Last Days (12 page)

Rachel smiled in secret triumph. ‘The stains on the plaster occurred in two of the rooms I rented. Three months after the property had an extensive renovation. Which included new plumbing, wiring throughout, and a complete redecor -

ation in all three flats. I know because I made the letting agent 99

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show me the invoices. And there was no damp. There were no leaks. No rising moisture. Nothing to have caused those marks.’

‘Well it’s just been done again. That place is show-home perfect inside.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me. But what should surprise you is that parts of the property were also renovated twice when I lived there, in just over twelve months. Were the other two flats still empty?’

‘Yes, they were.’

Rachel smiled again. ‘The other tenants moved out before I did. For the same reasons.’

‘The odours, stains?’

‘That was only part of it. But on the subject of the lights, two electricians assured me there was nothing wrong with the wiring, even though the lights going out throughout the entire building was not uncommon. I became quite adept at flicking the switch for the lights in the fuse box. That’s all it usually took to start with, and about a hundred spare bulbs.

What was tripping the circuit, no one could tell me. But then the wiring under the fuse box was found damaged.’

‘Damaged?’

‘Rachel nodded. ‘Vandalized. But by whom? And the lights going out always preceded an appearance of the odd smells and the stains. You see, Kyle, I will wager that if you go back to the property today, the mark on the wall of the storage room will already be well on its way to disappearing. And it won’t be near a pipe, so it’s no leak. Any tradesmen will confirm there is no damp. And an impression will be left behind.

You can see things in them. But that still isn’t the worst thing.

It was . . . It was always the sense that we had an intruder 100

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that unsettled me. I was there on my own most of the time, so it was the last thing a woman alone wants to feel. Unsafe.

But I did.’

‘We heard something weird.’ Kyle tensed when Rachel turned to him abruptly.

‘There was a fund manager and his wife on the top floor.

And the owner of an airline on the first floor, who used the apartment when he was in town. We all heard things.’

‘Can you describe it, the sounds?’

‘I can try. But they were very hard to define. I thought, well, it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes thought I heard children.

Crying. In distress. And wind. Children in a wind. The man upstairs used to complain of dogs. “The dogs were crying again,” he would tell me in the morning. He was Iranian. But his English was good. There were animal sounds. Or at least I hoped they were. But I’m not sure what kind of animals were making them. And always outside the flat, on the communal stairs. But the couple at the top were sure they were broken into. They had the police round three times in the middle of the night. Always sounded to me like someone was in the hall, though, or on the stairs. Footsteps. Like they were drunk, or something.’

Kyle stared at his feet. ‘Music?’

‘Music? No. But something like whistling, I used to think.’

‘So it wasn’t my imagination. We had quite a fright in there. Respect to you for sticking it out for so long. But we ran like a couple of kids. There was like this wind—’

‘That blew down the middle of the stairwell?’

Kyle nodded.

‘So what do you think it is? You’re the expert.’

‘I wouldn’t say expert. It’s not like anything I’ve heard of.

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Kind of like a poltergeist haunting, maybe . . .’ Kyle swallowed.

‘You never saw anything?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘God, no. But I can dine out on the story for the rest of my life as it is.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Amongst friends. So I don’t want to find that you’ve used my name in your film. Because I will be looking.’

‘No, no. Don’t worry. Wouldn’t dream of it. The neighbour kind of corroborated some of what you said anyway.

Dan spoke to him on Sunday, when we went back for the gear, and he said people were coming and going all the time.

No one lived there for very long. Never had done. Place was always being gutted and fixed up again. Drove him nuts. He kept going on about the rubbish skips, the hammering and scaffolding, shit like that. I’d just like to use a little of the detail about what the residents experienced at the property, but I won’t ever mention your name.’

‘Good. So tell me, the history. You said there was a history. Of course, the letting agent never mentioned it, but I’ve a hunch I’m not going to like what you are going to tell me.

Was it . . . haunted?’

‘We were there to begin shooting a documentary about The Temple of the Last Days.’

Rachel Phillips looked as if she was about to suffer a stroke. ‘The cult? In America?’

