HELTER SKELTER

 

‘Whatever you have read about the murders, this book will still shock you.’

Irvine Levine, Last Days

 

EIGHT

OUTSIDE MORTAIN, LOWER NORMANDY, FRANCE. 15 JUNE 2011

Another text message chimed its arrival on Kyle’s phone. From Max: Film every building. I want Brother Gabriel in every room. It was the ninth message from Max since they’d arrived in France with Brother Gabriel sat like a little doll on the back seat of the minivan.

‘Enough already, Max!’ The revival of his suspicions about Max’s disingenuous nature, twinned with a previously undisclosed habit of micro-managing a shoot, was now augmented by lumbering them with a genuine nutjob from the old cult. Irritation hardened to resentment. And it was hard to shift.

There had been eight hours on the ferry to Normandy from Portsmouth; the night crossing entirely sleepless because of Brother Gabriel’s relentless monologues, directed at them while they sat upon chairs bolted to a listing floor. The ferry journey was immediately followed by Kyle’s confusion and unspoken terror when driving from Le Havre to Mortain, on what would always feel like the wrong side of the road to an English motorist.

‘What’s up?’ Dan said, as much to break from Brother Gabriel’s latest spell of autodidactism issuing from the rear as to learn the contents of Kyle’s text message.

Kyle dropped the phone back into the cup holder. ‘Max! Again. Fuck’s sake. We know what we’re doing! He just keeps going on, and on.’ Glancing into the rear-view mirror he caught Gabriel’s little smiling eyes behind his spectacles, the lenses coated in a mosaic of crushed dandruff and finger prints. How can he see through those bins? Gabriel seemed delighted in Kyle’s irritation with Max.

‘Lot of it about, mate,’ Dan said, and looked out the passenger window; more to escape Gabriel’s sulphurous breath, whenever his shrunken head appeared between the headrests, than through any interest in the countryside. A landscape that seemed entirely composed of three colours: green, chalk-white and stone-grey. Around the car the fields and little farms were inoffensively monotonous; had Kyle not been driving on the wrong side of the road, he might have found the silty light from the low sky soothing.

He bit down upon a laugh that would have been hysterical had it escaped his mouth. And refused to believe there was another man alive who had more to say, that no one wanted to hear, than Brother Gabriel. He was also the thinnest man Kyle had ever seen. Next to the bulk of Dan, he looked like a puppet with a head crowned by a mane of long greasy grey curls, that bounced childishly about his shoulders. His face was at least two inches narrower than the oblong tortoiseshell spectacle frames that hung from ears the size of dried apricots.

They’d picked Gabriel up from Wood Green, where he existed on incapacity benefits inside a ground-floor council flat, that both he and Dan were eager to escape the moment they entered its fusty confines. It was immediately obvious that Brother Gabriel lacked the opportunity to converse with others unless they were trapped in a limited space with him. The very moment he appeared at his front door, his small mouth opened inside the unruly white beard and hadn’t closed since. His pea coat was at least three sizes too big for his scrawny frame, even though the coat was probably intended for a boy. White animal hairs festooned its fuzzy black surface, but they had seen no dog or cat in the dim and cluttered one-bedroom flat. In which, impossibly, there was also an elderly parent in her nineties that Gabriel mentioned looking after. It had made Kyle shudder.

‘Your mum going to be all right, Gabriel?’ Dan had asked the small figure as it fussed over the closing of an aged suitcase, made from cardboard and reinforced with brass corners. ‘You’ll be back in two days, mate. Might not need all that,’ Dan had added. The case was full of clothes. Between the hirsute lapels of Brother Gabriel’s pea coat, a green tracksuit jacket was visible, covering two other shirts, both stained around the neckline, suggesting to Kyle that once the layers were peeled off, nothing would be found besides a grubby infant skeleton. For a moment, he even worried that Gabriel was leaving home and that he and Dan were now responsible for him.

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 it went on and it went on; the end of each sentence rising in a knowing ironic tone, until Dan discreetly pressed tiny headphones 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 village? 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 derelict; 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, 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.

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 gatepost 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 magazines 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 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 Godlike 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.

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.

‘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—’

‘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 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 . . .’

Dan had turned the tripod about and filmed the little furtive figure who never broke his intense stare from the earth.

At the copse of trees, Kyle withdrew three bottles of water from his rucksack and handed them out. He drank two-thirds of his own. Lit a cigarette. Smoking, he moved carefully between the trees, their roots choked with nettles and blackberry vines. Every dead brown branch amongst the fallen leaves resembled corroded metal.

When he passed through the copse, he saw the farm.

Small trees partially concealed grey stone walls and slate roof tiles. Four buildings slouched against each other in grass that reached gaping ground-floor windows. The doors and windows were long gone in the biggest structure; the large white farmhouse the adepts had lived in communally.

According to Irvine Levine, the two buildings adjacent to the farmhouse had been used as an artisan’s workshop and a temple respectively. There was another agricultural building with a lean-to barn against it, but Kyle couldn’t remember its purpose. Sister Katherine had lived alone in a small fermette on its own plot of land somewhere nearby; the only building in the settlement with plumbing and electricity. He couldn’t see the fermette, but apparently it wasn’t far.

