THIRTY

SAN DIEGO. 26 JUNE 2011. 8.30 A.M.

‘Max. It’s covered in cameras.’

‘But who’s watching them? Look down anyway. I told you. At your feet. Can you not follow the simplest instruction?’

Too late, he’d been caught out and stared into at least three cameras as he and Max walked the sidewalk to the gate. ‘The front, Max? We’re going in through the bloody main gate!’ Max remained deep in uneasy thoughts that Kyle could only guess at, though assumed they were not dissimilar to his own. But his questions were irritating the producer of this new worst day of his life. Good.

They stopped outside gates designed into an art deco fan of a peacock’s tail; the spines of the long feathers made from steel bars, the centrepiece embossed with the initials: R. F. Posts on either side were stone pillars with crowns similar to the Chrysler building. Long steel flagpoles reached out of the gateposts towards a blue sky empty of cloud. On either side of the gateposts, white stone walls overflowed with ivy and began a total encirclement of the grounds.

From the front, the house was entirely hidden. Nothing more than a path of pink gravel, hemmed by wild flower beds and unruly hedges, was visible through the peacock’s steel wingspan. Periodically, the small black cameras fixed upon the walls peered through the ivy and surveyed the street and main gate area.

A canvas tool bag was held tightly in one of the executive producer’s small hands. They both wore blue one-piece overalls and baseball caps with ‘Four Horsemen Pest Control’ written on the pockets and cap peaks. Kyle’s camera and batteries were concealed inside a rucksack. Jed hadn’t given him a gun. Before they left the motel he’d asked for one, but Jed had laughed and said, ‘Yeah right.’ A mile away from the mansion, they’d changed vehicles in a dusty valley, moving from Jed’s black transit van to a tradesman’s truck; the colour of the panels and the signage matched their exterminator uniforms.

Kyle was told to sit in the truck bed and was thrown about among white plastic tanks, lengths of tubing and spray guns. Max and Jed had sat up front in the cabin. He was told not to film until ‘Max gives you a green light, Spielberg’. Every few minutes, to make sure he complied, Jed monitored him in the rear-view mirror. Whenever Kyle caught his eye, Jed winked.

Before the gate, Max’s hands shook so badly Kyle decided to stand behind him if he drew the handgun. And when Max spoke again, Kyle wasn’t sure how much of the old man had drifted out of his morbid self-absorption. ‘This is not our area of expertise. It’s Jed’s. And you need to trust him, Kyle. Listen to him. This is no joke, Kyle. Our lives depend upon him.’

‘You see me laughing, Max? And I don’t share your confidence. He’s a psycho. And another sweet little surprise you’ve foisted on me. I’m here now for your self-preservation, Max. Let’s be straight about this for once. Because your ape has a gun that he will use on me if I don’t comply with this bullshit plan. I’ve only ever been used by your self-interest. Right from the beginning. And who does that sound like, eh? So fuck you, Max. You know that. Fuck you for all of this.’

Max ignored him.

‘And salt now? I see that helps too. Might have been fucking useful to me, you know that? Cheers.’

Not even his bad language worked as provocation any more. And Kyle could not place Jed with a background in any kind of military service or police force. The man lacked the fundamental aura of respect and grooming uniformed service seemed to bestow on a man for life. Instead he seemed like the kind of crazy who’d learned his moves from action films and the internet, who lived at home in his mother’s basement and designed homemade bombs destined for federal buildings, because the United Nations were in league with Alien Greys. When Kyle pushed Max on Jed’s background, while the hired gun was urinating into the stained motel bathtub, Max had said he came ‘highly recommended’; that he ‘got results’, was ‘expensive’. But Kyle suspected Jed’s past was still nine parts mystery to Max. He thought again of Malcolm Gonal as a first choice of director; Max was only too happy to involve the discredited and hard up – they were easier to deceive. Himself included. ‘And how do I know . . .’ He couldn’t even say it. He swallowed to keep his voice firm. ‘That Jed’s not going to kill me.’

Max frowned. Shook his gauze-plastered head in astonished disbelief, which made Kyle feel weak and foolish for voicing the fear. Max continued to stare at the bottom of the gate, as if willing it to swing wide open.

‘I make films, Max. You’re a mind, body and spirit publisher. We’re not bloody commandos. You don’t know who this guy is. Jed’s not even his real name, is it? And you’re carrying a gun, Max. A gun! Have you thought that part through? You’re going to shoot a dying man this morning.’

Max turned his bruised and bandaged face towards Kyle. His smile was not pleasant. ‘Have you learned nothing? It’s not a man, Kyle. Has never been a man. It has no more right to remain in this world than the creature we caught last night. But if the execution of these abominations troubles you, then focus your attention on the boy whose life we will be sparing. Not to mention our own.’

‘And what if it’s too late for the boy? What if Katherine has already made the switch, eh? You going to shoot a kid?’

