TWENTY-FIVE

ANTWERP. 24 JUNE 2011. 11.30 A.M.

‘Max tells me I am to instruct you about Niclaes Verhulst and the Blood Friends, eh?’

Kyle took Dr Pieter Gemeen’s hand and shook it. ‘He sent me to see some paintings.’

Pieter frowned. ‘In good time. Such things are not to be taken lightly.’ And then he relaxed again and smiled. ‘Come, coffee? Or beer maybe? Beer I think.’

‘It’s early.’

Pieter grinned at him. ‘Beer will be best. Trust me in this matter.’

They’d met at the train station; the Renaissance historian already waiting for him on the arrivals platform of the airport shuttle. And Kyle wasn’t sure he’d ever actually spoken to anyone who wore bow ties before. Nor why he was surprised that anyone associated with Max would be eccentric, because Doctor Pieter Gemeen immediately confirmed the stereotype of an insane ac ademic with his snow-white hair launching from his scalp in a fountain, only to be carefully sculpted back at its furthest extent, like a quiff grown too long. His pointed face was all nose and minimalist spectacle frames, his brows thick and incongruously jet like a character from The Muppet Show that he couldn’t remember the name of. An observation he wished to share with Dan, without whom he felt exposed and vulnerable in the strange city.

Dan had called him five times during the flight. Just seeing his name in the missed calls list had flooded Kyle with relief and a welcome glow of warmth and familiarity; one night away from his best friend and he desperately wanted to repair any damage caused during their fractious flight back from Seattle. Dan left two messages in a voice unusually subdued, and full of uncertainty.

Mate, mate. Where are you? Call me. Shit. You won’t believe this. I found something. Oh, man.

There had followed sounds of laboured breaths, and insinuations of background interference as if Dan moved with a heavy weight in his arms. The camera? The allotted time for a message then ran out. The call was timed at 5 a.m., when Kyle would have been in security at Stansted airport. He’d risen from the sofa in Max’s study at 3.30 a.m. Had spent three undisturbed hours out cold when he was roused by Iris with toast and coffee just before the airport car service pulled up outside. Kyle’s flight to Antwerp had departed London at 6 a.m.

Dan’s second message arrived twenty minutes after the first: Dude. This is weird. You need to call me. Right away. Answer your bloody phone.

There were another three missed calls listed from Dan’s number, made ten, twelve and sixteen minutes after the second message. Since his arrival in Antwerp, Kyle had called Dan twice. There had been no answer, so he left messages and tried to explain in a few minutes where he was and why he was there. He wondered if Dan had gone back to Finger Mouse’s flat, for the all-nighter on the Avid. Maybe they’d found something on the footage, maybe on the audio track. And then his thoughts darkened and he wondered if Dan was in danger; a peril he had placed his best friend within reach of. A sudden cold seizure immobilized him in the train station and he nearly broke into flight, straight back to the airport.

No, he was here now and a moment from the revelation they needed to understand what it was that hunted so many through the dark. He had to know and needed to hold his nerve until Dan made clear his position; his calls could be nothing more than news of an accidental image caught on camera. Another one.

‘Your first time in Antwerpen?’ Pieter broke Kyle’s anxious absorption.

Kyle followed Pieter, who carried himself out of the station and onto De Keyserlei Strasse, like an old dancer upon voguish leather shoes, and one expensively dressed in a tailored three-piece suit. His companion smiled as if pleased with his role as guide, and struck a quick and purposeful pace through the pedestrians, cyclists and trams as the city opened around them; the sight of it added fresh demands on Kyle’s worn-out mind. He wondered if his brain function would soon reach maximum capacity and just shut itself down.

‘Not what you expected?’ Pieter smiled, and bowed slightly as he spoke, which made Kyle feel automatically privileged, as if his counsel was being sought, or as if something of great importance was about to be imparted. The man had a professorial gravity that drew in a listener’s concentration. Which made Kyle desperate to film him, and all of this, the spectacle of Antwerp. It really wasn’t what he expected; he’d expected a facsimile of a depressed British city in the 1970s. Though couldn’t think why; he knew nothing about the place.