The reddy-brown building he couldn’t remember the function of was the only structure with timber walls. A few of the vertical planks had fallen into the grass. Tilting inwards from the centre, the roof was concave. The main doors were gone too, but between the upright timbers the inner space was impenetrably dark. As were the interiors of the three stone buildings.

‘Gonna get the whole thing on that new two hundred millimetre lens,’ Dan said. He didn’t like using a zoom, he liked changing lenses.

‘If you must. Thirty-five mil’ will be fine.’

‘This is my David Lean moment, so step down.’

They colour-balanced both cameras and Kyle broke out the Sennheiser mic they used for exteriors. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch, but they had the collection of lights until the portable batteries ran down. ‘Gabriel. See that wooden building, with the lean-to.’

‘Barn. It was a barn.’

‘What did you use it for?’

‘The children.’

‘You put kids in that?’

Gabriel stayed quiet. Kyle let the silence play without further enquiry.

They entered the farm and stood in what must have once been a courtyard before the largest building. The remnants of an old plough and collapsed cart peeked from out of the long grass like mottled elephant bones.

It was here Kyle became aware of the silence, as he concentrated on framing shots for the best possible composition now he had more to look at than a black and white photograph in Levine’s book. And he found the quiet unnerving, as if it were accompanied by scrutiny. Though it was more than merely the absence of sound and the ominous aura that issues from dilapidation that affected him; there was a profound stillness too.

The air was thick and cool and undisturbed by even a hint of the breeze blowing across the meadow; not a single insect fluttered or buzzed near them, though they had been active in the meadow they came through. But the atmosphere about the farm was not what he would have called peaceful. It was an atmosphere more akin to anticipation.

Gabriel sat in the grass at the edge of the courtyard and peered at the buildings. He looked like a child with an old man’s head.

In between instructions to Dan, who needed little direction on shoots, Kyle began to take exterior shots with his stills camera. Then he set the second camera up near the barn; they always cut between two cameras. One day, he’d love to cut between four. Dream on.

They began with the establishing shots. His choice of opening shot in any scene always demonstrated a statement of intent as a director. And it would all be about dilapidation in this case: emptiness, the atmosphere of age, a mood of neglect. A place more dramatically marked than the London house; in his imagination it even began to appear tainted as if by some invisible presence that had once passed through, or even resided. He cut the musings dead because it looked like Gabriel was experiencing a similar reverie.

‘You sure you got all the shots you need?’ he asked Dan after an hour.

Dan nodded from behind the first camera. ‘Master shots look good. I got cutaways and will get some decent close-ups now.’

The location didn’t look as if it was going to present any technical problems. Lights would be needed for some of the interiors. The rest of the footage would be composed of stationary interviews, long shots, medium shots and close-ups. ‘I’ll give Max one thing, he knows how to pick a badass location.’

Dan nodded, his face one big grin.

Retrieving his copy of Irvine’s Last Days and the script from his rucksack, Kyle opened the book at the plate section and found the scale diagram of the farm. Imagined the place from the air. Opposite the map of the farm, one of the sixteen photos included in the ‘Sensational True Crime Classic’ distracted him. In it, the photographer had captured the farmhouse from where he crouched. In the black and white photograph there were panes of glass in the window frames, and pale wooden doors over the stone thresholds. Before the farmhouse, twelve of the adepts were pictured. A dozen of the twenty-three men and women who remained in the Gathering at that point.

In the photo, the men wore their hair long, and were heavily bearded. Most were smiling. The picture was taken in 1970, but looked as if it had been taken in 1870. They were a strange combination of Dominican monk, Old Testament prophet, and hippy. In the picture, the adepts all wore the hooded robes that had made them famous on the streets of London, and later in Los Angeles and Yuma.

‘Gabriel.’ Kyle beckoned him over with his head. Taking gentle and light-footed steps, Gabriel moved and stood beside Kyle, who showed him the photograph. Dan looked away from the viewfinder and listened to Kyle; it was all Dan would usually need to get the best shot. ‘I want you to stand over by the main building, where this lot are in the photo. You don’t have to say a thing. OK. You see this photo?’ Gabriel nodded. ‘We’ll drop in a B-roll slide of this photo, and then you in colour right after. We’ll fade from one into the other, yeah? Then-and-now sort of thing.’

‘How long is this going to take?’

‘That’ll be up to you, I’m afraid.’

The way Gabriel looked at the buildings informed Kyle they would struggle to get the old man inside any of them, unless he suddenly warmed up like Susan White. When Gabriel dragged his feet down to the long white dormitory, Dan whispered, ‘Bottle’s gone.’

Kyle returned his attention to the photo. According to the index, none of The Seven were present. This was the only picture of the farm Max knew of. Irvine Levine had bought it from an ecstatic called Sandy Wallace, aka Sister Juno, now long dead from septicaemia. She had escaped not long before the schism.

