Got promoted.’

‘Nice one. Congratulations. Well deserved. You was always a smart little bastard.’

‘Thank you. That was quick, wasn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘You remembering Tristram Greenaway. Just like that. After all these years. If it
was
years. And not days.’

‘Aw, fuck
off
, his picture was on the box! Ole picture, from when he was at the Cathedral School. That’s how come I knowed who he was. Used to come in regular, with his mates, school uniforms, and I en’t seen him since, swearda God.’

‘What did he come in for?’

‘
I
dunno, it was a long time ago. All sorts. CDs, books – we did more second-hand books, them days. Gothic novels. Bram Stoker, Sheridan le Fanu, Anne Rice. I do remember he’d buy old LPs. He liked the covers. Triple gatefold sleeves. I don’t remember what else, but he must’ve come in a lot, else I wouldn’t’ve remembered his face, would I?’

‘So you’ve had no contact with him since he was a lad.’

Bliss watched Jerry Soffley doing some rapid blinking.

‘I never said that. Just I en’t seen him. His name’s on my mailing list. People who buys from us and sells through us, mail order. I’m saying he just din’t come in no more, thassall.’

Bliss looked around at the black and white stills from
Nosferatu the Vampyre
, the framed LP sleeves for Nico and Siouxsie Sioux and other stuff he preferred to think of as before his time. He’d come here on his own, because he was the only one of them who’d ever nicked Jerry Soffley, a trader more streetwise and sly than he looked.

‘You doing much business on the Net these days, Jerry?’

‘Well, aye. Half my trade’s on the Net. Way it goes, now – eBay, specialist goth sites.’

‘What about Neogoth dot net?’

Soffley didn’t blink.

‘Well, yeah, that’s us.’

‘Us?’

‘Me. No secret. Mabbe not the biggest goth ring in the world, but we holds our own. Scores of clients worldwide, different interest groups, public and private, sharing info, what have you.’

‘Let’s start with the basics,’ Bliss said. ‘It’s a website, is it?’

‘Messageboard kinder thing. Special interest. If you’re looking for a book or a document or an album or a DVD, souvenir, memento, whatever, you posts your request on the site, and anybody who’s got one they want to sell… you know? Was a private thing, but it started to fade off, look. We took it over, in the end, for commercial reasons. Made sense.’

‘People buy and sell through you? Gothic kit.’

‘Everything. For which I gets commission. Or it might be some’ing
I
can obtain. Could be anything from a holy relic to a signed copy of
Interview with the Vampire
.’

‘What kind of people?’

‘All kinds. Groups, individuals…’

‘But it’s a closed ring.’ Bliss drawing on what Karen had told him. ‘Is that the right terminology? Membership only? That’s usually heavy porn, Jezza. Dark Net stuff.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not. That’s balls, that is. This is just people who wanner talk to each other, rather than the world, about
dark and spooky things. Some are quite well known. Experts, celebs. Actors, musicians. Private people.’

‘And maybe some of things they’re selling they wouldn’t want to see on the open market?’

‘Long as they en’t doing nothing illegal, that’s none of my business. Or yours, I reckon.’

‘Or what they want to talk about isn’t talked about in what you might call polite society?’

‘Well, so what? Fetish stuff. Fantasy. Fifty Shades of Shit. Long as no children or animals is harmed, it en’t illegal.’

‘And you’re sure, are you, that this is always the case? Like, if we were to have a poke around…’

‘Aw come
on.
’

Jerry Soffley spreading his hands, looking pained.

‘So,’ Bliss said. ‘Tristram Greenaway posted stuff on Neogoth.’

‘Not often.’

‘Few days ago, he sent you a picture of a human skull.’

‘Did he?’

Bliss did a long sigh.

‘I’m giving you some leeway here, Jerry. Don’t piss me about. When you heard he’d been murdered, the first thing you’d do would be to go into your data and refresh your memory.’