Pieter guided Kyle towards a cab. ‘A good day to walk, but the time we must be aware of. You fly back today, so we talk for a short time, and then maybe we see something.’

‘My flight’s at six.’

Pieter nodded, and once they were inside the cab, he said, ‘Let me tell you about this city. I have a friend. Also English. He deals in art too. He has been here two years and every week he tells me he finds a new square when he walks. He tells me this city is half fairy-tale and half Gothic nightmare. I wish I still had those eyes.’ He added as a sad refrain. Through the windows of the taxi, Kyle could see what Pieter meant. Under a blue sky and late-morning sunlight, the place was everything he loved about continental cities: chic and shabby, spired and blackened, mysterious and beckoning. ‘We come to the Old Town up here. I know a place that serves Tripel Karmelite. The finest beer in the whole world. You English like beer.’

Kyle nodded.

‘It will be good for you.’

‘That bad?’

Pieter lowered his voice so the driver couldn’t hear, leaned into Kyle’s shoulder. He smelled of cigars, garlic and mouthwash. ‘It is only an informed man that can understand these works. You see, one must get past the grotesque and understand the . . . er . . . the images, the symbols, that these works contain. In themselves. Otherwise we are just horrified, and we learn nothing.’

They took seats at a wooden table outside a bar in the Grote Markt, darkened by the shadow of the Cathedral of Our Lady. Itself surrounded by walls of grand stone palaces and the colourful Stadt buildings. Cobbled lanes fed off the vast square into a labyrinth of medieval shadows, dark glass, iron balconies, walls blanketed by ivy, turrets and flags. The cathedral flung its ecclesiastical claws at the heavens while the town at its foot promised to whisper and enchant amongst its alleys and canopied cafes. It excited Kyle and flooded his imagination with panoramic shots; it was beautiful, but daunting.

Pieter relished a long draught of the golden beer that came in a glass shaped like a vase. Nodded at the square. ‘The world has been coming here since the Frisians. The Franks. Romans. Vikings. The Spanish. Napoleon. The Dutch. Germans. All of them, they come and go. But they all leave something behind. Curious things. Antwerpen draws things to itself. Strange things. It collects them.’ He looked at Kyle over the rim of his glasses, smiled. ‘And you thought it was all industrial? Maybe cranes and docks?’

Kyle returned the smile.

‘No. Antwerpen itself is history. So much so it can hardly be unravelled because even as I say this to you, it changes again. It is art. Which is why Niclaes Verhulst came here too.’

‘You know about the film I am making?’

‘I do. Max told me. I should like to see it someday.’

‘But do you know about what we have seen?’

‘Max has confirmed some details that we expected, yes.’

‘Expected?’ He swigged at his beer. ‘Who is “we”?’

Pieter smiled. ‘Patrons. And my occasional employers. An old family who prevent remarkable things falling into the wrong hands. What I am about to show you, Katherine once tried to buy it. You know that? No? She was not the first, nor will be the last.’

‘Curiosity is killing me here, Pieter. I’m wondering how this relates to the story I am trying to tell.’

Pieter watched him gulp another mouthful; it was as sweet as wine and refreshing as a cold lager. ‘Slow. That beer is very strong. It gets you in the legs.’

‘Good.’

Pieter opened an elegant cigarette case. Withdrew a cigarette and offered the case to Kyle. ‘You have seen many strange things.’ It was a statement, not a question. Pieter lit their smokes. ‘All who seek old friends find out things they wish they did not know.’ He let the thought stand upright like an eager waiter beside their table. Looked about himself with an almost imperceptible turn of his head. ‘Like Niclaes Verhulst. He saw things. Many things he wished he did not. And he painted them. Here. After he escaped from a little place in France that I think you know of.’

Kyle frowned. ‘The farm?’

‘More or less. But it was a town then. In 1566.’