Max never answered him. No, but Jed might: the meaning in his silence was implicit.

‘Max!’

Max sighed. ‘All you need to do is point your bloody camera at what I tell you to. If you’d not fallen asleep, or locked yourself in the bathroom, you might have learned something last night. Of our strategy.’

‘Strategy? Is that what it is? It feels like a criminal heist. People will be watching this on ITV4, on America’s Dumbest Criminals, forever. There has to be another way.’

‘There isn’t. Weeks of planning have gone into this. We’ve thought of everything. Now, please, be quiet. I need to think.’

‘Weeks of planning’ did nothing to placate his anxiety. Kyle checked his watch, again; they’d been outside the gate for twelve minutes now. Twenty minutes before that, they had left the truck parked beyond the gaze of the wall’s cameras. Jed had ‘moved out’ from the vehicle alone.

‘Three of us, Max. This is it? Couldn’t you have hired some lowlife to do the dirty work?’

‘Loose lips, Kyle. And I will not endanger any more of the innocent than I have done already.’

‘What a saint.’

Dan was alive and no police cars had driven past, yet. He counted his blessings again, but never made it past those two. He fidgeted, sweated, and doubted he could take the sight of another Blood Friend. Images from the Kingdom of Fools flashed into his mind, to be replaced by those from Holland Park, the ghastly walls of the barn in St Mayenne, the urgent search of a thin figure about his bed in Seattle, the thing on all fours in his flat . . . And he began to lose it; felt his strength drain through his feet. Wished he’d eaten something more than a slice of dry toast at Dennies. ‘How long did Jed say this would take?’

Max ignored him.

Before they left the motel room soon after 7 a.m., with the bathtub still scorched and encrusted with blackened bones, Max told him Jed would open the main gates electronically from a gate house closer to the property. The security codes for the relevant barriers on the inside had been paid for ‘with good money’. Acquired from a member of the disgruntled and unpaid security detail that was no longer on Chet’s payroll. Jed had infiltrated them months before and bribed a man on the inside for all the breaking and entering information required. The security firm were even coming back the following week to rip out the cameras and motion sensors. The guard dogs had gone with them. Foreclosure was imminent on the actual property; it was going to auction in six weeks. According to Jed’s ‘intel’ there was no one left inside the mansion beside an incapacitated Chet, whom none of the guards had ever seen, and two ‘old girls dressed like red nuns’ who occasionally went into the grounds alone, to sit and talk on phones, but never for very long.

But Jed’s source had never seen a kid, nor had any of his colleagues. The supermodel ex-wife had occasionally visited the house, so they were assuming those visits were an exercise of some kind of visitation right, confirming the presence of a child.

Once Chet was dead, Max presumed the kid would go back to his wealthy mother and evade Chet’s debts, to grow into a life of beauty and luxury in Santa Barbara where his mother lived. Although half of him still refused to accept Max’s theory, Kyle had to admit it all felt very neat as far as the kid’s future was concerned. If you were going to start over, there were worse situations than a life in Santa Barbara with a model; a woman you could torment into suicide to inherit the thirty million dollars she shook Chet down for in a divorce settlement, out of court. Perhaps Chet had seen it as a loan.

Mercifully, the tiger had gone to an animal sanctuary in Montana, the snakes to LA: the only good news he’d heard since emerging from the bathroom in the early hours, before enduring more threats from Jed as he loaded the three handguns. ‘This is a Gloch 25. Military calibre. Prohibited in the civilian market. It has fifteen rounds in the mag. Assure me now that I don’t need to keep one on the side for you, Spielberg.’

There were many things Kyle thought of saying in answer, though he’d kept them all to himself, and chose instead to silently revel in the news that Dan had survived the attack at his flat. Max’s indifference to the incredible news had not just appalled Kyle, but terrified him. And in the motel room, just before they ‘rolled’, he’d drunk more whisky for courage, mixed with Coke to get a caffeine jag, while watching Jed customize the pistols.

Chet’s mansion was sealed from daylight with a combination of blackout curtains and roller grilles on the ground floor and steel security shutters upstairs to protect the interior against light. In response, Jed slotted a small Maglight and tactical sights into a rail on top of each handgun, and told Max the infrared targeting light was only visible through night vision goggles. Which was fine because he had two pairs, one for himself and one for Max to wear. At that point Kyle had felt it necessary to speak up. ‘What about me? I’d like to see whatever the fuck comes out of the ceiling too.’

‘You got night vision on the camera, Spielberg. And you better be Johnny on the Spot with it too. Them demons move real quick.’

Demons. From what he could gather from the discussions between Jed and his paymaster (that he was entirely left out of), Max appeared to have couched the ‘mission’ in Judeo–Christian terms to Jed from the very beginning of their involvement; and Jed was a man who revered some kind of vengeance-based theology, that sounded vaguely Biblical, in which ‘Jesus Christ would guide my hand’.

