The Devil's Moon (34 page)

‘Avril – I'm surprised to see you here.' He offered his open hand. ‘Come out of the sunlight so I can see you.'

Avril Henderson walked over to where he was standing in the middle of the room. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. He looked beyond her into the garden. Bobby was looking up at the window; Tempest's wife was fiercely intent on her book.

Avril stepped back. ‘You wrote to Colin about that ritual you did with Aleister Crowley, Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley in Saddlescombe,' she said.

‘Load of nonsense,' Tempest said.

‘You say,' Avril said. ‘Your letter left a lot unexplained.'

‘For instance?'

‘Why there?'

Tempest took a couple of steps and looked out of the window at his family in the garden. ‘The Templars,' he said.

‘What about them?'

‘They had a powerful secret.'

‘I don't know much about the Templars.'

‘They found a ring.'

‘A
Lord of the Rings
type ring?'

Tempest laughed. ‘Probably the same ring. At least, it's where Tolkien got the idea for his ring. From Crowley, actually, in a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child over more than a few brandies.'

‘What was this ring?'

‘Solomon's ring. The Templars found it in Solomon's tomb and they brought it to Saddlescombe.'

‘Why?'

Tempest laughed again. His son was still staring up at the window. He looked at Avril and smiled. He could see why his pubescent son was staring. In her thirties – and, therefore, ancient as far as his son was concerned – Avril was a very sexy woman.

‘I don't know. But it got here via a circuitous route through Provence. It came with the kings and reached Sussex with Simon de Montfort in hot pursuit.'

‘But why Saddlescombe?'

‘It's true that London or Paris were the obvious places. But maybe a small place – a quiet place – made more sense. Kings, princes and prelates all came down. Some believed in its power and hoped to share it. Some didn't. The De Montforts, father and son, were tenacious in trying to find it. The younger Simon, the one who won the Battle of Lewes in 1264, then dismissed it as nonsense. The king – Henry III – had stayed with the ring the night before and it did him no good. Then the king's son, Edward Longshanks, defeated Simon de Montfort at Evesham, so who was laughing then?'

‘What? You mean Edward had this ring?'

Tempest shrugged. ‘Or the power of the ring. The ring never left Saddlescombe – theoretically, its power is still there.'

‘That's what he told me.'

‘Colin?'

Avril nodded. ‘But is the ring still there?' she said.

Tempest looked down at his hands and smiled. ‘At Saddlescombe? Maybe.'

She shook her head vehemently. ‘I don't want to know that unless I know where.'

‘Finding a ring on a farm sounds a bit like a needle in a haystack scenario. And I can't believe for a minute it has any power.'

‘Why but for this do you think we're living in a freezing house in the middle of nowhere?'

He shook his head. ‘I think you're probably searching in vain. I was at Crowley's funeral in 1947. The service at the crematorium.'

‘And?'

‘A lot of his stuff was burned with him.'

‘This ring of power?'

Tempest shrugged.

‘But such a ring would survive a fire, surely?'

‘If it has the power that is claimed for it.' Watts put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It's all nonsense, Avril.'

She pulled sharply away from him. ‘No. I won't believe that.' She thrust her face towards him. ‘You know why they cremated Crowley?'

‘Of course. So his grave could not become a shrine or place of pilgrimage.'

‘That – and to be sure he couldn't return. Fire destroys any chance of return. They didn't want Crowley to be a died and reborn god.'

‘He wasn't a god, Avril. When I knew him he was a drunken, drug-addicted old man wearing rouge and a wig that looked like it belonged on a mop.'

‘He had the power.'

‘He was self-deluding. The cremation ceremony included his own Hymn to Pan so one local rag described it as a black mass. It wasn't.'

‘They say you could see his spirit rising out of the crematorium's chimney in the smoke.'

‘You couldn't.'

She turned away.

‘Why did you come, Avril?' he said, remarkably softly for him.

‘I'm on a long journey,' she said.

‘I hope it's leading somewhere,' he said. ‘Excuse me a minute.'

He walked back into the garden. ‘I'm just going to give our guest a lift,' he called. ‘I'll be back in half an hour.'

Tempest had recently purchased one of the first Saab convertibles.

‘You OK with the roof down?' he said as he closed Avril's passenger door.

She nodded but said nothing, looking straight ahead. Tempest intended to have sex with her somewhere but no layby seemed appropriate. He drove into Richmond Park.

There was certainly tension in the car. He couldn't work out whether it was the right tension. He pulled into the car park.

When he put the roof up she seemed to know what was expected of her.

They were having sex when the first blackbird hit the canvas roof. He didn't know it was a blackbird. He thought it was some pervert who'd sneaked out of the bushes. The timing couldn't have been worse. The last thing he wanted to do was make her pregnant but, startled, he lost control.

A couple of moments later he glanced up and saw hundreds of black objects plummeting from the sky.