Kyle wiped beer off his chin. ‘1566?’

‘Yes. Sister Katherine and her followers were made in the image of some other thing.’

The immensity, the age, the epochal stature of the square seemed to lean inwards, to crush Kyle deeper into the cold shadows at the foot of the blackened cathedral. He shivered.

Pieter exhaled smoke slowly, watched it drift. ‘People come here to see Rubens’ work. Brueghel. Others. But I think Niclaes Verhulst is the most affecting of them all. He painted what was known as The Saints of Filth. Something that tourists do not see. I would like to say you are fortunate, because I will show you a forgotten masterpiece. But I cannot say that. Because the fact that you get to see it means you are involved too. Which is no privilege at all.’

‘Who was he?’

Pieter turned back to the table, looked at Kyle intently. ‘He is not the subject of your visit. Like you, he was a commentator. A recorder of things. The man we must speak of is Konrad Lorche. A German. From Cologne.’ Pieter studied the end of his cigarette, nodded, muttered to himself.

‘Lorche was a printer with big ideas who became a playwright. But not successful. Then he was a travelling actor. And it is said he was charismatic. Persuasive. A well-educated man. He even went to university. You see, his parents had some money, for a while. And like many opportunists, after the Reformation Lorche also declared himself a prophet of God. Claimed to be in receipt of divine insight. He attracted many disaffected people about him in Germany, then the Netherlands. Walloons, English protestants in exile, French Huguenots. He and his followers they moved around, you know. Set up in villages and small towns. Got chased away often. You see, they grew from the tradition of Taborites and Anabaptists. From the 1530s. You know of these?’

Kyle shook his head.

‘These groups, they governed themselves. They thought they were an elect. They looked with contempt upon all authority. Government. All faith, Lutheran or Catholic. They were radicals who denounced the State and Church. Militant. Who answered only to God directly through their prophets, their leaders. Lorche even survived the siege of Munster. He learned from Prophet Matthys and John of Leyden there. Leaders of the Anabaptists who once took over a whole city. Made it their own. And Lorche, he transported their ideas. He copied them. And like the Anabaptists, Lorche was also persecuted. In Germany. In Switzerland. But he had total power over his followers. We don’t know how many. We think maybe a few hundred.

‘And eventually, he moved his operation south to Utrecht, Ghent, even London before the reign of Queen Mary. But 1566 is the year in his life that we must concentrate on. The Duke of Alba with ten thousand Spanish soldiers came into the Low Countries. On the orders of Philip II, King of the Spanish Netherlands. To suppress Protestant heretics. It was called the Edict of Blood. And Lorche and his Blood Friends were hunted. Again. So they went to France, where the Huguenots, the French Protestants, had much power at that time. Lorche took his people, his Blood Friends, to this little place called St Mayenne in 1566. He declared that he would walk no further. That he and his people were The Last Gathering of Saints and they came there to build a New Jerusalem.

‘St Mayenne was a small town in farming land. This place you have seen. It had a wall around it, like Munster. That suited him. Not just to keep people out, but also inside. It also had a peasant population he hoped would be keen on his New Jerusalem. On his own brand of salvation. This town is no longer there. But he renamed it New Jerusalem in 1566.’ Pieter looked at Kyle sideways and acknowledged his unease with a tilt of his forehead. Observing that no one was eavesdropping, Pieter leaned back in his chair, waved a cigarette through the air. ‘You know this place as a farm. That came much later, in the 1830s. But once it was a whole town. I have been there too, many years ago, and I found bits of the original walls in the fields nearby.

‘But here, in 1566, Lorche had visions. Like he did in every place he had been. He ran through the street naked. He frothed at the mouth. He spoke for God. Great angels had come to him and spoken to him. They told him he was the messiah. And the peasants, they loved him. He convinced them, this actor. And then the usual thing happened. The Catholics were thrown out, as were the Protestants who didn’t rebaptize in Lorche’s faith. All the clergy too. Anyone who did not accept and obey the prophet was gone.

