Last Days (15 page)

‘You mentioned crops. How did you plant them? How did you even farm?’

‘We, the adepts, farmed with our hands. With pieces of rock and wood. The plough and cart came with the place, but they were already broken when we arrived. They were useless to us.’

Kyle nodded, smiling.
Good. All good. Bearded and
beatific, they had come here looking for salvation
. He’d jot that line down for his voice-over.

‘Gabriel, the adepts who abandoned the farm before the schism, Levine claimed they were, and I quote, “bone-thin and dressed in rags”. Is this true?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘We all had malnutrition. I had scurvy. I remember a doctor in England was amazed. He’d never seen scurvy before.’

‘Brother Gabriel, did you know that at the time you were here, The Last Gathering’s assets were close to two million pounds?’

‘No. I did not.’

Three work benches were still in place inside the artisan’s workshop. Fitted around the old stalls that once housed cattle, maybe horses, when it was a real working farm. Heaps of dead leaves mingled with plaster and rubble on the dirt 129

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floor. Again, the windows had been smashed out from the inside.

Gabriel wouldn’t enter. He completed another quick segment to the camera outdoors, while fidgeting, and told them that as well as producing ‘some basic jewellery, and furniture’ the workshop was used to keep busy the parents separated from their children with a variety of ‘senseless tasks’.

They lit up bare black wooden beams and stained planks in the high ceiling with a selection of small lights. Much of the illumination soaked into the mould and was crushed to black.

Inside the Kennel/School building there was more light, provided by the gaps in the walls and where the roof slates had fallen into the weeds and grass outside. Dan filmed the interior with both cameras, once in natural light and once with a small rig of lights placed about the floor.

Levine claimed that some of the favoured children were eventually schooled directly by the leaders, by The Seven and Katherine herself. Levine also claimed Sister Katherine was childless and resented other women not being so. When it was put to him, Gabriel confirmed Katherine’s attitude to other women’s fertility as ‘quite likely’, but declined to elaborate.

When he refused to cross the threshold, they filmed Gabriel stood in the doorway of the Kennel/School. Kyle asked Dan to offset the frame in a close-up and a medium shot to get Gabriel and the barn in the same scene. A good call, because the position framed a powerful view of the silhouette of a shabby old man in the doorway, lit by thin light. And again, Kyle saw Gabriel suppress the urge to look over his shoulder, into a building he had being eyeing nervously since they 130

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turned their attention and the cameras upon it. Kyle watched him through the viewfinder of the second camera and briefly suffered the uneasy notion that someone else was about to appear inside the black doorway behind Gabriel. But he liked that too. It built a bit of unscheduled suspense.

Kyle read the questions from the script he’d written the day before; a script he revised after reading Levine’s book a second time in less than a week. ‘Gabriel, it is claimed that at least three infants and six adults became sick and died at this farm. This is according to a source Irvine Levine interviewed. A woman who refused to be named, and who died of an overdose while Levine’s book was still a room full of interview tapes. Do you know who that woman was?’

‘I . . . I can’t be sure. But I always suspected it was Sister Athena who spoke to Levine. She was here for most of the second year. And he was offering money to people who had nothing left.’

‘Levine said that “prayer had not been enough to heal them”. There was no proof of the deaths, they were never properly investigated, and the issue was hotly contested at the defamation trial in 1974. But what do you make of these allegations? Levine claims it’s why the Gathering fled to America to avoid any scrutiny from the deceased’s families back in England.’

Gabriel sighed, impatient, anxious. ‘What you have to remember is that there was also no proof of the infant births either. None of the original children of the Gathering had birth certificates. We didn’t even have a midwife, but three of the girls gave birth in the first year here. They had been conceived in London, but the mothers weren’t sure who the 131

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fathers were. Another two girls were pregnant when I left.’

Gabriel pointed at the black doorway. ‘But three babies were born inside there while I was here. None of them died in my time here. Nor any of the adults.’