Kyle nodded. ‘They started life in that house, Rachel. When they were called The Last Gathering. They were there in 1968

and 1969.’

102

SEVEN

west hampstead, london.

13 june 2011. 2.45 p.m.

‘Max, relax for chrissakes.’

‘I never told you to go and interview some bloody lawyer,
or the bloody neighbours! You’ve enough to get through
without digressing. I hope I’ve not misplaced my confidence
and my trust in you, Kyle.’
At the other end of the phone, Max’s voice shook and not just from anger; he sounded close to tears.

‘Whoa. Whoa. Hold on. Your brief directly specifies that we are to research and film the evidence of paranormal phenomena arising from the belief system of The Temple of the Last Days. That’s straight from your pitch, Max. Interviewing an ex-tenant of their original headquarters, who was directly affected by said uncanniness is directly relevant to this film.

And this “bloody lawyer” is a damn sight more credible than Sister Isis, by the way, who looks like a freak show.’

‘Don’t be so unkind! That lady is as honest as this day is
long. She was there. There, Kyle! The lawyer and her neighbours were not. Susan White would never embellish her story.

Whatever she told you, you can take it to the bank.’

This was unfamiliar ground. He’d not encountered Max 103

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as anything but genial and unruffled, if not self-superior and covertly sly. But now he sensed instability. Someone irascible and emotional, if not controlling. And he really did not care for it. ‘Look. My work speaks for itself. I am thorough, Max.

I follow leads. I do not overlook important testimony. Credible, believable testimony from reliable witnesses. Rachel Phillips is a barrister, Max. A barrister! How do you think this film is going to look with a load of old hippies in their seventies talking about “presences”, and “The Seven”? Eh?

And playing to the gallery. Think about it. It’ll look like a load of Dungeons and Dragons, mate.’

‘Please. Do not raise your voice. You must try and understand—’

‘No, Max. I cannot. I cannot understand why you are balling me out for taking some initiative here. This is not a good way to start a working relationship. I do not expect my decision to seek a corroborating story to be questioned.

I told you that when we first met. You gave me creative autonomy. I will not be steered, Max, by an agenda. It’s not how I work. I don’t have an axe to grind here, Max, and I am not going to grind one of yours either. Particularly as you were a member, eh?’

There was a long silence from Max. But at the other end of the phone, Kyle could hear the old man’s tremulous breathing.
‘No. Kyle, you are right. I apologize. I am under
a lot of pressure right now. Bear with me.’
His tone had softened to conciliation, to penitence, as if he were now surprised by, or unsure of, where his own outburst had originated. It seemed to have taken them both by surprise.

Kyle remained cautious; instinctively wary of any med-dling authority in film-making. God knew he’d had enough 104

LAST DAYS

of that. ‘Why did you not tell me that you were part of The Last Gathering? That’s a major omission. You were balls-deep from the beginning, mate, but you chose not to tell me.

So what’s that all about?’

‘Susan should not have mentioned that. I told her not
to.’

‘Why? You left the group in the same week as her! You could have told us the same things as Susan. Maybe we should interview you—’

‘No!’

Kyle flinched, as if he’d been electrocuted by the handset of his phone.

‘Sorry. I am sorry. It’s a difficult time for us right now.’

‘Us? Who is us?’

Max let out a long, tired sigh.
‘Another one of us went in
the night.’

‘I don’t follow, Max. What are you telling me?’

‘We can’t waste any more time. It’s paramount we get
Gabriel’s testimony this week. And I need the London
footage right away. Uploaded to the ftp site. You have the
address?’

‘Yes. But wait. Hang on. What do you mean, “another one of us went”?’

‘We’re old. There’s not many of us left. Some of us are
unwell. And a dear old friend of mine recently left us.’

‘You mean he died? Who?’

‘
Doesn’t matter. He was unwilling to break silence for the
film. Would never have been involved. But I’m very upset
about it.’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry, Max.’