‘The church was ransacked. He took control of the town. Total control. His followers had fought many sorties in the Low Countries, so they came here prepared for violence.’

Pieter paused and closed his eyes in concentration, then sighed as if with impatience at himself. ‘Lorche’s Blood Friends even outlawed private property here in the New Jerusalem. Ownership of any possession was forbidden. Even the ownership of food. The buying and selling of anything, no! Working for money, that too. Usury, lending. Like communists. All worldly possessions were to be controlled by a depository, like a bank. Overseen by the prophet, Lorche, through whom God spoke. He took everything for himself. And next, all activities were communal. Sleeping, eating. Doors on buildings were taken away. Spiritual teaching, guidance, all public life, was controlled by Lorche and his council of seven elders.’

Kyle started in his seat. Pieter peered at him intensely, but only with the one eye that rose above his spectacles. ‘You see, eh? The pattern forms already.’

Kyle swallowed the rest of the beer in his glass. Pieter looked at the table, frowned in concentration. ‘Lorche the Prophet. He slept for days and woke to announce new proclamations from God that had come to him through his whispering angels. Then he went and spread the word in New Jerusalem. And at first, celibacy was the rule of his law. Of God’s law. Fornication a capital offence, punishable by death. The New Jerusalem only had room for the purist disciples of his scriptures, his interpretation. The world had lost its way and was damned and Lorche was the saviour. Angels told him this. When there was a problem, or opposition to what he wanted, then the angels spoke. Some said they were devils, but those that did were not only banished, but executed too. It is a terrible place, but he called it paradise.

‘The first big trouble came because there were too many widows. Life had been hard. Their husbands had died in wars for sure. But mainly through banishments and executions ordered by the Prophet. So he introduced polygamy. Lorche himself, he took the three youngest and most beautiful girls in the town as brides. Lorche even had an accession. He crowned himself the King of Israel, with all the world as his dominion. He said he was the messiah as foretold in the Old Testament. He wore fabulous robes of purple. All the gold in the town was melted to make him rings, jewellery fit for God’s one king. His court of seven elders also had magnificent clothes. They went everywhere with him. He made up new holy days. There were festivals and parades. All had to bow. He never got tired of it. Soon he had fifteen wives. All were made queen. They had the best houses by the church. They lived in luxury. The people of the town gave up all their clothes, their possessions and their food was rationed. The market square became his court. His soldiers protected him; they encircled the square. On his throne that he stole from the Bishop of the diocese, Lorche sat in the market square and he announced new laws from God. Gave out sentences too. He claimed he was the Emperor of the Black Forest, who would reign for one thousand years.

‘But was it through God his power came? And which God? we must ask ourselves. And who were these angels as emissary to the chosen one? We do not know. But his followers believed him and that was enough. He proved it by pouring out his sin in serpents, from his mouth, you know. And by walking above the ground. By finding hidden gold, where people buried it. It is said he knew all the secrets of their hearts. That he controlled their souls. That he turned them into dogs should they displease him. To prove his power he made some of them see through his eyes. See through the eyes of God, he claimed. Others, he made them see through the eyes of dogs. The children, he claimed were to become true angels, to be saved from the sins of their fathers. He took them too and kept them in a barn in isolation. He smashed apart all families and marriages. The Church, they thought he was a witch. That he consorted with devils. Who can say? Who even thinks in these terms now?

‘In France, this was also the time of the Wars of Religion, and the House of Guise heard of Lorche and his vandalism, his heresy, his iconoclasm in St Mayenne. But it was only when Lorche killed the local Bishop that he signed his own death warrant. Then he became a priority for the Guise family. Lorche even had the Bishop beheaded in the market square to show the people that the Church had no power over them. He also fed the Bishop to a pig and then appointed the pig as the new Bishop. He claimed he put the Bishop’s soul inside the pig. Such was his power. It was called the Unholy Swine by the people in the town. They dressed it in robes and a hat. It even had a sceptre.