A blackbird came through the passenger window and landed beside Avril's head. Her eyes were closed but she turned her head to see this bright orange beak and dead eye beside her. She started to make guttural noises that were not screams but weren't to do with the sex.

Blackbirds rained down on the car. Two more came through the open window and landed in the driver's seat. It took them a minute or so to disentangle then another minute for him to close the windows. A bird struck Tempest a glancing blow on the side of his head.

Birds were splattered on the windscreen and on the hood. As birds thudded against the canvas above their heads and continued to rattle on the bonnet and boot Tempest was trying to remember his schoolboy physics.

Galileo had figured out that all free-falling objects fall at the same rate of acceleration. Didn't he drop a couple of cannon balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Tempest couldn't recall if anyone had been standing underneath.

Anyway, a beach ball, an aircraft or a bloody blackbird starting from the same point would all hit his car at the same time. Or was that only in a vacuum?

And what happened about the weight? Couldn't a peanut crush your skull if it had fallen far enough before impact? He knew it was something to do with Newton's second law of motion and the object's terminal velocity.

He heard a rip – the very reason his mind was racing around these questions. In practical terms, what chance did a stiffened canvas roof have of withstanding the direct impact of a blackbird that, at the point of contact could, for all Tempest knew, weigh half a ton?

Then again, the blood dripping into his eyes reminded him, his skull had survived the impact of a blackbird. Perhaps they weren't falling very far? He grimaced when he realized he was wondering how far they were falling without asking the more fundamental question: why were they falling at all?

Another ripping noise, directly above his head. A yellow beak poked through. He immediately thought of the Hitchcock film
The Birds
. Was this a scene from that? If not, it should have been. He looked at the mound of birds in the driving seat and the back seat, realized several others were crowded round his ankles and one – ugh – lay by his head, a glistening black eye staring up at him. He pushed it to the floor with the back of his hand.

The difference between what he was experiencing and the film was probably that all these blackbirds were dead. Didn't seem to help his Tippi Hedron though: Avril had gone into a rigid state of shock.

Tempest remained protectively hunched over her as the bombardment continued. He didn't know how long it actually went on – he hadn't looked at his watch when it started – but by the time it slowed down the roof was pretty much shredded and his windscreen was splintered in a dozen places.

He and Avril sat in the car a good five minutes after it seemed to have ceased, squashed together in the passenger seat. He could see in the vanity mirror that he had a deep laceration down the side of his head and a bloody gouge in his scalp.

When the sky was clear of flying objects he opened the car door and stepped out, squelching birds as he did so. The car park was littered with broken-winged, broken-backed birds. It was a dizzy collage of colours – the black of the birds, the yellow of their beaks and the crimson of their blood. Most of them had burst open on impact with the tarmac.

He helped Avril out and put the back of the passenger seat up. He helped her sit in it. For as far as he could see in the park there were smudges of black. Halfway along the road, a car, dented and buckled, had its windscreen wipers sluggishly smearing the smashed remains of the screen with blood and feathers. A dazed-looking driver stood beside the vehicle, his head tilted back to look up at the sky.

Tempest glanced at the Saab. A dozen broken birds lay on the remains of the car roof; a dozen more were piled on the buckled bonnet. He looked up. Fluffy white clouds drifted in a turquoise sky. The sun was big and bright.

He looked at the ring on his finger. He hardly ever wore it. He'd put it on today on a whim. It was among the stuff Crowley had bequeathed to Ian Fleming in 1947. Fleming had passed it on to his friend. It had been in his cufflinks box most of the time since. It looked like brass but he'd never bothered to check.

Avril was staring straight ahead when he leaned into the car and said, ‘It will take more than the AA to sort this out.'

They both burst out laughing.

I
am grateful to Diana Souhami, author of
Gluck: her biography
(Pandora) for advice about Gluck's
The Devil's Altar
. My characters' views on Gluck do not, of course, reflect hers. The painting is in Brighton's Museum and Art Gallery, where the security system is far more robust than I suggest, as it is in the Jubilee Library (which does not possess a copy of the
Key of Solomon
).

The Lewes Archaeological Museum does not possess anything belonging to John Dee. The British Museum does have some of John Dee's magical paraphernalia on display in its wonderful Enlightenment Room (Room One). The Museum of Jurassic Technology really exists in Los Angeles and contains all but the photographs as exhibits. It has no plans to open a branch in Brighton so I created a facsimile.

I have invented all employees of Brighton police, Brighton Museums, the Royal Pavilion, the Jubilee Library, Lewes Archaeological Museum and the British Museum. No character is based in any way on any real employee of those institutions. Ditto Saddlescombe's tenants.

The curious history of Edward II's shielding of the Knights Templar in Britain is true, although Saddlescombe's part in this history is my invention.

Aleister Crowley's involvement with Ian Fleming during World War II is based on anecdotal evidence, although the rituals are said to have taken place in Ashdown Forest not Saddlescombe.

Birds, fish and other creatures fall from the sky in large numbers more often than you might think . . .

Peter Guttridge, 2013