‘I heard yesterday. It’s all very sad. We’ve all been through
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so much together.’
Max cleared his throat.
‘Call me when
you’re in France. We can talk more then. We’ll meet when
you get back.’

‘Wait.’ But Max had already hung up.

106

HELTER SKELTER

‘Whatever you have read about the murders, this book will still shock you.’

Irvine Levine,
Last Days

EIGHT

outside mortain, lower normandy,

france. 15 june 2011

Another text message chimed its arrival on Kyle’s phone.

From Max:
Film every building. I want Brother Gabriel in
every room.
It was the ninth message from Max since they’d arrived in France with Brother Gabriel sat like a little doll on the back seat of the minivan.

‘Enough already, Max!’ The revival of his suspicions about Max’s disingenuous nature, twinned with a previously un -

disclosed habit of micro-managing a shoot, was now augmented by lumbering them with a genuine nutjob from the old cult. Irritation hardened to resentment. And it was hard to shift.

There had been eight hours on the ferry to Normandy from Portsmouth; the night crossing entirely sleepless because of Brother Gabriel’s relentless monologues, directed at them while they sat upon chairs bolted to a listing floor. The ferry journey was immediately followed by Kyle’s confusion and unspoken terror when driving from Le Havre to Mortain, on what would always feel like the wrong side of the road to an English motorist.

‘What’s up?’ Dan said, as much to break from Brother 109

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Gabriel’s latest spell of autodidactism issuing from the rear as to learn the contents of Kyle’s text message.

Kyle dropped the phone back into the cup holder. ‘Max!

Again. Fuck’s sake. We know what we’re doing! He just keeps going on, and on.’ Glancing into the rear-view mirror he caught Gabriel’s little smiling eyes behind his spectacles, the lenses coated in a mosaic of crushed dandruff and finger prints.
How can he see through those bins?
Gabriel seemed delighted in Kyle’s irritation with Max.

‘Lot of it about, mate,’ Dan said, and looked out the passenger window; more to escape Gabriel’s sulphurous breath, whenever his shrunken head appeared between the headrests, than through any interest in the countryside. A landscape that seemed entirely composed of three colours: green, chalk-white and stone-grey. Around the car the fields and little farms were inoffensively monotonous; had Kyle not been driving on the wrong side of the road, he might have found the silty light from the low sky soothing.

He bit down upon a laugh that would have been hysterical had it escaped his mouth. And refused to believe there was another man alive who had more to say, that no one wanted to hear, than Brother Gabriel. He was also the thinnest man Kyle had ever seen. Next to the bulk of Dan, he looked like a puppet with a head crowned by a mane of long greasy grey curls, that bounced childishly about his shoulders. His face was at least two inches narrower than the oblong tortoiseshell spectacle frames that hung from ears the size of dried apricots.

They’d picked Gabriel up from Wood Green, where he existed on incapacity benefits inside a ground-floor council flat, that both he and Dan were eager to escape the moment 110

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they entered its fusty confines. It was immediately obvious that Brother Gabriel lacked the opportunity to converse with others unless they were trapped in a limited space with him.

The very moment he appeared at his front door, his small mouth opened inside the unruly white beard and hadn’t closed since. His pea coat was at least three sizes too big for his scrawny frame, even though the coat was probably intended for a boy. White animal hairs festooned its fuzzy black surface, but they had seen no dog or cat in the dim and cluttered one-bedroom flat. In which, impossibly, there was also an elderly parent in her nineties that Gabriel mentioned looking after. It had made Kyle shudder.

‘Your mum going to be all right, Gabriel?’ Dan had asked the small figure as it fussed over the closing of an aged suitcase, made from cardboard and reinforced with brass corners. ‘You’ll be back in two days, mate. Might not need all that,’ Dan had added. The case was full of clothes.

Between the hirsute lapels of Brother Gabriel’s pea coat, a green tracksuit jacket was visible, covering two other shirts, both stained around the neckline, suggesting to Kyle that once the layers were peeled off, nothing would be found besides a grubby infant skeleton. For a moment, he even worried that Gabriel was leaving home and that he and Dan were now responsible for him.