‘The House of Guise was, of course, outraged. And so a small army of fanatical Catholics was sent to St Mayenne. And they were horrified with what they saw there. The people even starved now because Lorche ordered from his throne in the market square, with his pig-bishop beside him, that no one was to work. They were to wait for God, and to do nothing else . . . besides, of course, to listen to him. They even turned the church into a stable.’

Pieter sat back and sipped his drink, sighed. ‘What happened next, was inevitable.’ He took another cigarette from his case.

Burning eyes made Kyle realize he’d stopped blinking. The Grote Markt no longer seemed to be around him. He wondered again, and hoped, that this was all some elaborate practical joke of which he was the secretly filmed victim. Pieter studied his face. ‘I can see that you do not laugh. This has your interest. Because you identify a beginning of something terrible that was to be repeated, as all terrible things are.’ He smiled. ‘Now, I think we can go and see The Saints of Filth.’

‘Niclaes Verhulst, the painter, he survived the massacre. All the others who came down from the Low Countries with Lorche, they were slaughtered or they burned. Pope Pius V in Rome give the order himself. He said the soldiers were to take St Mayenne off the map. Burn it. So the place went back to nature afterwards. Became farmland again. But the land was no good after the Blood Friends.’ Pieter paused before a vast wooden door in the deserted street he’d led Kyle to.

As Pieter talked, they had walked south from the Grote Markt to a tall, thin building with a pointed red-tiled roof in St Andries. It was unmarked and appeared empty. The huge door was set between a gallery that featured in its window a few sculptures made from wire and on the other side was a shop selling maritime antiques. Neither seemed to be open. The narrow lane was still, silent, chilled by shadow in the gully formed by the steep-faced buildings on either side, and shielded from the sounds of traffic by the high facades. ‘At the moment, the family keep The Saints of Filth in here. But it often moves.’ Pieter placed both hands upon the ancient iron door handles. He smiled at Kyle. ‘But not by itself.’

Kyle followed his guide into a narrow reception with plain white walls. It was an innocuous space; clean, lit with dawn-light simulator bulbs. A smell of incense dominated. Opposite the door, a thin staircase with a black iron handrail began an ascent.

Once inside, Kyle felt peculiar; dizzy, unwell now they had left the big sky and the thoroughfare of the Old Town. His stomach popped and fizzed. He tried to put it down to lack of sleep, then accepted his guts jangled at the expectation of seeing something he was sure would not be good for him.

‘And now, I am afraid, I must search you.’ Pieter said without a trace of humour.

‘Sorry?’

‘The family insist. Cameras are very small these days. Please do not take offence.’

‘Who are these people?’

Pieter put his index finger against his lips. ‘Guardians. Their ownership is, shall we say, reluctant. But necessary. Even if you come back here, the paintings would be gone. And it’s not good to look for too long. Many people who have done, they never have a good end. They go mad. When the family realized this many years ago, they took measures.’ He looked Kyle in the eye. ‘May I?’

Kyle couldn’t disguise feeling insulted. ‘Go ahead.’

Pieter inspected the lapel of Kyle’s leather jacket, his collars, belt buckle. Crouched down and studied his boots. ‘Your bag, leave it here.’ Kyle slid it off his shoulder and dropped it.

Pieter smiled when he was satisfied. ‘Good. Now I think we can go up.’

They passed two floors of closed doors, two per floor. Went up through the intense light of the stairwell to the small landing of the top floor, which no more than two people could stand on together. Pieter entered a code into a metal panel in the door of the street-facing room. Looked over his shoulder at Kyle, nodded, and then entered the room.

Steel blinds covered the windows. White paint softened the walls and ceiling about an unfurnished room, its floor plain wooden boards. A quartet of aluminium stands in each corner of the room held clusters of powerful dawn-light simulators. Wires trailed from them to a multi-plug board. A concentration of their luminance upwards prevented a direct focus of the lights on the three wooden stands, upon which three large paintings were mounted. Each painting was covered with a black cloth. Behind the easels were three black cases, open to reveal protective velvety interiors.

