The Devil's Moon (27 page)

He set the scalpel against his forehead. ‘So instead I shed my blood.'

As he said this he cut his forehead with the scalpel then made other rapid cuts all about his shaved head. Blood spurted and flooded in a sheet down his face. Kate cowered away, even though she was nowhere near the front of the church. No one else cowered away. On the contrary.

The vicar held out cloths in both hands to catch the blood.

‘Bathe in my holy, blessed blood,' he shouted, passing the cloths to two people in the front row.

He started down the central aisle, shaking his head as he did so. People leaned towards the spray of blood. Kate leaned away, feeling nauseous.

As he walked the vicar was talking rapidly. The congregation was wailing and moaning at increasing volume and attempting to repeat the vicar's words, which, as best Kate could hear, were gibberish.

People were grabbing for the rags or rushing out into the aisle to dab their own cloths in his blood. The people to her left pushed by her to get to him, allowing her to retreat against the side wall. All around were raised, nonsensical voices; blood-smeared people writhing or tearing at their clothes.

In the bedlam Kate felt increasingly giddy and the vicar strutting back to the front of the church, his bare, flabby buttocks wobbling, making Kate even more nauseous.

He raised his arms and a semblance of calm came upon the congregation, although some were still delirious and babbling. Kate saw that one man had ripped all his clothes off and was hunched naked in the corner, alternately grimacing and grinning. A woman was blowing a feather in the air. The man next to her, his face distorted in fury, tried to snatch it.

Other people were plucking at imaginary objects on their bodies. A number were staring with a strange intensity at a hand or foot or scrutinizing one of the bloody cloths. Some were licking their lips or thrusting their tongues out and panting like thirsty dogs. A few were simply reeling, others clutching at their hearts. A worrying number were convulsing.

Kate held down panic. Was this mass hysteria and, if so, was she catching it? She felt that if she moved away from the wall she too would overbalance.

The vicar, blood still streaming down his face, laughed, showing expensive dental work. He fixed his eyes on Kate and gestured round the room.

‘The important thing is having a witness to your insanity to make sense of the madness of it.'

Kate looked down at her hand, still clutching the order of service tightly. Order of service? What bloody order? A laugh bubbled up in her throat but she daren't let it out.

She jammed the paper into her bag, pushed herself away from the wall and squeezed past a comatose woman lying on a pew, a flip-flop dangling from her right foot. She staggered out into the rain.

Watts drove from Saddlescombe to Nicola Travis's house in Lewes to take her to Glyndebourne. He'd said yes to her invitation but he was nervous. He recognized she found him attractive and he certainly found her so but he had been pretty much celibate since the breakdown of his marriage.

He had wondered about prolonging his brief affair with Sarah Gilchrist but neither of them seemed to know how to take it forward. She was clearly as bad as him at developing a relationship. He liked and admired Sarah a lot and was pleased to have her as a friend. Perhaps it was easier to leave it at that. But what about Nicola?

She was in her front garden with a pair of secateurs and a trowel. She was wearing wellingtons, short shorts that showed off her strong, tanned legs and a T-shirt with the logo ‘Wind in my hair, men at my feet'. Whilst reading her chest, Watts deduced she was wearing no bra.

She grinned when she saw him, his dinner suit on a hanger draped over his shoulder.

‘Mr Watts, I know you're going to scrub up well.' She tilted one hip and angled one knee in towards the other. ‘Though I was intending to go as I am.'

‘There'd be no men watching the opera if you did,' he said, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek.

She moved her head and they were kissing on the mouth. When he pulled away she gave him a look and led him round the side of the house.

The kitchen door was open. She put the secateurs and trowel down on a table beside the door then went to the sink and washed her hands. She dried them off quickly, turned and hoisted herself on to the kitchen table. She stuck a leg out. ‘Help me with my wellies, will you?'

He took hold of her heel and pulled at the rubber boot. As he did so he was aware of her raising her arms. He put the first wellington on the floor and looked up as she dropped her T-shirt on the table behind her and leaned back. He was right about the bra.

