TWELVE

WEST HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, 16 JUNE 2011. 10 P.M.

True to his word, Max had four boxes of SAD lights delivered by express courier. They’d arrived before he got home and Jane downstairs signed for them. Imagining the dust, hair, scratches and stains of his pit revealed in forensic detail by Max’s indoor sunlight, he left the lamps inside the boxes, stacked up in the lounge.

To divert his anxiety, with a stomach sloshing with a bilge of brandy, whisky and fruit cake, he took his laptop to the desk, went through Max’s production schedule, and made more notes for the US section of the film’s script. Two interviews had been arranged by Max with two cops involved in the 1975 Last Days murders: the first patrolman on the scene of the bloodbath at the Arizona copper mine, and the lead homicide detective who investigated the case that more or less ended when Brother Belial hit the bricks of the rec room in the Florence penitentiary.

They had another shoot with the son of the man who owned the horse ranch neighbouring the copper mine. The final shoot was with the only surviving adult member of The Temple of the Last Days who had been present during the cult’s final year: the money shoot with Martha Lake. She’d n ever spoken to the makers of the four existing documentaries; films that only made assumptions about what occurred at the copper mine, up to and including the Night of Ascent. Even Irvine Levine’s guesses about what happened were pretty wild, so Kyle had decided to reserve judgement until he interviewed them all himself. Max didn’t want them filming the San Diego mansion Sister Katherine had resided in for two years before the Night of Ascent. The notes said screenshots would be sufficient, though Kyle wasn’t sure he agreed. Variety claimed it was now owned by Chet Regal, the terminally ill Hollywood badboy, which gave the location a cool Kenneth Anger Hollywood Babylon vibe. But you can’t have everything.

Two of the documentary films about the cult were made in the seventies, two in the eighties. Since his first meeting with Max he’d seen them all. Terrible recreations with amateur actors plagued them. Bits of the same bleached news footage in every one too: cops and lawyers with sideburns and collar-length hair, aviator sunglasses under the desert sun at the copper mine, or walking into the courthouse in Yuma; black-and-white cars lined up and cops herding skinny figures under blankets into the halls of justice; women reporters in flared pastel trousers and fitted blouses, their thin wrists holding microphones like steel toffee apples; the governor of Arizona in black-framed glasses speaking on national news; the police chief sweating, the Coroner, the DA, all the boys from City Hall.

And the very same photos in the plate section of Levine’s Last Days: True Crime Bestseller paperback had been recycled ad infinitum: the black-and-white photographs of the young members of The Temple; long-haired, perfect teeth, eyes smiling in high school yearbook photos, in graduation snapshots taken in better days; or lean and haggard and doleful, dead-eyed or excitably defiant, in the Arizona Police Department mugshots of the cult members who had run away before that infamous night in 1975, and then been rounded up from whatever failure at living a normal life had befallen them.

Only one of the documentaries, Children of the Beast, had a decent production budget because there were several minutes of helicopter footage of the mine, of Sister Katherine’s mansion from above and the distant Sonora desert looking like the baked surface of an uninhabited planet, where the cult had frolicked and then hunted each other with high-powered rifles when it all went to shit.

There was still a lot of hearsay in Children of the Beast, as well as its rivals, from people not directly connected to the cult. Three old television celebrities from seventies Hollywood rambling on about Katherine’s charisma, her allure, her uncanny ability of telling them exactly what they were thinking and feeling, as she sashayed around B-list parties wearing Chanel and Yves Saint Lauren; told them things they had never told anyone before . . . blah blah blah . . . things they could not articulate to themselves . . . blah blah blah. There was a clumsy and unrevealing probe around her connection to Scientology in all four films, and a facsimile of Katherine’s arrest for running a brothel in London in the early sixties. Somewhere upon its lurid cover, every DVD case featured either the famous pop-art portrait of Katherine – a cross between an overweight Elizabeth Taylor with long Mona Lisa hair, the smile equally beguiling – or the one reinterpreting her as a jowly, red-eyed false messiah.

Not one of the other film-makers visited the French farm or the Holland Park headquarters, he guessed, due to budget implications. There was nothing in any of the films about the paranormal aspects of The Last Gathering, aka The Temple of the Last Days, that he’d literally walked into. Instead, they all dealt with the murders, the blood, the mute, naked children, the decapitation of Sister Katherine. Before Jim Jones trumped Sister Katherine three years later, during his notorious White Night in Guyana, by poisoning nine hundred of his own followers with fruit squash and strychnine.

When he was done with the script, the flat stank of stale cigarette smoke and the cat was asleep in the middle of his pillow. The television went on and off. Kyle checked his emails. No word from Dan. He sorted his laundry and began packing a rucksack for America. He’d redraft his script and do the shooting log the following day, then revise it on the ten-hour flight. Get to the shoots early and scope out the sites, while also working out the best compositions. The last four interviews were going to be done in record speed.