Pieter smiled. ‘Come.’ Under their feet the floorboards groaned. ‘Here.’ He stopped Kyle about five feet from the stands. Positioned himself between Kyle and the stands. Checked his watch. ‘Look at the painting on the left. Do not look to your right until we are ready. I’ll tell you when.’

Kyle nodded. The paintings were unveiled.

Pieter turned, then moved and stood beside Kyle and faced the triptych. ‘The Saints of Filth.’

Kyle’s eyes refused to stop flicking across all three paintings. Each canvas was at least four feet across, as many high, and all dark as if sooty. Within the shadowy smears the only details he took away were those of intense red fire in the first two frames, like occasional flashes. The tone of the last picture was much lighter, the colour of smoke.

‘The first one. Yes? It is called The Siege of Jerusalem. It is the beginning of the end for Konrad Lorche and his Blood Friends. At least for a while.’

Kyle glanced at Pieter, who nodded at the canvas. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Kyle looked to the top of the first ancient wooden frame and moved his eyes downwards. Saw a thin strip of distant sky, red and black, cut above an arid plain of dry or scorched land. In the top third of the picture, beneath the angry sky, an army bristled with pikes and lances, their steel helmets were close together, and the armoured cluster moved as one mass upon a mostly broken wall. About the rubble inside the town a handful of men with thin legs threw their arms into the sky, or stood with drawn swords and banners. It looked like a final stand.

‘I see the army. The siege?’

‘The besiegers. Seven hundred soldiers. Two hundred mercenaries. Spanish. Very disciplined, with much experience slaughtering Protestants.’

‘The walls are broken and the soldiers are pouring into the town. St Mayenne, I’m guessing.’

Pieter nodded. ‘What are the people doing in the town?’

Horribly thin and miserable women wearing cloth caps and long gowns trailed bone-thin hounds about their skirts. All of the people’s faces were depicted with hollow eye sockets. Mouths hung open and were dark inside. Roundheaded children watched from the upper windows of one building. The few male figures he could see were at the collapsed walls. Only a few wore armour or clutched weapons. Hopelessly, women threw buckets of dirty water at the fires that licked out of three visible windows. ‘The women are putting out fires.’

‘Yes. And they also repaired the buildings and the walls at night. The Catholic army fired cannon shot at them. The siege lasted six weeks.’

‘Six?’

‘The army built a trench round the town and decide to starve the Blood Friends. See how they all look? Niclaes Verhulst painted them as bones in rags. They have no eyes, their jaws hang open like the dead. The royal court held the stores of food, which ran out very quick. And the people had no bread for six weeks. It was forbidden to eat the dogs, so they ate the horses, they ate the rats, then they ate the grass. The Unholy Swine, he was all right. And the Prophet’s elect. The royal court of God’s one true king ate well while the people starved.

‘Lorche sent sorties outside the walls and he even destroyed the army’s cannons in one skirmish. But the Catholic soldiers, they still surrounded them. Starved them. Lorche killed those people who tried to go over to the Guise army when the town people were promised sanctuary if they recanted. See the market square?’

Kyle found it. Eight headless figures in white winding sheets lay in the dirt of the square before a figure in purple robes, who sat upon a golden throne. The seated figure looked up to heaven. Its face was greenish, its grin skeletally beatific.

‘Apostates,’ Pieter said. ‘Beheaded. He offered their blood to those angels he served, with whom he had a pact. You see Lorche? He looks to heaven, waits for the angels who guide him to save him as he promised his followers. But the people have no food and little water. There is disease and many bodies fill the houses. So in the final days, Lorche told them to drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh of Christ. Lorche got the pig-bishop to bless the bodies of the sick and the dying and said eat to his people. So they stayed alive a bit longer eating their own dead.’

Kyle swallowed the bitter taste that had come into his mouth.

‘Look upon the table in the market square. You see the feast?’