Beneath the hems of the ecstatic’s robes, Kyle could see sandaled feet; a symbol of their ascetic lifestyle. Irvine Levine claimed that in France the more attractive female adepts were permanently hooded and veiled around Sister Katherine. She wasn’t keen on competition. But in the photo, the five women in shot were all visible; young and pretty, freckled by the sun, their slender shoulders enshrouded by long straight hair. The girls held the leashes of the visible dogs. Sister Katherine’s beloved ‘vargs’; the huskies she adored and brought over from England, and who had always eaten better than the adepts.

Kyle checked the index next to the scale diagram of the farm and saw that the dilapidated wooden building, which he had been unable to remember the purpose of, had ‘Kennel/School’ indicated as its function. ‘Gabriel, when you were here, were the dogs kept in that barn with the children?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘The children born at the farm were put into communal care immediately after birth. The infants were kept in little handmade cribs, though. The older children slept on mattresses,’ Gabriel offered, as if as an excuse.

‘In that terrible building. With the dogs. Jesus,’ Dan said to himself.

Kyle walked into shot and positioned the tie mics on Gabriel.

Kyle had never been interested in art directors; didn’t want places made interesting. He’d found by experience, if he looked hard enough in the right way, a location was already perfect for his purposes. They were what they were. As scruffy, downbeat, disused as the places he filmed usually were, those very qualities made them interesting. At least to him, and were often an essen tial part of the story he was trying to tell. Same with the burned-out cottage he’d filmed in Scotland for Coven, and the dreadful graffiti-strewn Oslo tenement he’d shot in Blood Frenzy, as if the terrible things that occurred in certain places left them abandoned and irretrievably dilapidated as a kind of reckoning. And this farm issued more than any dressed-up set ever could.

Kyle peered through a corroded window frame in the long white farmhouse; the old living quarters of the Gathering’s penultimate retreat from the world. Sunlight fell through broken windows and two large door frames in the wall that faced the courtyard, and created a weak brown haze inside. Broken glass crunched under Dan’s boots when he’d set up the camera for close-ups of the exterior. The windows had been smashed out from the inside.

From his sources, Irvine Levine claimed a terrible storm destroyed the roofs, windows and crops of the settlement at the time of the schism. But then Irvine had never actually been to the farm.

Kyle stepped through the doorway. The unmistakable tang of animal urine made him sniff and wince; it was compounded by the fungal scent from the black spores blotching the stone walls. An additional odour of damp wood and perhaps a whiff of stale carrion filled his sinuses.

‘Dan!’

Dan came through the door after him. ‘Creepy.’

‘I want you to get all of this for cutaways. See how it looks with no lights too.’

‘Can do.’

‘This is going to look bitchin’, my friend.’

‘You want to do some lines?’

‘Not yet. Just shoot it and make it look all Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And let’s line up the mics. I want to hear this place’s voice.’

‘Will do my best.’

‘You always do, mate. Which is why I’d kiss you if you’d bothered to shave this morning.’

Dan snorted. ‘Gabriel won’t come in. I think we’ll have to do his lines outside.’

Kyle rolled his eyes. ‘He could have told us at Wood Green.’

Wheezing with laughter Dan set up for the interior. The ground floor was constructed as a single long room, with a giant fireplace and hearth at one end. The floor was cement, uneven and strewn with detritus, so they were immediately ankle deep in leaf mulch. Scattered firewood, loose bricks, clots of soil and wet plaster appeared within the drifts of dead leaves. The Gathering had eaten every meagre meal inside the room in shifts. Three long wooden beams ran the length of the high ceiling; wooden planks formed the floor of the next storey and were visible between the beams.

‘Dan. Get some close-ups of the hearth.’

About which Dan found two discoloured and dented cooking pots, the remnants of a broom and a bale of books rotted to pulp.

‘Still here?’ Kyle said, staring in surprise at the dull metal amongst the black leaves. ‘Gabriel!’

Pale and fretful, Gabriel stood beside the hearth, where he once ate a thin gruel concocted from animal feed. Not even this moment of his immortalizing seemed to offer him any comfort; which he must have relished when he accepted Max’s offer and, they had learned from Gabriel on the ferry, a large fee to take part in the film.

‘Battery will be flat by the time he’s done,’ Dan said with a smile.

Kyle whispered to Dan. ‘A platform. At last, a pulpit from which to preach. But not the one you would have chosen, eh Gabriel?’ Kyle nodded at Gabriel and then slapped the clapperboard shut in front of the lens. ‘Action.’

Brother Gabriel cleared his throat. He swallowed the last of the water inside his bottle when he couldn’t possibly have still been thirsty. The little mouth inside the beard opened. ‘There was no electricity here. We used kerosene lamps. Even our water had to be purchased from the village. We brought it back here in buckets and plastic containers . . . it was tortuous.’ The dry, ironic know-it-all eloquence had gone. Gabriel’s delivery was staccato, interrupted. The man’s face glistened with sweat.

