Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (17 page)

T
HEIR PATHS DIDN’T
cross for the rest of that Michaelmas Term. Guy looked out for her in every pub he visited, every Junior Common Room, on the street, in the quads, in the lecture halls, even down by the river. He didn’t know which college she was at, what course she was doing, anything other than her nationality and her first name. It was a fruitless search. There were other girls interested in him – he slept with one or two of them – but he kept biding his time, waiting for a second chance with Molly. If he got it, he wouldn’t bungle it this time. He promised himself that.

Hilary Term came, bitter cold, with mist hanging perpetually over the spires and meadows. Guy was strolling back to his college early one morning after a drunken hook-up with a girl from St Hilda’s. He was crossing Magdalen Bridge when who should he see coming the opposite way but Molly. She was on a bicycle, pedalling serenely down the High, lost in her thoughts, a million miles away.

Guy hailed her, but she didn’t hear. He darted across the road, narrowly avoiding getting run over by a Hillman Imp. The driver’s irate horn-tooting caught Molly’s attention; she spied Guy and braked.

“You,” she said, sounding both mystified and delighted. “Sideburns boy. Hi.”

“Hi yourself,” said Guy.

“I haven’t seen you since, well, ever. Where have you been hiding?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Want to get breakfast? There’s this café up Cowley Road serves great bacon and eggs and the thickest toast you’ve ever seen. Plus real coffee, not instant. I was just going myself.”

“Kismet,” said Guy.

T
HEY BECAME AN
item. That was the word Molly used for them, so Guy used it too. Item. Not inseparable. Molly needed her space. She didn’t want to hang out with him all the time. She was a liberated female. She valued her independence. But two or three nights a week he would stay over at her digs, the tiny terraced house she shared with two other girls in Jericho, down near the canal. She was a second-year, living out of college, so there weren’t any restrictions about overnight guests for her as there were for him. On her narrow mattress on the floor, by the soft glow of a batik-draped lamp, with
Moondance
or
Tapestry
on the turntable, Guy had never been happier.

It was Molly who suggested, late one evening, that the two of them hold a séance using a Ouija board. She’d done it with school friends back in Wisconsin. It had been spooky and a bit freaky but still fun. She wasn’t sure they had made actual contact with the Other Side, but some of the messages the board spelled out had been scarily close to the truth, stuff she and her friends hadn’t known they’d known, things about the other townsfolk, secrets and such.

“C’mon,” she said, fetching the Ouija board out of her cupboard, “it’ll be a gas.”

They sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the floor, the board between them. A candle wedged into the neck of a Mateus Rosé bottle was their only illumination. They had shared a joint earlier and Guy was still a little lightheaded from that, and from the couple of glasses of cheap plonk he had downed. Dimly he recalled his escapade in the cricket pavilion at Scarsworth Hall with Clive Milward, the so-called black mass. He felt less trepidation now than he had then. He and Milward had not managed to raise Satan, had they? It was all bollocks. Childish nonsense. Demons and spirits and séances... But he would indulge Molly. He could deny her nothing. Sometimes her unpredictability vexed him; sometimes her mood swings caught him on the hop. Nonetheless, he was truly this woman’s lapdog.

Molly placed the planchette in the centre of the board, rested her fingers on it and instructed Guy to do likewise.

“You have to clear your mind,” she said. “Empty your thoughts. There’s no room for doubt or cynicism here. You must be open to what lies beyond. We both must. We must let the spirits enter us and speak through us.”

Guy nodded. It was cold in Molly’s room. A single-bar electric fire was doing little to dispel the damp February chill.

“Wait for it,” Molly said. “Wait...”

Guy waited, wondering idly whether his tutor would grant him an extension on his essay on Keynesian Macroeconomics and the Relationship Between Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply. It was due in the day after tomorrow and he hadn’t done nearly enough of the background reading, let alone begun to plan his argument. He also thought of his mother. How was she doing? It had been a drab Christmas, just the two of them again, her still drinking too much. He kept encouraging her to find a new man, have some fun in her life, but she maintained that nobody could replace his father, and he had to admit she might be right.