Kyle did, but wished he had not. Entire skeletons of horses littered the flagstones of the square before the church. Picked clean. Before the doors of the church a table was laid with bowls of reddish-brown liquid; lifeless sticklike arms and legs were laid upon great steel platters. A scattering of empty coffins were built up in a pile beside the banqueting table.

‘Now look to the next painting. The Martyring of Fools.’

The market square filled the entire canvas and was depicted in much greater detail; a dirty, rubbish-strewn space of wet stone in poor light. Either the painting was filthy with age or dark, greasy smoke had been deliberately conjured to drift across the area and stain the background. The flagstones were littered with the dead and the dying. Faceless figures in dark steel armour formed a border about the slaughter. Upon the long shields of the soldiers the thin red crosses looked wet. But the apex of the picture’s images concentrated on a series of upright poles with things attached to their upper lengths.

‘In the middle, upon the longest stave, you can see Lorche, the Father of Lies. Around him, The Seven. They were all stripped of their clothes. Their legs and their arms were smashed with poles while they are still alive. Then they get tied to the beams and raised vertically. Slow fires of dung, tow and pitch are built under their feet.’

Kyle felt unwell, lightheaded, and adjusted his feet. The floor of the room groaned beneath his boots.

Nine thin black posts held dirty ruins of barely recognizable forms, engulfed in smoke. About the figures on the poles, others were strapped to wooden chairs with red fires beneath the seats. Yet more had been tied to and broken upon cartwheels raised on thin poles. The agonies of the Blood Friends were captured with white twists of face and sinewy throat, reaching upwards to escape the fumes. Every figure yearned for the boiling black sky.

‘Nine. There are nine posts.’

Pieter smiled. ‘Here burns the King, The Seven Elders, and their bishop, the Unholy Swine. You see his feet. The last one on the right in the picture. Pig feet. The picture is dirty, but if you look closely you also see his vestments. They burn him in his holy robes and his bishop hat.’

Kyle chose not to look any closer. ‘What happened to the others . . . the peasants, the people of the town?’

‘They were slaughtered in their homes. Few lived. The soldiers lied. Said they would be saved if they ended the resistance. But they found most of the people too given over to Anabaptism to save, and alive with demons, so they cut their throats in their homes. Many were beheaded. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. Who knows now? Their corpses were salted. The children and some women were sent to other towns in the diocese, but nearly all others died here on this last day of the siege. Verhulst was an educated man and his parents had money. He survived because we think he bribed the Spanish mercenaries. Now look at the sky. Tell me what is happening there.’

The sky seethed with a cumulus of pitch-black smoke, from which curious vanilla gases appeared in places as if a sickly sun was trying to light the ground. A thin red fire glowed on the horizon. Kyle found his throat to be so dry he could barely speak. ‘It’s dark. Smoke maybe, from the fires. Or a storm.’

‘The captain of the soldiers claimed a storm came on the final day. The Last Day. As they put the heretics to the sword, and as the town and the bodies burned to ashes, he said a terrible wind came up and started to scatter the bones. He said the air was full of smoke and embers and they were forced to withdraw. What was left of Lorche and his chosen was meant for steel cages, to be taken around the nearby towns. The cages were to be hung from the steeples of churches as a warning. But the storm, it spoiled that. Because when the wind blew in St Mayenne on the last day, on the day of the false martyrs, a priest with the soldiers wrote that the sky filled up with ash and then rained with black bones. All the soldiers ran when this happened. Now look above the walls, before the air is dark. What do you see?’

‘Birds.’

Pieter nodded beside him. A score of black shapes, crows, seemed to hover lifelessly above the ruined walls. ‘They’d been coming in for many weeks to eat the blessed dead. But on this day, they got lost in the wind. It took them too. Took them into the sky with the remains of Lorche and his disciples.

‘And now, we come to the end of Verhulst’s triptych. The Kingdom of Fools.’