If that’s how he feels, that’s how I will take it. The harder his story was to tell, the better the film would be. An intensity Kyle always longed for in interviews was apparent from the man’s first line. Not something he’d anticipated with Gabriel, who he worried would appear too knowing and self-consciously clever on camera. Kyle also now identified sympathy for the old figure.

‘At one time the only thing to eat was eggs from the hens. Dog food. Oh, and the corn seed we bought in sacks to feed the hens.’

‘You ate dog food and chicken feed?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Tried to make bread from the seeds. In here. Never worked. Sister Katherine forbade outside food.’

‘What did she eat, Brother Gabriel?’

‘I never saw her eat. She never came in here.’ Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at the wall, as if a door was about to open. Then collected himself.

‘Allegedly, she ate a rich and varied diet,’ Kyle prompted. ‘Imported treats, down in her cosy, well-lit fermette.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘That’s what people were saying at the time. Eventually we grew some small crops of root vegetable and there was orchard fruit, to supplement our diet. Which was rationed. It was pretty miserable.’

‘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 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 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 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?’

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 praetorian 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 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.’

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. 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 “emancipation”. 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 celibate, 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.

‘No way.’

This was no smear, but an outline of an upright figure. Kyle took out his Zippo and sparked it up for more light. The blue-gold flame batted about, steadied. He peered closer.

Could a watermark, or the vestiges of old paint, or a formation of mildew and fungus, create such a shape? He stood back. It would have been about five feet tall, were it not crouching to shield an indistinct face he was glad he could not see in the same level of detail that shaped the bony legs and thin fingers, the latter raised as if to protect its eyes from something hateful or painful.

No, this was definitely no stain. Individual metatarsals had been fashioned to depict the figure’s sharp feet. And here was a rib cage and a concave stomach, the colour of a tea stain between the darker streaks that represented bones and limbs. He took more photos. Zoomed in on the appalling mouth and its long teeth. Horse teeth with receding gums.

He reached out, touched it. Cold against his fingertips, some kind of matter was not so much raised from the wall, but seared onto it. Fused into the stone like a fossil. He took his hand away. Tried to convince himself it was an accidental formation. Please let it be. A kind of Turin Shroud, but on stone. No, it couldn’t be. This was a man-made image, but made ghastly through physical deterioration surely.

‘Dan!’ he called out through the door. ‘Dan!’ There was no answer. ‘Dan!’

Kyle shivered as if in response to the sun having lowered further behind the farm. Looked about the other walls. It was too dark to see them by the door. Why had he not thought to bring a torch? He dithered. Looked more longingly at the dying light outside than he wanted to admit to himself. Checked his watch: another hour before dusk. And they still had to shoot Sister Katherine’s fermette and get back to the van. If Max saw a photo of this figure, he would start wheedling about them going back to finish the job properly. What had started with such promise was slipping away fast. ‘Shit.’

Kyle walked close to the inside front wall, eager to reach the next narrow pillar of light that fell through the second empty window frame. He traced his lit Zippo down the wall at chest height, a few inches from the stone. In several places the paint had fallen from the wall, but he detected nothing uncanny about the discolourations left behind.

Until he reached the head of the temple. Towards the middle of the wall, he came across what looked like feet, unclothed by raiment or flesh. They hovered a yard from the ground, as if the owner of the feet were levitating. He immediately snapped the Zippo shut. Then realized the darkness beneath those fleshless toes was worse than the sight of them and he fumbled to get the lighter ignited. And saw not just the feet again, but the entire silhouette and in more detail within the surge and retraction of the small flame.

The rest of the figure had flung its arms above a threadbare head. The chin was raised. And pale eyes were rolled back in an ecstasy that was horrible to behold. A malnourished groin exposed its sex as that of a female. As did an impression of dark shrunken paps beneath pronounced collar bones. Strands adrift from the patchy skull could have been lengths of unhealthy hair or some sort of headdress.

It was striding. There was no other word for it. Striding as if through the wall, and downwards from above. The image suggested the idea, and one that was deeply unpleasant for Kyle to entertain, that the figure had been passing through the stone in a moment of wild exultation when its negative, or a trace of its physical remains, had somehow been scorched into the hard, inflammable stone. It must have been etched on somehow. Painted? Carved? Rachel Phillips said they faded. This one hadn’t.

Again, as if Kyle stood upon something not yet desiccated, the scent of carrion was apparent near it. Accompanied by another odour he identified as stagnant water. Carrion and sewage. And . . . and . . . he thought of sneezes . . . dusty feathers around his face. Old greasy pillows. Yes, old feathers, pillowcases stained yellow. Aged clothes, maybe. Damp, unwashed, rotted fabric. The very same odour from Clarendon Road.

His scattering thoughts snatched at an explanation: the cult had dug a septic tank and made primitive latrines; their vintage silage had seeped into the floor of the temple. And these figures had been put upon the walls because the cult had gone mad out here. Madder, gone crazier.