‘Gabriel, of the five children taken into care in Arizona in July 1975, only two were born at this farm. The other three were born in the States. So what happened to the other three children born in France?’

Gabriel swallowed. ‘I don’t know. How could I? I wasn’t here in the second year. People were coming and going and dropping out all the time. No one was killed here in 1970.

It was a hard time. People got sick. I mean, we were starving.

But no one died.’

‘You know that the parents of the children found at the mine have never been traced. According to runaways, some people were said to have “simply vanished” in the desert.

From what you experienced here, could that have been true?’

‘After I left, I had no contact at all with The Temple of the Last Days! How many times do I have to repeat this? We were still The Last Gathering in 1970.’ Gabriel suddenly looked away, to the copse of trees and softened his voice. ‘I don’t know . . . about this.’

‘But if someone had died here, after you left the farm, or out in the desert later, do you think Sister Katherine would have notified the authorities?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘You doubt it?’

‘I don’t know! There is no point asking me if I don’t know!

Can we stop now?’

*

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Dan followed Gabriel back into the field to try and calm him down. Gabriel had scuttled away directly after the interview outside the school and now refused to speak to Kyle. Who had insisted on making amends, but to no avail. When Gabriel sat down in the grass above the farm, halfway back towards the copse of trees, and began to cry, Kyle withdrew.

Dan stayed with Gabriel, the first camera discreetly rolling on his Steadicam shoulder rig. ‘Get this,’ Kyle had whispered to Dan, as they passed each other. He would worry later about Gabriel retracting permission to be filmed.

Kyle entered the last building, the temple, alone. Walked carefully into the place where, according to Levine, Sister Katherine’s ego and paranoia and hateful envy poisoned her following into its first schism, when five members of her prae-torian guard, The Seven, rebelled. The Gathering’s final days in Normandy became, as Levine put it “a testament to rage, jealousy, and division. From that dreadful maelstrom of one woman’s pathological self-interest and sadistic cruelty, The Temple of the Last Days was born: the most notorious of the cult’s two incarnations.”

Inside the temple, where they’d been told Sister Katherine held her Confessions, sometimes all night long, black paint still covered the majority of the wall space. Only in a few patches did mildew-green stone peek through the paintwork.

The high wooden ceiling of the temple still retained the black paint used to promote sensory deprivation. Which accounted for the darkness, because even with four broken windows allowing in some of the pale light, Kyle could barely see his feet where they scuffed among the leaves. The shards of broken glass he found outside were painted black on one side 133

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too, so the temple had once been completely sealed from natural light.

Deeper inside, the terrible reek of decomposition startled him. Something had come inside here to die and maybe brought all of its friends too. Small deaths, old feathers, bad meat. Though he could see little of the floor and could not identify the source of the corruption.

‘Stinks,’ Dan appeared in the doorway, the camera on his shoulder.

‘Tell me about it. Let’s get started. Film the interior. I’ll get the mics and do some narration.’

‘Might be too dark, mate.’

‘Film it in what light there is first. Try that.’

Dan stared hard at the camera. ‘This has amazing receptivity to low light, but not this low. Let me fit an ND filter.

See what we get then.’

‘OK. Go get Gabriel.’

‘No chance. He says he wants to go back now. To the van.

He’s already halfway across the field.’

‘You are fucking with me, Dan!’ This was the scene into which he’d scripted Max’s questions about the presences.

‘I’m not, mate. He’s really frightened. Kind of freaking me out too.’

‘Jesus! This is going to shit.’ Kyle seized his head with both hands and closed his eyes for a while. ‘Tell you what, set the camera up for a shot of the doorway, with a filter, and I’ll do the rest of my lines. We won’t have time to come back tomorrow and do this again. You go and look after Brother Waste-of-Space, then get back and help me light this up for the second take.’

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Dan set up the camera on the tripod and began the recording, then lumbered off to find Gabriel.