Rising to the upper margin of the grey charred sky in the third painting, a single figure immediately captured Kyle’s attention. The Unholy Swine. The pig clutched a sceptre in one uncomfortably prehensile trotter, and a gilt-edged book in another trotter. But what most unnerved him about the pig was its apparent glee at the elevation, or even levitation while seated in its throne. Up it went, into the broiling maelstrom of the heavens; the air now depicted as an unpleasant sulphurous-yellow mist.

The pig and its host rose above the suggested miniature detail of a blackened town, crowned with smoke, at the foot of the piece. Up into the sky the host of tormented and stricken martyrs writhed; thin wretched forms of at least a hundred naked human figures.

The ghastly sky filled two-thirds of the picture, with its tainted air seeming to churn, circle, and pull at the earth far below. Birds who were still feeding on the listless human carrion of the air, grinned as if delighted by their ghastly ascension, and were also whirlpooled into the sky. Bone-thin dogs with long snouts, lolling tongues and prominent rib-cages rose upwards too, as if on their hind legs, and barked at the turmoil in the heavens about them.

‘You see the Unholy Swine?’

Kyle nodded that he did.

‘He holds a book. The Book of One Hundred Chapters. It is Lorche’s hierophantic manifesto of the Blood Friends. A testament that deified him as immortal and those who follow him as saints. A written proclamation of their divinity. Sister Katherine wrote something similar, and just as badly. She said it was transcribed through her. Maybe this was one thing she did not lie about. Now see the faces. Those around the pig are in better detail.’ Several of the faces were turned skywards in a mixture of wonderment and cruel leers. ‘They think they are saved. But they are merely guests in damnation. Guests of those they served through Lorche. These angels. The Blood Friends are consumed by this other place, their souls are devoured, they become one with their angels, their false gods. They mimic the expressions of the Christian saints and martyrs. But this is an inversion. Now look in the top section of the picture. The final ascent into hell. Through the sky.’

The top third of the picture depicted a long, miserable stretch of what looked like pale dirt. A shore before a great body of lifeless water. A place positioned above the maelstrom of sky that the martyrs moved upwards through.

‘We’ll take two steps closer. Come.’

Kyle swallowed.

‘Up here. In hell. The Blood Friends frolic like blasphemous angels above the world. They cavort with the pig and a pack of mad dogs, who stand on their hind legs. All their tongues flap to suggest idiocy. You see their simple crowns?’ All of the bone-thin figures were crowned like royalty in the featureless vacant space. The crowns were crudely made of wood. ‘Here Verhulst represents Lorche and The Seven as kings of emptiness, of vapours and foul gases. Their constituency is a pestilence of sinners executed and burned alive, a flock of dead birds who feasted upon carrion, and dogs who have eaten diseased flesh. You can see the birds around the feet of the people. The birds too are bones. This is the paradise they were promised.’

The Blood Friends were even more wretchedly gaunt and spindly than they had been during the siege and the martyring. They didn’t look like people any more. But the depiction was accurate; Kyle knew where he had seen such things before.

‘Instead of heavenly bodies they now are caged within twisted demoniac forms, human remains reshaped in the image of their masters. They can only masquerade as angels. They grin like fools upon the devastation wrought upon their earthly forms. You see? Clutched in their hands are rags and bones. They clutch at ruin, but prize the things they have seized as if they are made of gold and are encrusted with precious jewels. In the middle you will see Lorche. He dances with the pig.’

Indeed he did. The horrible prance of a skeletal man who wore a wooden crown, about a pig with grotesque human features under a bishop’s headdress, made Kyle feel sick and nervous.

‘They are no longer men. They are the damned. Devoured. Yet still they yearn for the light below that burns them. They await here, in the wasteland, for a call from those old places where they were once strong, or from those who have come to adore them.’

Kyle turned away. The images had been seared into his memory; he knew he would revisit them, often. And as he walked across the room towards the door, unaccompanied by Pieter, who had remained behind to hastily throw black sheets over the stands, all Kyle could see were the thin wretched faces of the Blood Friends in their Kingdom of Fools. Their white eyes were full of madness.

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