Kyle took photos of the second figure from three angles at close range; the flash lit the thing up horribly in the dank enormity of the barn. When he zoomed onto its face and tried to get the entire murky head framed within the viewfinder, a tremendous crash outside obliterated the silence of the farm. It sounded like a heavy door slammed shut. With force, with anger. What door? The buildings had no doors, were empty. Old and empty so maybe some timber had fallen. A roof slate. The place is unsafe. Is dangerous. Condemned. Damned.

‘Hey!’ he called out from where he crouched in the darkness and stared at the distant doorway: a square of grey light in a black surround. And was only motivated to straighten his legs and stand up when he realized he had cowered again, in what now felt like a fearful sublimation beneath the clawed toes of the thing upon the wall; at the head of the temple where a crucifix would hang in a chapel.

He should leave. Go.

‘Dan! Dan!’ The others were here, just outside; there was nothing to worry about. But he suddenly cramped inside at the unwelcome recollection of the hasty exit he and Dan had made from the house on Clarendon Road. They’d heard a door slam there too. Shit.

Kyle relit his lighter. Tried to move quietly through the dead leaves, the broken wood, the unseen objects that bumped against his toes and broke beneath his heels. His jerky movement across the uneven floor put the lighter out. All he could hear was his own desperate breath, the thump of hot blood inside his ears. But he dare not take his eyes from the doorway. And it was so dark in the middle of the temple; the light from the two windows and gaping entrance remained within the rotten frames and came little further.

Just ahead of him, he heard quick feet flit through the dross. ‘Dan?’ He thrust out both hands to fend off an unseen form racing through the darkness. At him. If anything were to touch him, his heart would stop: he knew it at once.

Nothing came. There was just him in the silence. The terrible stillness. The waiting. The darkness. It had been a figment of his own witless confusion and near total blindness.

All in your mind. An animal. Rat or fox.

Zippo open and flaring; the shadows retreated across the murky floor. Back to the walls. The black walls. He followed the ragged hem of one shape that threw itself upwards to the ceiling, in flight from the flame. The shadow vanished into the blackened timbers of the roof’s underside where they met the wall opposite the door he’d come in through. And just beneath the place where timber met stone, high up, at the very edge of his lighter’s pale luminance, he glimpsed another patch of haphazardly flaking stone.

He moved closer to the wall opposite the door and held the stills camera aloft. Gripped by a thoughtless curiosity, he lingered in that terrible place long enough to shoot another wide-angle shot of the wall where he thought he’d seen the ragged silhouette of a third figure. He must have missed it earlier as he took most of the other pictures at eye level.

He checked the viewfinder of the digital camera: too dark. He’d need a light stronger than the camera’s flash.

Kyle left the barn and brought in the camera and its tripod; it still had the ND filter attached. And he wanted his own breathless shock on tape, so attached a tie mic to the neck of his shirt and ran out a longer cable from the mixer. Checked the sound levels on the DAT. With jerky, fumbling hands he placed a little portable LEDPAD light in the doorway. Dan could light up the etchings properly, or whatever they were, when he came back.

On the far wall, the little LEDPAD cast a vague phosphorescence upon the blackened stone, a horrible glow that spread to the ceiling of the temple. He stepped back inside and confirmed the depiction of a third figure in the thin light. ‘Christ almighty.’

It too was composed of stains or scorches. But it differed from the other two figures, because this one was partially clothed. Remnants of a dark cloth twisted about its emaciated length. The visible limbs were more bone than flesh, and the sharp face was gripped with an excitement that inspired nothing but revulsion. There was a suggestion of a jaw wide and loose, if not hanging open. Like its companions, the eyes were wide, pale, and lost in some private joy. About its head there might have been a cowl loose about the thin head. And one long hand held a staff or sceptre.

‘Not sure what I am seeing here,’ he said into his tie mic. ‘But it’s inside the Gathering’s temple. On the wall. What looks like a figure. And there’s another above the doorway. A third at the far end.’ Kyle carefully retraced his steps across the soft floor of the barn. He should get something with the ND filter, so he shot the first figure by the door and the second one opposite the entrance quickly, but spent time looking about himself, into the half-lit barn while he did so, because of his earlier suspicion that something other than him had moved in side.

And there it was again: a rapid skitter through dead leaves at the far end of the building, where the LEDPAD light barely touched the walls. ‘Jesus!’ Before he managed to turn towards the sound, something brushed against him.

Kyle lost his balance. Lurched towards his right, fell to one knee. His right hand plunged through a surface cold and wet. Moisture instantly pooled about the knee sunken into the floor. Frantic, he raked a hand about. It met thin air. He stood up too quickly in the gloom, staggered about, disoriented by the dark and the stench. That’s all it is. Keep cool.

In the half-light, he saw nothing near him, nor against any of the three walls the little LEDPAD light tried to illuminate. But a thin and brittle touch lingered on the side of his neck, like the delicate impression of leafless sticks brushed while passing through an autumnal wood.