On the sofa, he flicked through the plate section of Irvine Levine’s Last Days, because he couldn’t leave the book alone for long. Stared at Sister Katherine’s plump, though not unattractive face. Then stared at the dark Rasputin looks of Brother Belial on the opposite page; the thin bearded visage of the man who helped shoot and kill four of his temple mates who tried to run on the Night of Ascent, then murdered Sister Katherine and cut the throats of four of his comrades in The Seven, before being found by the police at the copper mine with five raggedy children, forty minutes after the owner of the neighbouring ranch raised the alarm about a fire, a UFO, barking dogs and the sound of gunshots at the Last Days commune.

Dogs. Always with the dogs.

Kyle drifted over to his bed. He tried to move the cat, but its eyes went black as olives and the claws on one paw were shown. ‘Fuck’s sake.’ He fell asleep curled around the cat, one hand under his head.

And came half awake into darkness and from a place already distant in the vague memory held by the last fragments of sleep. From a place hazy with soot, with smoke. Where wet stones ran with rain. Where strained and yet indistinct faces yearned upwards at colourless gases. Stripped, lean and smeared ruddy, they were more bone than meat. Straw and dark clods of refuse were strewn in the mud below their thin feet, suspended above the terrible ground. Rutted clay puddled with swirls of oil on unclear water and foamed with stagnation.

A feathery clatter of dry wings beyond the smoke.

Distant clashes of dull metal.

A place of winter colours in faint light and ponderous air.

And then him, in here . . . above his own bed, in the darkness of his room. The light about the curtains was millimetre-thin and silvery. He was insubstantial and hovered above the mattress. Joints bulged above and below his leg bones. Pelvis wide, stomach hollow, ribs a prominent racking: he could sense every inch of his wastage. Scrawny-throated, he murmured for water. Parched and lipless, his death-mask face lay in a fanned halo of colourless hair, wisps about a skull patchworked with blemishes and prominent blood vessels gone to black.

And too long, too long, these feet that hung in the cold air, and this length of clawed finger on gristle hands too weary to move from where they had been cast outwards like the crucified of the air. He was gone from himself and was inside this thing.

Twisting, he fought and struggled to wake the moment he half comprehended this entrapment inside something frail and unfamiliar above the bed; a body that still rose gently to the ceiling he could not see. And the very notion of who he was writhed in search of a return to whatever flesh had once clothed his own bones.

Nearby, beyond him, in the darkness, there was a scratching and bumping, then a frantic bang bang bang. The noise erupted from another room, but one close by.

And then he dropped. And came awake from a sense of being in the air. Was shocked into a palsy, a jerking in disorderly bedding, and left panting, turned on his side, cramped over, bent in half.

Slowly, he explored his face with tremulous fingertips. Felt stubble around an immediately familiar mouth: his snub nose, his tatty hair. The rush of recognition spread and he lengthened his own back, his own legs and arms. Clenched his fists and curled toes.

Sat up.

There had been bumping, but now there was only scratching. Frantic carpet pulling. The cat, somewhere out by the front door.

Kyle rolled across the bed and turned the bedside lamp on. Squinted in the light that bruised his eyes. Staggered from the bed and crossed the room that functioned as the bedroom and living room. Snapped on the hallway light and peered down the corridor.

The cat turned its head briefly from where it crouched at the front door, nose dipped to the thin crack between the mat and the door. It glanced at him only to flash eyes gone to ebony marbles in fright. Its hackles were up. Out, out, out; let me out.

Feet numb and dragging like he had a trapped nerve in his groin, Kyle careened down the hallway, past the kitchen and bathroom; the caravan dimensions and dollhouse appliances were in darkness beyond doors pulled to but not closed. Somewhere within the murk of the kitchen was the litter tray. A backup. Maybe the cat couldn’t wait to go, had held on, but had reached the critical moment and was embarrassed and unsettled as cats can be about such matters. Better get it outside.

Wakefulness complete, Kyle shivered in the cold. If he let the cat out, he’d have to go down a flight of stairs to let it into the communal garden at the back of the block. ‘I thought we were past all that. Thought you could wait until the morning. Eh?’

Catch off, lock unlatched, he only managed to open the door a fraction before the cat fled out, slippery and sinewy as water, through the crack and onto the unlit stairwell. Shivering in his briefs, his body still frail with the residue of a troubled dismorphic dreamtime, Kyle knocked the staircase lights on and padded down the dusty carpeted stairs to the ground floor, pondering the nightmare all the way to the bottom: he’d never experienced anything like it, anything so vivid. Twice now. Out of his body, and off his bed like he had become lost outside of himself, or been taken and put somewhere else, far worse. Why? Those things on the walls in France and London, flashed, then flickered inside his mind.

Cold air seeped under and around the back door and broke the uncomfortable enquiry of his thoughts, returned his focus to the real world. No trace of dawn outside; sky black, clouds concealed the stars. What time is it? The cat climbed the wood and reached out its front legs to hurry him. Still frantic and coal-eyed, muscles tensed and twitched under the bushed-up fur. And then it was gone, without a sound or backward look, into the garden darkness. ‘Not coming down again tonight,’ he said, but the cat wasn’t listening. It had already scattered away through the overgrown yard.