It was some time before the other boot came off.

Kate Simpson walked unsteadily into Hove Park and sank on to a bench. She was facing a huge rock with stones around it and a fence outside that. There was a sign but she was too far away to read it. She felt drunk – no, different to that. Spaced out. She wasn't a drug user but when she had smoked marijuana the effect had been similar. Except here her limbs didn't seem to belong to her.

She stretched her hand out in front of her and examined it for any sign of familiarity. She turned the palm up and started. It was scarlet. She brought it close to her face. There was a scarlet line going up her arm.

She looked at her other hand. Normal.

She was aware she had started to sweat.

She speed-dialled the radio station's taxi firm. She stayed on the bench, breathing slowly for a few minutes, then tried standing. She walked over to the rock.

An old sign read: ‘Goldstone tolmen or the Holy Stone of Druids.'

Kate found she was mouthing each word she read. Goldstone. That was the name of the old stadium for the local football club. She looked blankly at the big rock. It was twice her height, probably three times her length. She walked round it slowly.

She came to another plaque.

‘On 3 June 1929 the Ancient Order of Druids (Brighton and Hove Royal Arch) planted an oak tree nearby. There was a ceremony and a banquet afterwards attended by many important figures in Druidism.'

She was wondering which of the trees around her was an oak when a car horn sounded. Her taxi. She glanced at her hand again then grabbed her bag and made her unsteady way out of the park.

A part of her felt she should go to A&E but the main part of her thought she should just get back to the flat and calm down.

She closed her eyes in the back of the taxi then immediately opened them as her head whirled. The streets going by also made her dizzy. She focused on the back of the taxi driver's head. He was bald but he seemed to have dandruff. The thought made her start to giggle but she forced it back down.

Back in the flat, finally, she lay down on the sofa, dropping her bag beside her. The scrunched-up order of service from the Church of Blood fell out on to the rug. She closed her eyes without feeling quite so giddy. She drifted away.

Gilchrist was thinking about her father on her way to meet Heap. Her relationship with him – there was a story. Her mother, Sylvia, had died when she was six. She had only vague memories of her. Perhaps because of her mother's death, her father became more rigorous about his religion as she got older. Not what these days would be called a fundamentalist, perhaps, but certainly extreme.

He shovelled religious shit on her until she was old enough to know better. Some of it stuck. The worst part was the guilt about perfectly natural human desires. The best of it – maybe the only good thing about it – was the morality. That morality led her to become a copper because she wanted to do good things in life.

Of course, her affair with the married Bob Watts tipped her own moral scale over to bad. And her guilt was probably what screwed that relationship even before it got going. She was a moral person, although the morality had long been disengaged from its religious source, and, well, she didn't approve of people like her.

She was still unsettled by the events of the past few days. She didn't feel fully recovered from the food poisoning she'd experienced. Occasionally she found herself going into a kind of trance. She intended to get herself checked out – just maybe not yet.

In charge of men like Donaldson she was also getting a familiar feeling she usually tried to keep away from. Old stuff welling up. Stuff to do with her father.

Heap gave her a little wave. He was standing in a narrow alley in front of a black door. ‘Welcome to the Jurassic Museum of Technology, ma'am.'

‘What is this place?'

‘A museum of curiosities. Madame Tussaud crossed with Barnum and Bailey. It's quite something.'

‘Jurassic Technology? I thought Jurassic was a period in geology. Jurassic Park – dinosaurs and stuff. Is this like the Booth Natural History Museum?'

‘Stuffed birds and foxes about to pounce? Not exactly. Nor is it dinosaurs. I don't really know what it is. There's one in Los Angeles.'

‘And?'

Heap looked down at his feet. ‘That's weird too.'

‘Weird how?'

‘They have this stuff that's . . . weird.'

‘Weird. Barnum and Bailey, whoever they are. Thanks for explaining. Linked to Devil worship in some way?'

‘Probably not. It's more that it's . . . weird.'

Gilchrist tilted her head and touched his arm. ‘You're being unusually inarticulate, Bellamy. This is Brighton, you know. Weird is the norm.'