Holding his breath and then whispering to prevent himself tearing outside, he moved the camera about on the tripod and shot the peeling walls, the charcoal timbers and murky stains. But nothing moved in the viewfinder. He swallowed. ‘It’s uncanny, but inside here, you get the feeling that you’re not alone. I’m really not liking this.’

Under the unwieldy bulk of the camera and tripod, Kyle retreated through the barn and burst back through the doorway, peering over his shoulder as he stumbled forward, fearing a second set of footsteps in swift pursuit to the threshold.

‘An auditory and visual hallucination. That is what it was.’ Surely, because he could see by the dusky light in the doorway that nothing was behind him. Aiming the camera back at the interior from outside, he picked up the distant glow of the far wall on the viewfinder, but no motion. He could study the audio tracks and footage later. He didn’t want to play back those awful figures here, when so near the derelict temple.

He sucked at the air and hurriedly packed the second camera and tripod into their bags. Glancing about the courtyard, he now imagined faces just out of sight, peering down at him from the empty windows and from between the gaps in the nursery walls. Those faces would be smaller. He shook himself, hating the direction of his thoughts. ‘Stop it.’ Then, ‘Dan!’

No answer. So who had made the noise? And touched you inside the temple? Even louder: ‘Dan!’

No answer.

The sky had purpled from the Atlantic blue-grey he remembered before entering the last building, but he suspected some kind of permanent stain had been smeared across his eyes inside the temple barn. He looked to the sun behind the low cloud and tried to cleanse his vision.

What to do?

Sister Katherine’s fermette still had to be found. He’d have to shoot the remainder of the footage alone. At least until Dan chose to reappear to do his bloody job. Which meant none of his footage would be properly composed or lit in the fading light, and they wouldn’t have variety from two cameras. He’d also have to do the sound on one microphone. But this was too good to miss, let alone ruin. Coming back the following day was a bridge too far; the farm was too far away from the hotel and they had the ferry to catch. They were flying to the States in two days; as it was they hardly had time to prepare for that. ‘Christ.’

Kyle packed the sound equipment he’d need to go solo. Shouldered the first camera with the low-light filter still attached, but left the rest of their stuff near the temple. He took big strides across the overgrown courtyard, his eyes everywhere, looking for Dan, for Gabriel. He paused to peer at the copse of trees. No sign of them. He thought very hard about splitting. The other two must have returned to the van. Why? What was Dan thinking? He didn’t want to go back across the field in the dark, alone. It could be difficult to find the gate. And there were the traps that he believed to be utterly plausible now. ‘Fuck this.’

Then he became conscious again of the stillness of the air about him, between the buildings. Not a breath of wind stirred the grass. And not a single bird opened its yellow beak for miles around. So what had caused a timber or tile to abruptly dislodge in one of the ruins? He swallowed. Wet his lips. Tried to slow his heavy breathing under the weight of the equipment he carried. Bit down on his panic and staggered past the former artisan’s workshop in the direction of where the meadow continued below the farm.

Once clear of the main farm buildings, he spotted the chimney of what had to be Sister Katherine’s little house, about half a mile away, almost entirely concealed by a line of willow trees.

His focus returned. Nervous excitement bustled anew. A long shot on the tripod, then a medium shot, would be ideal to catch more of the curious atmosphere contained in the landscape he no longer doubted was imagined. But the time for varying the camera work was long gone, as was a delay of the inevitable. Now or never.

Cursing Max, Dan and Gabriel, Kyle broke through the long grass and headed towards Sister Katherine’s abandoned fermette, alone.

Forty years after Sister Katherine packed her bags, the fermette remained fifteen square metres of squat stone of uneven sizes, beneath a mostly absent layer of earthen stucco. One end of the house was concealed by ivy that clambered up to the chimney. Many roof tiles had dislodged, but the lines and angles of the roof appeared straight and firm. A sea of grass, white at the tips, reached the sill of the ground-floor windows. The panes of glass were intact and the front door in place.

Kyle set the camera up on the tripod and shot close-ups of the fermette from the front: one door; three small windows, two of them on the ground floor. He lined up the sound on the mixer and fitted his mic. Took a breath and looked about the darkening landscape. Satisfied he was still alone, he turned to the door and hoped it was locked. It wasn’t. He pushed it open.

In the grainy light prior to dusk, three thick beams crossed with smaller ribs of the same dark timber appeared on the ceiling. Dirty plaster filled the spaces between the beams and covered the walls too. On the cement floor, before the great blackened fireplace, he was confronted by an ancient-looking bathtub, mounted on clawed feet. It supplied a sudden notion of domesticity he found unwelcome amongst such neglect. A cramped staircase made of dark wood turned once then disappeared into the first floor.

Kyle crept inside and set up the camera to resume his commentary from behind the tripod by reading from his script. If this wasn’t extreme guerrilla film-making, then nothing was. Battery level on the camera wasn’t great. There was a spare in the bag, but he wanted to be quick; though he refused to dwell on the reasons why.

