TWENTY-THREE

WOOD GREEN, LONDON. 23 JUNE 2011. 10 P.M.

‘Mate! Mate! We’re ’ere.’

Kyle didn’t remember any of the journey. The cab pulled away from the curb in New Cross and he’d fallen into a quick but uneasy sleep. He wanted to sleep in the Hackney cab for a week. Would Max’s credit card have covered it? Kyle grinned like a mad thing as he paid the driver. He could film himself chittering, wide-eyed and witless, to camera. Put the documentary out himself: Cab Man. He better get on to it before Morgan Spurlock did. Perhaps this was the only way to survive the indelible staining of his thoughts now; to stay in the air, or within crowds in airports, or in the back of cabs. For ever. Bottled water, food from service stations and airport cafes, constipation, the odd nap, keep moving, stay inside the light. They hate the lights! He could hear Gonal’s voice inside his head, screaming.

His brief sleep in the cab had been deep, but not empty. Bone things had lit themselves up at one point in a horrid red light against a black void, and he had jerked awake for a second or two, with saliva all over his chin. Too tired to resist the urgent desire for rest, he’d recklessly fallen asleep again. Malcolm Gonal had been in his head then, participating in the dream, wearing some kind of wooden crown in a dark building where he kicked his little feet in the air above the ground and grinned like he was doing something clever. Martha too, who looked at a grey sky above the mine, and smoked cigarettes while she waited for something to arrive. The rest he was glad he couldn’t remember and the sleep refreshed him; the back of his eyes ached and his neck hurt, but his mind was more alert.

‘Cheers.’ The cab pulled away and left him alone and cold on the dark street.

The lights were on in Gabriel’s flat. Kyle rang the bell. A huge African woman answered the door, spoke around the safety chain. ‘Is late, what you want?’

Kyle explained he was a friend of Brother Gabriel. She hadn’t a clue who Brother Gabriel was. Had he moved out? Was he even still alive? Kyle stood mute an d stupefied. Before the woman closed the door, he heard Gabriel’s frail voice call out from inside the flat, ‘Who is it?’

‘Gabriel? It’s Kyle!’ he shouted over the woman’s head. ‘It’s urgent!’

‘Arthur, who is Gabriel?’ the woman bellowed over her shoulder, back inside the hot orangey interior of the flat.

There was a pause, and then, ‘Show him in!’

Brother Gabriel had reverted to his original name, Arthur Smith. The woman was Gabriel’s carer. And maybe his mum’s too. They’d both need her now. She’d come courtesy of Max.

Kyle found what was left of Brother Gabriel inside the cramped living room, reclined in a tatty armchair before a glowing gas fire. Mercifully, a tartan blanket covered what was left of his legs. He’d marvelled at how thin Gabriel had been during the shoot in France. But he’d been a relative picture of health back then, compared to the jaunty collection of puppet bones slumped inside a chair that looked four sizes too big for his body. Grey-skinned, shrunken eyes glazed, a lipless mouth drooling, the face that peered up at Kyle appeared impassive, in the way the heavily medicated are at the point of death. The room smelled of hospitals. The side table was covered in medication and small water bottles burst from a cellophane wrapper. A wheelchair was folded against a wall, two crutches laid side by side upon the sofa. Asking him how he felt seemed irrelevant.

‘I don’t care any more,’ he wheezed before Kyle could apologize for not visiting him in hospital.

‘Mmm?’

‘The film. Anything.’

Kyle nodded, tried to smile reassuringly, but couldn’t. ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry, mate. But things have got out of control. I had to come. I need your help.’

Gabriel raised a thin hand that was mostly bone and let it drop. The hopelessness in the manoeuvre seemed to sum up the situation perfectly.

‘We’re all in a whole heap of trouble, mate. All of us Max has used. And I am trying to understand how, and why.’

‘You think I know?’

‘In France. At the farm—’

‘I don’t want to think of it.’ Gabriel shook his shaggy head.

‘You never told us everything. About Sister Katherine. About what happened at that farm in the seventies.’

‘What difference does it make now? And I told you, I wasn’t there in the second year.’

‘You must know something. I’m only getting bits of things. From all kinds of people who are mostly as confused as me. A woman in America said that what she called “old friends” came into the temple. In the desert. And left things behind. Bones. Clothes. Fragments. But Katherine came to America with a collection of them too. Did she find things in France, at the farm? Old things? Like artefacts? Do you know?’

