Last Days (13 page)

On the drive to Portsmouth they were regaled with long and detailed lectures about the history of the estate Gabriel lived on, its importance to psychic geographers, the building of the M25, secret allied bunkers buried in Hampshire, the possibility of Atlantis off the south coast, how psychic energy moved through ley lines and was affecting the radio that Kyle had switched on to drown out the seminar. It went on and 111

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it went on and it went on; the end of each sentence rising in a knowing ironic tone, until Dan discreetly pressed tiny head-phones into his ears and Kyle asked for ‘a bit of quiet’ so that ‘he could concentrate on driving an unfamiliar vehicle on a fast motorway’.

In a queue of cars at the ferry port, Kyle received a text message from Dan:
Guy looks like an Egyptian mummy
wearing a Harpo Marx wig. Another freak show. Going to
throw him over the side.

Kyle replied:
I’ll take his legs, you take his arms.
The idea of being trapped with the tatty little figure for the entire day, as well as the journey back, was stupefying. But during the journey, what Gabriel barely mentioned was The Last Gathering.

Past Le Havre, the nearest location the satnav recognized to the cult’s farm was the town of Mortain. The farm had no listed address. To cartographers and satnav programmers it didn’t appear to exist as anything but an empty field. From Mortain, Kyle employed a road atlas and the pen-marked photocopies of a map included in the shooting schedule. He must have overshot it again.
Must have done.
This wasn’t right; he’d gone too far south from Mortain.

You can’t see it from the road
, Max had instructed in one of his messages.
Two miles from the village you will see a
great white oak at the bottom of an incline. Opposite the
oak is the gate. You will not be able to drive to the farm.

You must climb the gate or go through the hedge. Or is it a
wall? Ask Gabriel. But you will see a distinctive copse of
trees in the field directly north of the gate. Find the oak tree
and you will find the path.

So was the last miserable collection of buildings the vil-112

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lage? It was slouched about a road so narrow there was barely room for one car, let alone the potential for oncoming agricultural traffic, which Kyle dreaded enough to chew his lip bloody. And the ‘village’ had looked deserted, even dere -

lict; every window was shuttered.

How many buildings constituted a village? He didn’t know.

Didn’t know anything. Couldn’t speak French. Had never driven in Europe before. His entire back was a swamp and he visualized a moist Rorschach imprint upon the seat covers of the hire car, which was repeatedly grazed by the bushes and tree branches intruding upon the shadowy lane, while he tried to read the map and watch the road and listen to the satnav over Brother Gabriel’s most recent oration about a Templar sect within the French government.

When the road widened sufficiently to allow a manoeuvre, he performed an ungainly ten-point turn, then retraced his tracks. ‘Any of this look familiar, Gabriel?’ He shouted over the headrest.

‘How many times are you going to ask me? I don’t

remember it.’

‘You used to live here!’

For once Gabriel lacked an answer.

‘I mean, can you tell us something useful? Forget the conspiracy behind the EU, yeah? No use to us out here, mate.’

Dan smiled, but turned to Kyle and nudged his shoulder.

‘Chill.’

There were so many trees along the hedgerow, Kyle began to doubt he knew what an oak tree looked like. When he was a child there had been one in his parents’ garden. He remembered sliding down the outside of the trunk on a scorching summer’s day, wearing only his swimming costume, 113

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his thin arms and immature legs gripping the unforgiving bark like a bear. For a few seconds after the accident his mother thought he’d castrated himself. He remembered her bathing his ‘tail’ in the bathroom with antiseptic, while he held cotton wool against his cut face with one hand and a wet flannel pressed against his bloodied nipple with the other.

His nose and forehead had been a constellation of scabs for the rest of the summer.

He punched the steering wheel. Stomped the brakes. The jolt threw them all forward in their seats.

‘What’s up?’ Dan asked.

‘Would it not have been better to study the map before we left the cafe?’ Gabriel droned.

First gear
: he paused beside every substantial tree for a mile, retraced his tracks to see if it jogged his memory of what oak trees look like, until the road sloped.
The incline?

‘Getting anything here, Gabriel?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Because if it’s not here, then I don’t know where the fuck it could be. If it even exists!’