‘This is Sister Katherine’s fermette. In London, the trend was set. And the same physical separation between herself and the rest of The Last Gathering continued here. This building had electricity and basic plumbing, but it was still more primitive than she could stand, and she would never sink to this level again. In the Arizona desert, she bought the fabulous art deco palace for herself, miles from the abandoned copper mine that her followers in The Temple of the Last Days occupied. Perhaps the mansion was a reaction to the privations she endured in France.

‘There are no photos in existence of the interior of this building during Sister Katherine’s occupation, so we can only rely upon the hearsay of the apostates that Irvine Levine interviewed, to imagine what it was once like. But out here in those cold Norman winters, it was claimed that Sister Katherine acquired a fondness for antique furniture and thick rugs, for velvet drapes. She was sensitive to the cold and impatient with the heat.

‘The luxurious furnishings, the queenly fittings, are long gone. The floor, as you can see, is now bare cement, stained in places by what looks like oil and some water damage.’

In the gloom, he quickly recorded the solitary artefact of her occupation in a close-up, and ad-libbed some narration. ‘I mean, it’s amazing, to find this. Sister Katherine’s bathtub is still here after forty years. Makes you wonder why no one has taken it.’

None of the terrible figures he had seen in the barn were present on the grimy plaster of the fermette’s walls, which made him giddy with relief. But again there was an acute and incongruous stillness.

‘It’s really strange, but in here, there is an atmosphere. Again, just like in the temple. Pregnant. An anticipation almost. It’s like the very moment before the arrival of someone, or something. An event perhaps suspended in a fixed state within the space in which I am standing. When we first arrived here, Brother Gabriel reported feeling something similar. He has since decided to leave the shoot. He’s very upset with coming back here. Dan the cameraman is with him. So I am continuing solo from this point.’

Kyle found the right page of his script and dropped his voice to a softer tone as he read into the mic; he was becoming breathless with excitement at the find. ‘This is a significant place in the history of the cult. In this building, perhaps even inside this very room, Sister Katherine transcribed The Book of One Hundred Chapters: the theological text recited to her by what she called the presences, and Holy Spirits. It’s a thin, almost unreadable book, but it was mandatory for the adepts to quote from it upon command. And this is the very space in which she administered the highest and most personal theological instruction to the brothers of the cross, The Seven. Five of whom tried to wrest control from her at this farm. During the resulting schism that followed the failed coup of 1972, this is also the very building where The Temple of the Last Days was born: the version of the cult that destroyed itself in Arizona. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it was the actual place where Sister Katherine was completely accepted by her last few loyal followers as ‘a living divinity’.

‘She and the two remaining members of The Seven, Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona, were the nucleus from which the diaspora to the new American Temple was launched in 1972, when Sister Katherine declared to what remained of her blessed elect: “Take up the cross and follow me”. Words that were to become notorious in the Sonora desert.’

He would have to come back down for the sound equipment, but took the camera off the tripod and put it on his shoulder, and gingerly tested each stair before rising to the next one. The old steps creaked, even made snapping sounds, but instinct assured him they were firm enough for a careful footfall and an average weight near the sides. He filmed as he moved upstairs. It would look horrible without the Steadicam rig on the second camera that was with Dan, but at least he’d capture something before coming back down for the tripod and sound equipment to get better footage.

Like the ground floor, the second storey was one great room with a ceiling supported by stout timber beams. Little light made it through the one grimy windowpane, but enough to show him the water that had seeped down from the roof and left the plaster and paint in a terrible condition. But even in the gloom, Kyle still gaped in disbelief at what he saw, because Sister Katherine’s bed remained in the upstairs room. How was it that the locals did not disassemble and cart away such a colossal bed, let alone the bath? Great purple curtains, now rotting and sodden with damp, swept from the canopy and suggested the original magnificence of the four-poster.

He’d have to go and find Dan. Where the hell was he? He wanted the fermette shot in its own light, and then again with one of their ensembles of lights. He wasn’t half the cameraman Dan was and this was far too good to mess up. Kyle went back down for the sound equipment and tripod. Quickly checked the levels and then set up as best he could with the boom pole lodged between two soft floorboards for the sound.

‘It’s as if this great bed, still remaining in the middle of her boudoir, attests wholly to the grandeur of an Empress. The Empress she probably always believed herself to be, before she became a Goddess.’

Kyle shot the great fireplace, its brickwork black. ‘She must have been quite comfortable in here. The fireplace would have roared at the foot of her bed on those cold winter nights, while the children shivered with the dogs up in that wooden agricultural structure built for livestock.’

When he came around the foot of the bedframe, his boots scuffed through rotten tendrils of a once luxurious rug, to film the other half of the room. Below the small window, set deep in its stone casement, something caught his eye. The answer to his earlier query as to why the locals had not made off with the bed. Because no one sane would have lingered long in a room with that charred upon the wall.

The very moment he glimpsed it, he quickly backed away. The thick mattress, still wrapped in the wretched bedding, indented the back of his knees and made him sit down upon the wet bedclothes and whatever it was that oozed outwards on either side of his sodden buttocks.