“Yes,” said Molly, almost a gasp. “Yes, they’re here. The spirits are here. Can you feel it?”

To be honest, Guy could not. The air had grown a little colder – a draught sneaking in around the ill-fitting window sash – but nothing else seemed to have changed. If entities from beyond the veil were in the room, they weren’t making their presence perceptible to him.

“Ask them something,” Molly said. “Go on. Something you’ve been burning to know.”

“All right. Is Molly Rosenkrantz going to give me a blowjob tonight?”

“Asshole!” She was surprisingly cross. “Don’t mess about. This is serious shit.”

“I am serious. And the answer is...”

He shoved the planchette over to the YES on the board.

“Bingo,” he said. “The spirits never lie.”

Molly thumped him in the chest. Pretty hard, too. “Guy Lucas, you do that again and you can get the fuck out of here right now and never come back. I mean it. This isn’t the time for goofing around.”

“Okay, okay. I apologise. I’m British. We find it difficult to do anything solemn with a straight face. You always say I should learn to hang loose. Well, okay. This is me, hanging loose.” He rolled his shoulders, cricked his neck. “I’m ready now. Let’s try again. I swear I’ll do it properly.”

They laid their fingertips back on the planchette.

“Spirits, can you hear me?” Molly intoned. “Return to us. Share with us your wisdom and knowledge. Are you there?”

Nothing happened.

Then, to his surprise, Guy felt the planchette begin to move. He wasn’t pushing it. Was Molly?

The heart-shaped piece of wood slid across the board on its three stubby legs. It came to rest with its tip pointing firmly at YES.

“Wow,” said Molly. “Groovy.”

“Yeah, groovy,” Guy echoed uncertainly.

“Go on, ask them a question,” she urged. “A real one, this time.”

“Okay. Ummm... Will I graduate with a first?”

“
That’s
your question?”

“It’s important to me.”

“Kind of materialistic, though. Thinking about your own worldly progress.”

“Well, I don’t know. How about this? Spirits, do Molly and I have a future together?”

“You can’t expect ––”

The planchette interrupted her by moving. It scuttled over from YES to NO.

“Oh,” said Molly, and “Oh,” said Guy too. She was embarrassed. He was crestfallen.

“Why?” Guy blurted out, before he could stop himself.

The planchette headed for the letters of the alphabet, arranged in two rows across the middle of the board. Gliding from one to another, it spelled out a word.

M-A-D-N-E-S-S.

“‘Madness’?” said Molly. “I don’t get.”

“This is daft. Let’s stop.”

“No. What is it saying? I’m not mad. Okay, so I can get a little flaky from time to time, but...”

The planchette was on the move again. The whole thing was just too eerie. Guy knew he had nothing to do with its activity, and was almost entirely convinced that Molly wasn’t responsible either. She looked genuinely baffled, verging on distressed. Some other force was guiding the planchette, something from elsewhere. Their hands were mere passengers.

P-O-S-S-E-S-S-I-O-N, the planchette said.

Neither Molly nor Guy spoke.

Finally Molly stammered, “W–what’s that supposed to – ?”

The planchette raced back and forth, visiting five letters in swift succession.

D-E-V-I-L.

“Oh, God,” she breathed.

The planchette darted to the same five letters again.

D-E-V-I-L.

And again.

And again.

Until at last Guy, with a cry of “That’s enough!” snatched his fingers away.

The planchette shot across the room, as though fired from a catapult. It rebounded off the wall and skidded under Molly’s desk. It was as though energy had been building up in the thing, and the moment Guy let go, the energy had been violently released.

Guy sat trembling, his gaze fixed on the planchette where it lay poking out beside the desk leg. He was aware that his breath was coming in short bursts, as though he had been sprinting. He no longer felt lightheaded. He was as sober as he had ever been, his entire body seeming electrified, every sense and synapse on high alert.

He turned to look at Molly.

Molly’s eyes were rolled back inside their sockets. Only the whites showed. Her head was canted slightly backwards. Her chest heaved.

Then came the voice.

It was not Molly’s voice.

It was barely even a human voice.

“Guyyy,” it grated. “Guyyyy Luuuucassss.”