‘Oh it does. The stones they used to build—’

‘Not now, Gabriel,’ Dan said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to hold forth when the camera’s rolling, yeah?’

Kyle inched the bonnet forward to the next substantial tree.
Maybe this big bastard is the oak.
Yes, unmistakable once he was under it: a wide, short trunk that looked climbable and a great flowering of branches and leaves that covered the lane and put the car into darkness. He killed the satnav. Lowered the passenger-side window and peered past Dan. There was an inlet in the foliage opposite the oak, but no gate. The hedge was thick and overgrown.

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Kyle unbelted and climbed out of the van on rubbery legs.

Peered over the hedge on tiptoes. About one hundred metres inside the empty field the hedge protected, he saw an island of trees.
The copse?

Under his feet, he found a break in the ditch beside the narrow stony road: a flat mound of earth, covered in grass that dampened his jeans to the knee. He stood on it and pulled branches from the thick hedge aside. Spotted a gate -

post two feet in. ‘Found it!’

The sun would be going down in under four hours.
Better
to be done by night. Don’t arouse suspicion
: instructed Max’s final text, before the signal on their phones vanished.

Why? And from whom?
he’d texted back. Max never answered.

Kyle thrashed himself through the bracken and hedge.

Held it aside for Dan to come through backwards with the cameras and the first of the equipment bags. Gabriel followed, gingerly, on his little feet.

They stumbled into a meadow; an ocean of weeds and nettles and rough grasses that were damp and reached Kyle’s waist. Somewhere underneath the scrub was the path Sister Katherine’s adepts had taken on journeys to and from the village, from where they sold eggs, shipped out their handmade crafts, the manuscript of Katherine’s book, and the editorial to their publisher in Dorset to be transformed into the increasingly surreal magazine,
Gospel
. Max had included a surviving copy of the book and two of the rare maga

-

zines in his file. The book was almost unreadable; a beatific, Old Testament-styled manifesto of self-publicizing gibberish, espousing Katherine’s belief in her own divinity, her role as 115

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saviour to her flock, and her self-pitying rants about persecution and exodus from a fallen world. One she had turned her back upon in pursuit of veiled suggestions of the God-like immortality she and her flock would attain through faith in isolation. The magazine reiterated much the same, as well as the promise of salvation from the horrors of family, society and government, but only through devotion to her, of course, and her revelatory insights. Neither seemed much of a testament to anything but an imaginative mania and monumental ego.

The ground had not been tended in years, perhaps since the farm was abandoned in March 1972, after the Gathering endured its second excruciating winter. According to Max, the place had never been sold and was still owned by the estate of The Temple of the Last Days, which made Max’s fears about arousing suspicion puzzling. Max had been unable to find out anything else about the probate of the organization, but its holdings were kept by a front company in Nassau. If the abandoned farm was still owned by an organization that ceased to exist forty years before, then why worry about trespassing?

Stay on the path
, Max had also instructed, most significantly, and only once they were on the French side of the channel.
Katherine claimed she put down traps to deter the
crude and to punish fleeing apostates. I heard they were the
kind of traps once used to catch badgers and wild dogs. They
are spring-loaded and can smash a man’s leg. The teeth are
steel and will go down to the bone. I always thought it was
a lie, and they would (surely?) have been removed by now;
I mean, it’s been forty years. But just in case, stay on the
path. Please.

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When Kyle shared the information, it had not gone down well in the minivan. And Brother Gabriel could not confirm or deny the story about the traps. He had left the farm late in the first year.

‘What bloody path?’ Kyle stared at the acres of overgrown farmland, bordered on two sides by distant wire fences and dark foliage. The copse of trees was the only distinguishing feature inside the visible meadow. Beyond the ragged trees, he guessed the wild paddock continued. ‘Hippy bullshit.’

Looking down, he could see no further than his belt and his mind supplied an image of something rusty and skeletal against the soil. Jaws open and serrated. A little pressure-activated plate covered in pale weeds. Waiting four decades to finally close faster than a blink. His rectum squeezed itself into an even tighter ring.