He leaped to his feet. Swatted the back of his jeans. Turned and noticed the head of the bed in greater detail; saw the remnants of one long dark pillow, with vestiges of pale tassels at either end. If he wasn’t mistaken, the middle of the roll was indented, as if with the recent memory of a head at rest upon it. And when the bedclothes moved around the hollow his backside had made in the mattress, his breath sealed itself inside his chest and his teeth clamped down on the shriek that gathered in his throat.

He gripped the sodden bedspread, perhaps once satin or velvet, but mostly just matter now. And tore it upwards to see what writhed beneath.

There was nothing in Levine’s true-crime classic, nor in Susan White’s fretful eulogies or Gabriel’s nervous testimony to prepare him for the sight beneath the rotten eiderdown. As the ancient bedding rose in his fist, then came apart as lumps of mulch, he looked into the hole he had made and saw a murk of black and yellow flesh, twisting wetly in its own brine.

‘Oh God.’

Kyle aimed the camera at it. ‘This is incredible. I can’t believe I am seeing this. There’s . . . snakes . . . I think . . . a terrible smell too.’ But before he could embellish his narration, the light in the room faded like his sight dimmed, or a great curtain had fallen over the solitary window. In a panic, he looked to where the light had been, but only received a strong impression of the thin scorched figure beneath the stone casement.

A sudden stench of decay filled the room in one tremendous gust. And into his mind grew an image, so clear, so crisp, of a flock of lifeless birds, their dusty wings at rest on dry bodies, before a lake of fetid water, greened with flotsam. Upon the shore an indistinct figure wrapped in tatty cloth raised its face to see him.

Kyle mewled like a lost and frightened child. Crouched down, dropped the camera onto the bed. Clutched at his eyes to rub away the vision of the figure and the terrible water: superimposed by that bony upright shape burned into the wall.

Huddled into himself, he turned his body away from the window. Needed to escape the hallucination, the things in the bed, everything . . . couldn’t bring himself to even look over his shoulder again. Closed his eyes to see if the vision had gone. It had. He was dizzy, disoriented by the smell, the bed . . .

A door slammed shut. Downstairs. The one he came through.

‘Christ almighty. Dan! That you?’

There was no answer. He thought of the thin figure, running through the dark of the Clarendon Road house.

‘Dan!’ Then quieter, his tone pleading, ‘Dan? Mate?’

And Kyle remained bent over, a man reduced to a thing all shaky with moist unblinking eyes that peered across the stinking bed, at the doorway. That opened to the stairs. That descended to the ground floor. A space now indistinct at dusk; its door shut against the dying light. Shut behind someone that had come inside.

Below him in the building, he heard a sound not dissimilar to the one outside the rooms of Sister Katherine’s empty penthouse in London: the noise of ungainly feet. A thud and shuffle amongst the detritus, in the pattern unsteady legs make as a search commences through the dark. A search for something, or someone.

When Kyle came out of Sister Katherine’s fermette, his mouth was a tight crease in a wide-eyed and bloodless face. He could barely feel his legs, let alone the camera and equipment he clutched with shaking hands.

Paralysed with fear, he had waited for twenty minutes after the noises of intrusion had abruptly stopped downstairs. But the sudden silence left an image in his mind, of a small thin figure stood at the foot of the staircase, that looked up and waited for him to come down.

Heartbeat paused, he eventually emerged from the room and began his descent from the bed chamber, deciding that one more moment in the horrid room beside the reeking bed, that still twitched with the movements of its small burrowing occupants, was still less preferable to a confrontation with a visitor in the shadows below.

But he was alone in the fermette. Inexplicably, it seemed he had been the only occupant all along. Though he was certain someone had come in. He’d heard footsteps, hadn’t he? The mic might have picked them up too, in between his whimpers. He would check later. Maybe the front door had been closed by a wind of which there was now no trace.

He stumbled back through the long grass to the farm buildings. There was still no sign of Dan or Gabriel. He called out for them, albeit weakly. When he received no reply, he located the remainder of their equipment bags outside the temple’s empty doorway, that he could not even bear to glance inside now, before dragging the bags to the edge of the courtyard. Talking to himself in a hurried whisper, with the first tranche of their gear, he set off across the meadow towards the copse of trees.

Only once he was back amongst the bracken and spindly boughs of the copse with the second load of equipment did he see a tall distant figure, beneath a darkening sky, stood upright with its head down. It approached from the direction of the road they had parked upon.

And, for a while, too frightened to move or breathe, Kyle remained rigid. Could do nothing but stare, trapped between the horrid farm and the barely moving figure. He thought he might scream. Until he realized the figure in the meadow was Dan. But something wasn’t right. Because Dan was walking so slowly he was hardly moving. His face never rose from his feet as if he were studying the ground intently.

‘Dan! Dan!’

The distant shape of his friend looked up. Stopped moving. And what he shouted to Kyle slowed the blood cold and thick inside his veins. ‘Don’t move! Stay there! Traps!’ It sounded like Dan was crying, or trying not to. ‘Gabriel stepped in a fucking trap!’

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