Guy nearly pissed himself then and there.

The voice continued, growl-hissing from Molly’s throat like an escape of steam from a broken pipe. It sounded like the voice of someone who had not spoken in a thousand years, whose tongue was dust and whose lips were sand.

“You’re mine, Guyyy. We belong together, we two. We have a bond that none can break. Your fate is fused with mine.”

“Stop this. Molly, stop this. It isn’t funny.”

“Molly isn’t here. You know who I am.”

“No, I don’t. Molly, stop taking the piss. You’re totally weirding me out.” He said this, not because he believed she was playing a trick on him, but because he
wanted
to believe it. So much.

“We’re never going to be apart,” the voice that wasn’t Molly’s said. “How else can it be? You made a commitment to me. Did you think that that wouldn’t matter? Did you think I’d
forget
?”

Guy slapped her face. It was all he could think of to do. He needed to snap Molly out of this trance she was in, or whatever it was. But there was repugnance behind the blow, too. He had to make the horror of what was happening go away. Somehow. Anyhow.

Molly reeled. Her eyelids fluttered like those of a sleeper coming round. Her hand went to her cheek.

“Ow,” she said, and then, louder, “Owww. What the – ? Guy, why the hell did you just hit me?”

“Why the hell did you just talk to me in that creepy voice?”

“What creepy voice? What do you mean?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Like a
Scooby-Doo
monster.”

“I have no fucking idea what you’re going on about.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. But I can tell you this, buster. Nobody hits me. Especially no man. Get out. Get out of here, this instant, or I call the cops.”

Guy stood. He grabbed his velvet jacket and his army-surplus overcoat. “I’m going, all right. That was a really nasty little stunt you just pulled, Molly. Hope you’re pleased with yourself. Know what? The Ouija board was right. Madness. There’s something profoundly wrong with you, you crazy bitch.” He tapped his temple. “Up here. You are one seriously fucked-up human being.”

He stormed out of the room. Molly’s housemates were downstairs, watching
Callan
on a tiny black-and-white portable. They peered out through the living-room doorway as he raged past.

“’Bye,” Guy said to them, meaningfully, and slammed the front door behind him.

T
HERE WAS A
note in his pigeonhole in the porters’ lodge the next morning. All it said was:

We need to talk. The Bodleian. Catte Street entrance. 4pm.

M

He made sure not to turn up. He spent the whole of the next fortnight scrupulously steering clear of Molly’s known haunts and spent as little time as he could in his room at college in case she sought him out there. He buried himself in his studies. His Keynes essay was one of his best, earning him a rare “A,” and he also turned in a pretty good dissection of the
Critique Of Pure Reason
and Kant’s counterargument to Hume’s assertions about empiricism.

A second note came from Molly. This one he didn’t read at all, just tore up and chucked in the bin.

The rational part of him kept insisting that it had all been a sham. Molly had put on a fake voice and groaned out that stuff about them belonging together, their fates being fused, all the rest. What for? Maybe to contradict the Ouija board’s initial verdict about their relationship. Maybe to provoke a row, for her own perverse satisfaction. Maybe to get back at him for that blowjob wisecrack. Maybe simply to mess with his head. Who knew? Some barmy reason, at any rate.

But a deeper, less rational part of him couldn’t help but ask: what if it had been no pretence? What if the séance had opened a portal to the netherworld and allowed
something
to enter Molly and take up residence inside her? What if she had become a mouthpiece, a puppet, for some malign creature with designs on him?

Guy’s nerves were jangled. He felt as anxious as he had in the days immediately following the half-baked ‘black mass’ in the pavilion. All at once he was a fretful schoolboy again, terrified at having transgressed against God’s will. He even attended a Sunday service at the college chapel. Religious observance had been compulsory at Scarsworth Hall; here at university it was optional, more or less an irrelevance. To sit in a pew and sing hymns and pray meant something. But he felt no better afterwards. His inner self didn’t feel lighter or unburdened or spring-cleaned, as he had hoped.

So he went home for the weekend. To be away from Oxford. To get some distance from the place, some perspective. He took the train down to London.