He might need the bleach and a rag, a plastic bag, from under the kitchen sink to clean up and dispose of the mess in the litter tray, or worse. A hassle that should have been unbearable at this time of night, though he discovered he was glad to be awake. To not be in, or above, his bed any longer.

The lights would stay on. He’d doze again when the sun rose. Still be up in plenty of time to start work. Would be no time for the gym, again. Pity that. A trivial matter compared to the simple and profound relief of being awake. Of not being stuck inside a nightmare.

But back inside the hallway of his flat, he paused under the overhead light. Raised his chin and sniffed at a scent of burned hair, a whiff of decomposition. And more: old water, damp clothes forgotten in dark unheated rooms. Something else too . . . What was that? That smell? The moist ashes of a dead fire. Like a garden fire full of newspaper that had been hosed down. In here? How?

He checked the bathroom. Could smell the mildew on the wall above the cistern, his own musty animal scent on the one bath towel that needed washing, the scent of once wet but now dry lino, the municipal scents of old bleach and disinfectant. He went further inside. Sniffed. A sickly tang of cheap spray-on deodorant that left white grit inside the armpits of his shirts. Distant deep-well smells of the toilet, seat up. He had a good nose; had never taken cocaine, a rarity in film and television production. But there was nothing amiss in the bathroom. The walls were clear.

He recalled the noise in his dream, the slaps, bangs and scratching like the rake of fingers. Thought about the hotel room in Normandy. Leaned against the wall, dizzy with a sudden suspicion of the improbable becoming probable. He shivered, swallowed. Not here. Never. Please.

Kyle fled back to the kitchen with his breath caught high in his chest. Looked up at the wall space; saw white paint shadowed to ivory between the cabinets, and above the sink and cooker. Some cooking oil and tomato sauce splatter above the hot plates, but nothing unusual there. The litter tray was clean, the grit dry. The windows were locked.

He looked up at the ceiling. Cobwebs, and the small black dots that insects leave in an orbit of tiny yellowy rings you only ever see in rented flats. Old stains that he managed to avoid; but they were in place when he moved in two years ago. A small moth trembled in a corner. Beyond the one small window, the outside world was black.

But the smell originated from the kitchen. Was weaker now, but still noticeable, as if a window had recently been opened to air the room. He moved further inside the kitchen, chased the scent of stale carrion and bad water to the bin. Opened it: not in there. Peered into the cabinets under the sink: a burst of furniture polish and lemon. Not there. He checked the two cupboards beside the cooker: a tang of aluminium, a trace of dust. Spun around and went across to the two cabinets that held his tins and dry goods, opened them.

And stepped back with a gasp. A tin of pineapple and a tin of red kidney beans fell and banged off the top of the microwave oven, followed by a trickle of spice cubes, a desiccated bulb of garlic, and a green net with one onion inside. After the small avalanche came a concentrated gust of stagnant water, of corruption gone dry, lit matches, wet clothes.

Every other packet and can inside the cupboard had been swept aside, and was bunched or upended at either side of the wooden storage space. At the rear of the cabinet the wallpaper distinguished itself with a pattern of stains.

Jesus, God, no. He looked away. No. No. Looked back. Stepped forward, kicked the onion on the floor aside. He squinted at the broad discolouration. Stared and stared for some kind of meaning. It looked as if a soil pipe had burst behind a wall to spend a year soaking into the plaster and wallpaper. But when he fed the cat yesterday afternoon, he’d had this cupboard open. There had been no stain on the wall.

Gingerly, he reached a hand forward, pressed the stain at its heart. The paper looked singed too, as if by a flame that had been quickly doused.

He stepped away, concentrated on the thicker detail, the longer band through the centre of the contamination on his wall, this reeking stigmata that had appeared suddenly in the night. Not dissimilar to the stone in Normandy, the unpainted plaster of Clarendon Road’s basement wall, and the smooth paint of the bathroom in his Caen hotel room. Different surfaces, but all redecorated with the same colour scheme: singed, glazed, wet, the murk of soiled bandages, dark moisture dry on a shroud, impressions of . . .

Dear God. Two long curving bands across the centre of the blemish suddenly kick-started his comprehension. Ulna. Radius. Latinate phrases dropped into his mind from biology at school. And at one end, like a cluster of stones, were the impressions of carpals; the bones of a hand papered by a veneer of skin. At the other end, the twin bulbs of an elbow . . . humerus . . . the funny bone, though Kyle wasn’t laughing.

It was as if a forearm had been inside that cupboard, having emerged through the solid wall to cast about. To slap and bang the cupboard doors open and closed as he slept, like an arm thrust through a window ajar to flail for purchase inside a room; before it was withdrawn, leaving an impression of itself, a dirty reproach to the naked eye, and to the living.

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