‘Ma'am.' He pushed open the door. ‘Just a reminder: we're looking for a Roger Newell.'

It took a moment for Gilchrist's eyes to adjust to the dark. Gilchrist saw a black-bearded man, soberly dressed in a black suit and shirt behind a narrow black counter. She waited whilst Heap went over to ask for Newell. He gestured for Gilchrist to come over.

‘He'll be back in fifteen minutes, ma'am. This gentleman suggests we look round.'

Without speaking the man handed them each a floor plan of the museum. It was laid out in a series of dark rooms, each one hidden from the next. As they walked through Gilchrist was aware of ambient noise filtering in from hidden speakers. In the first room it was breathing. The only light in the room came from the glass boxes on pedestals.

Gilchrist peered into a glass box containing an insect on a leaf. ‘It's an
ant with a tie-pin sticking out of its head,' she said.

Heap read the card. ‘The stink ant of the Cameroon.
Megaloponera foetens
. Because it's so big, it's one of a very few ants whose cry can be heard by humans. It's a floor-dweller in the rain forests. And sometimes it inhales a spore from a fungus and the spore grows in the ant's brain.'

‘Do ants have brains, Bellamy?'

‘Indeed, ma'am. Tiny ones. An ant naturally has far fewer brain cells than a human but when you put ants together a colony of ants has the same size brain as us.'

Gilchrist gave him a look. ‘How do you know that?'

Heap shrugged. ‘Swot at school.' He carried on reading. ‘So this ant's behaviour changes as the spore grows in its brain. It climbs to the rain forest canopy and dies up there as the fungus eats into it and produces this spike—'

‘Tie-pin.'

‘When the tip of the spike bursts the spores rain down on the rain forest floor to get other ants.'

Gilchrist frowned. ‘That has to be a gag, doesn't it?'

Heap shrugged again.

The next room had odd barks of laughter coming out of the hidden speakers. There was a glass box containing, according to the label, the Horn of Mary Davis of Saughall. It was indeed a horn, some five inches long. According to the card it had grown out of the back of Mary's head.

‘In Cheshire,' Heap added.

‘Do you think the fact it was Cheshire is significant?' Gilchrist said.

‘You mean something in the soil? It seeds football millionaires now.'

‘This can't be right,' Gilchrist, reading, said. ‘Men grew horns in front and women behind.'

For the next five minutes they wandered through more rooms. There was a scale model of Noah's Ark. A plan of a sixteenth-century battle.

They moved into a room of Victorian photographs. There was whispered conversation just below their aural threshold although there was no one else in the room. Indeed, they seemed to be the only two visitors to the museum.

Gilchrist looked at the first two photographs then looked more closely. The first photograph was of a stocky, muscular man standing facing the camera, legs apart. He was naked except for a pair of thigh-high white women's stockings. He had bushy pubic hair and a long penis.

In the second photograph the same man was lying on his back with his knees bent, his legs apart and his feet flat on the ground. Beneath the penis, where his testicles should have been, there was a vagina.

Embarrassed, she glanced at Heap, but he was reading the card beside the first photograph. The next photograph had an anonymous hand pulling back the foreskin of the penis. In the one after the same hand was spreading the vagina.

‘The celebrated French photographer Nadar took these photographs of a hermaphrodite in 1860,' Heap read. ‘Possibly the finest examples of medical photographs ever taken, he took them at the request of Armand Trousseau who told him this patient had a “strange malady”.'

‘Armand Trousseau?' Gilchrist said.

Heap was examining the photographs. It was too dark to see if he was blushing.

‘God, they're weird,' Gilchrist said.

‘I think they're rather beautiful,' a male voice said from behind them.

Gilchrist flushed at being overheard and turned.

An androgynous young man with a pale face framed by a mass of curly hair gave a small smile. ‘I disagreed with the word “hermaphrodite” when they wrote the card but that's what such people were known as then. Today the term ‘intersex' is preferred.'

He held out his hand to Gilchrist.

‘I'm Roger Newell. I understand you want to speak to me.'