Kyle crouched with his cans on, the laptop and DAT

recorder before his knees. He cleared his throat, operated the clapperboard, and unconsciously lowered his voice, as if in reverence. ‘This was the very heart of the cult, as the house in Holland Park had been its womb before the exodus to Normandy. A spiritual centre until Sister Katherine realized that celebrity in America would make more money and win more adoration than religious seclusion or her complicated theology ever could out here. Either that, or she was leaving bodies behind. A lot of bodies.

‘And when The Last Gathering wasn’t scratching out a terrible existence in the rain and soil of Normandy, the adepts spent most of their time in this building: the temple.

‘As soon as they arrived in France, this was also the place where Sister Katherine reintroduced the
presences
into the Gathering. Or the holy spirits as they were also called in France. Where she first announced: “What I am I wished to be, and what I wished to be I am.” And where she put the finishing touches to her creed of what Irvine Levine called her “malignant narcissism”; something that was to serve her well until the bloody end of it all in 1975.

‘So imagine the sallow, gaunt, and bearded faces gathered in supplication about the porcine Sister Katherine, on the throne it was said she used, raised on a little dais. Leading them through one tawdry confession after another, Maoist style. In here. Tearful outpourings of every weakness, flaw and shameful secret were chanted out in desperate voices. It must have soared to the rafters. Hungry people dehumanized.

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Driven through the most tedious and repetitive sessions of self-analysis to remove their individuality, their very identity, to induce the trance, which eventually produced a state of religious exultation, and a clear channel of communication with the presences. The Holy Spirits.

‘Or was it only madness they found in here? Merely the euphoria that comes with exhaustion? And were the presences another scam, a mere tool for Sister Katherine’s desire for control? Irvine Levine thought so.’

Swearing under his breath at Gabriel, whom he desperately needed now to elaborate on the stories about the presences, as well as being the entire reason they had come here, Kyle paused to check the sound on his two tie mics.

Cleared his throat. ‘It is said that Sister Katherine cut her sharpest teeth in here, the temple. Cultivating a master class in using sexual abstinence and sexual humiliation as a force for social control. This was the space in which adultery was enforced amongst the three married couples, to create “eman-cipation”. A place where bonds were severed, and divisions created between friends, where the mystical erotic flourished.

Though always within the strict boundaries overseen by Katherine, whose followers again had no say in who they slept with, or procreated with.

‘In an atmosphere allegedly saturated with flagellation, and even rape, five children were born in this dark and grimy barn. In a place built for livestock. But a place used by people as a place of worship, and where the congregation was bred like cattle. Exactly why she allowed her adepts to bear children, though, remains a mystery. Sister Katherine, the former prostitute and madam, eschewed a love life herself and never took a lover. As far as anyone could tell, she remained celi-136

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bate, and despised pregnant women. So why would a woman who could effectively command celibacy from her followers conduct these strange mating rituals that were almost certainly going to produce children?’

Kyle finished his piece and removed the mics. He went inside the temple to assess where they should set up the lights.

The ground oozed, then moved under his feet. He adjusted his footing, ventured further into the barn and took more photos with his stills camera: the blackened roof and the patchy walls from a distance.

The camera flash lit up the vaulted air in bursts. Moved shadows. Made intangible shapes dart back and forth in the damp miasma of neglect, as if they sought the darkness through an aversion to his light. He checked the shots on the viewfinder screen as he retreated, eager to be out of the stink and away from the source of his unpleasant thoughts that suggested a responsive character in his surroundings. Dan could get better lit footage when he came back, with or without Gabriel.

Beside the door he had come in through, he paused. And looked more closely at a section of wall four feet down from the edge of the door frame he had passed as he entered, but was now facing on exit; a place where the scent of decomposition was at its worst. The black paint had chipped away, or had
been
chipped away, and left behind what looked like the hem of a complicated stain on the pale stone. He thought of the Clarendon Road basement, of what the barrister Rachel Phillips had said. Took his mobile phone out and lit the wall up with the screen.