Gabriel sighed with irritation. ‘We all found them in the temple. After the visions started. After they came inside to be with us. I never saw them . . . the presences. But they were there. You could hear them, above us. Moving. Under the rafters. It’s why I left.’

‘What did you see, in the visions?’

Gabriel stared at his lap in silence, then raised his head. ‘It was like the end of the world. Burning. A place on fire. Dogs barking. I didn’t join up for that.’

‘Were there any drugs?’

‘No. We didn’t even have food. We were starving. Weak. Ill. We were exhausted. We nearly died out there. I told you the truth.’

‘But not everything. There’s visions now. And finding these bits of things. What are they? What was it?’

Gabriel shrugged, sighed. ‘I don’t know. Some bones. Old clothes. I didn’t like to look at them. Ask Max. He knows. I only went along with it for the money. Your film that is.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us, in France?’

‘I couldn’t. They were still there. I could smell them. I could feel them. They were angry. It was like the last week I was there all over again. I got frightened.’

‘The presences? They were there with us?’

Gabriel looked at the gas fire. Nodded. Appeared on the verge of tears. ‘They left me alone for a long time. I tried to forget them. I did forget them. Then the dreams began. Around the time Max got in touch. I needed the money. But at the farm I suddenly knew it was a mistake. Being there again. I didn’t want them coming back. Coming here.’

‘I think they would have done anyway. They seem to be looking up their old acquaintances all over the place. But how? What are they? You have to tell me. Please.’

Gabriel swallowed noisily. ‘There’s nothing you can do. And I don’t care any more. This life . . .’ His frail voice trailed off, and his dim eyes drifted to the ceiling.

Kyle kneeled beside him, held his wrist. It was like gripping a flute. ‘Tell me what you know, Gabriel. I need to know everything before I go and see Max. He’s keeping things from me. Lying.’

Gabriel smiled. ‘Because you wouldn’t believe it. You’d think he was a nut. Maybe you’re ready now.’

‘For what?’

‘For what he’s found out. He wouldn’t tell me either. He never really liked me. Only wanted me back in France for his own reasons. I think he wanted me to . . .’ Gabriel swallowed. ‘I was bait.’

Kyle felt the room swim around his head. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘He wanted them filmed, I think. Thought me and Isis might draw them out in those places. All I can tell you is that after I left the Gathering, once Katherine brought those others to us, a friend of mine, Stewart, he wrote to me. He was known as Brother Abraham back then. He stayed behind after I ran. And he wrote to me a few times. Smuggled his letters out when he went to fetch water. He told me he was leaving. And to send money for his ferry ticket. I was skint, but I borrowed the money from my parents and posted it. He asked me to meet him at Victoria Station when he arrived. He gave me a date and a time. But he never came. And I never heard from him again. Nor the others. I looked for Brother Abraham that first year back in London. No trace. When Max got in touch with me, a few months back, I asked him if he’d ever found Abraham or any of the others. He said he’d looked. He said they’d all been missing for years.’

‘And he told you to keep it quiet. Not to tell me and Dan.’

Gabriel didn’t answer, just looked at Kyle with tired eyes as he wheezed.

‘Did you ever go to the police?’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘For all I knew, they’d stayed on. Or went to America with Katherine. She could be very persuasive.’

‘And how would it make you all look twenty years later?’

‘I don’t care any more. Tell the police.’

‘You think they’d believe me about all this?’

Gabriel’s smile was so thin it nearly never happened, but there was still a sliver of triumph in it. ‘Abraham left because he said . . . he said it wasn’t safe any more. There’d been a terrible row. Some of The Seven tried to take over the farm. Only Gehenna and Bellona stayed loyal to Katherine. Who’d tried to do something unpleasant. I don’t know what. But it started a revolt. And he said there was some kind of storm right after the rebellion. Terrible. People got lost in it. Three children. They never found them. Or the apostates, the five who tried to usurp her. All of the dogs too. The hens. All gone. But there was nothing on the news. I checked. Nothing about a storm in Normandy. And Brother Abraham said that he saw people go into the air. Up, you know? Just up. And they never came back down.’ Gabriel swallowed. ‘I thought he was crazy. I convinced myself he was. I mean, out there . . . Now I’m not so sure. But he wrote something about “the Unholy Swine and the rain of black bones”. I never forgot that. It was something that happened at the farm during the storm. I always thought it was why the group moved to America. Because people, and children . . . had gone missing at the farm. But I kept the last letter.’

‘Give it to me. Where is it?’

‘I gave it to Max. He has it.’

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