No one would hear their cries; the village was two miles distant and appeared deserted. Neither Dan nor Gabriel could drive. Kyle imagined his fingers slippery with hot blood, pulling uselessly at rusty steel in the dark. He pushed the image from his thoughts. He had to assume it was a rumour – another one. What would Max know anyway?

He’d bottled it long before it all went bad out here.

‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Dan said, as he surveyed the meadow.

‘Over to you, Gabriel,’ Kyle said.

‘You’re the minesweeper, mate,’ Dan said, with a chuckle.

But Gabriel didn’t find it funny; he barely stood upright, and remained shrunken into the hedgerow, as if ready to bolt for the van. His thin face was ashen, and his tiny dark eyes shuttered up and down rapidly.

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‘You all right, mate?’ Dan asked. Then looked at Kyle.

‘Must be flashbacks.’

The ground they stood on had been the only thing to mute Gabriel, which didn’t reassure Kyle. ‘Let’s get some footage as we go through the meadow. Could be cool. It’ll suggest just how remote this place is.’

‘I don’t know,’ Gabriel’s voice was almost a whisper.

‘The overgrown path, I reckon, would logically follow a straight route up to those trees. The farm must be somewhere behind them. That right, Gabe?’ Dan said.

Gabriel nodded.

‘We’ll need you out front, mate. For the shot.’ There was a tinge of sadistic delight in Dan’s tone; payback for the hours of Gabriel’s unfilmed narration in the van that wouldn’t make the extras on any DVD.

Kyle couldn’t resist the temptation to tease Gabriel either.

‘Yes, talk us through your feelings about being the first member to return here after forty years.’

‘I need to speak to Max,’ Gabriel said.

‘No signal,’ Dan said, as he prepared the camera tripod.

‘We’ve come too far to go back now,’ Kyle said to Gabriel.

‘We just need to get up there, shoot what’s left of the buildings, get your pieces done to camera, and then follow our tracks back to the gate. A hot meal and a hotel bed, a few cold beers. All on expenses. Easy.’

Gabriel didn’t look convinced.

Kyle softened his voice; he was under an open sky and the stress of the drive had begun to work itself out of his body.

‘Now is not the time to be having second thoughts. I understand you went through a lot out here—’

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‘No you don’t.’

‘OK, I imagine that it was hard, but revisiting a place like this can be cathartic. It was for Susan White. You know, Sister Isis, when we took her to Clarendon Road? And you did agree to this.’

‘I know. I know. But now I’m here, I can . . .’

‘What?’

Gabriel beseeched Kyle’s face with his small watery eyes.

‘I can feel
them
. It’s like they never left.’

Kyle tried to divide the grasses with his hands to see where his engineer boots sank, but it was no more effective than parting dirty water. For the first ten steps, he winced, tiptoed, stumbled twice. Then went back to the hedge and found a dead branch. He used it to prod the ground before him, and to guide each boot down to the earth.

Carrying the bag of lights and all of the sound equipment, he kept the technique up until he reached the copse of trees; by then, he sweated hard, his shoulders ached, and his neck was one column of stiffness and pain.
Slow going.
Thirty-five minutes to cross a field. The sun was still out, but not so strong now, and they’d need the last of the afternoon light; no way was he going through this again the day after.

Gabriel had refused to go first, so there was no opening shot of an old survivor walking back to the ruin of so many dreams and hopes. Instead, Gabriel kept close to Dan’s giant footsteps, and peered around nervously the further they moved inside the meadow. His fear didn’t look like an act, but Kyle barely kept the lid on his irritation.

As an alternative, Dan had filmed the empty meadow from the hedgerow. Then filmed Kyle as he prodded the ground 119

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for traps and recorded some narration. At least the myth about the hidden traps would make a nice suggestion of Katherine’s maniacal control over the cult in France.

‘The Last Gathering were swept out here on a great tide of faith, after Sister Katherine’s first prophecy. That they all apparently shared. And by now in their strange story, The Last Gathering were vegetarian. They had no farming skills, no field craft, only some basic carpentry, and they nearly starved out here in their first year. They just literally showed up in the uniforms they stood up in, and set about the construction of ‘paradise’. But with us today is Brother Gabriel, who fled the organization at the end of its first gruelling year out here . . .’