When the gate unlocked with a thunk, Kyle wiped at the sweat that leaked from under his baseball cap. Seconds later, to the sound of a low electronic hum, the peacock’s tail began to part down the middle. And Kyle experienced an urgent need to visit the toilet for the immediate expulsion of everything inside him not attached to bone or muscle.

Max touched his arm. His face was pale, stiff with nerves, his little eyes blinked rapidly. ‘Come on,’ he whispered.

They found Jed with a big grin on his face waiting beside the gatehouse, his back flat to the wall that faced away from the house, which reared behind like one of the seven follies of the world. The gatehouse was a modern addition intended for a security detail; a small bungalow with tinted windows, festooned inside with small monitor screens that might have revealed changing views of the house and grounds, if they were operational.

Kyle stared in amazement at the mansion; it was just too grand to break into and a photograph did not do it justice. Jed smiled at him. ‘You know, Spielberg, I been reading up on this place. It was built by a guy called Rouben Fischer. You heard of him?’

Mute with nerves, Kyle shook his head.

‘Made a fortune with B-movies. Colour talkies in the thirties. So he had his house designed like a theatre. Pretty cool, huh? You know who’s been here for parties? Jean Harlow. The Swedish Sphinx herself, Garbo. John Wayne too. The friggin’ Duke, man. You believe that? Clark Cable. Johnny Weissmuller. Gary Cooper. All those guys came down here from Hollywood.’

‘Jed,’ Max said. ‘The house. Shall we?’

‘Oh, yeah. We’re going in through some patio doors round the back. Point of entry is the old dining room. Looks like lights out inside. Every window is blacked out. I just checked.’ He smiled conspiratorially. ‘Looks like we gonna have company on the inside.’

Kyle shoved another stick of chewing gum inside his mouth because Jed wouldn’t let him smoke. ‘Butts got DNA on ’em.’ But the gum helped plug the long scream of frustration and fear building inside him. ‘You said there were motion sensors. Alarms.’

‘Come on, Spielberg. Catch up. What am I, an amateur?’

‘You tell me.’

Max frowned at Kyle. Jed’s grin widened. ‘They pulled the plug on old Chet. Cameras and sensors are all out. Couldn’t pay the bills. But when the show starts, Spielberg, we’ll see who’s got the “stones”. But just so you can focus, instead of pissing your panties behind that camera, even if the alarms are still on and get tripped, the signal goes to the security detail. Status: contract expired. Ain’t no one coming out here to wipe your ass today.’

‘Which does not mean we need dilly-dally on the inside,’ Max warned.

Jed guffawed. ‘Dilly what?’

‘Can we get on with this, please?’

Jed grinned. ‘OK. Giddy up. Let’s rock and roll.’ Jed moved out from behind the gatehouse, then paused and turned to them. He grinned. ‘Oh, and fellas, just relax.’

The building’s facade rose forty metres above the wide pink forecourt. It was easily another fifty metres across. Didn’t have a porch so much as an awning that reached all the way to the roof, and looked like an amalgam of an old cinema and the prow of an ocean liner built after the First World War. The walls around it were an ice-cream-pink stone. Where they appeared across the three storeys, the windows were circular and nautical in design, but darkened with whatever was blacking them out from the inside. The building reminded Kyle of many things, a high-camp tomb amongst them.

‘The windows on every floor are sealed with metal shutters.’ Max said this like he hoped it wasn’t true, because he’d spent a bit of time in the dark with the Blood Friends. The old producer was also breathless, and they were still only moving towards the front of the building. Kyle considered begging Jed for the spare handgun.

Jed was unfazed. ‘We don’t get to see the roof, but I heard it’s a metal deck. Painted white. Like on a ship. Where they used to throw parties. Imagine the pussy that was up there.’

Max mopped at his forehead. ‘Katherine saw it as a magnet for rich donors. For wealthy acolytes. She bought it with our money.’

Kyle gaped. From a side angle it looked like an Aztec temple, the roof ascended in a ziggurat pattern to the distant railings, hung with the life rings. Built between the portholes on the third storey were polished aluminium bas-reliefs depicting Grecian scenes of willowy women in long gowns and what looked like swimming caps. Geometric surrounds of metal bordered the occasional door at ground level. Embossed with a peacock and the initials R.F., the iron doors seemed intended for tall, thin people who lived on pink champagne and cigarettes smoked through lacquer holders. Kyle broke out the camera. Jed grinned. Max nodded. ‘If you have to.’

The grounds at the back, though having seen better days, were still astonishing. Great curving tiers of stone radiated from the rear of the property like ripples on water, until they reached what was either a dance floor, an empty ice rink, or the world’s biggest tiled patio, guarded by chevron-patterned cornerstones. A gazebo with sides made from iron peacocks stood in the centre of the court. Beyond the court, grounds capable of housing a golf course flowed down to the perimeter wall of white stone and ivy.

‘You see that little house made from birds?’ Jed said, nodding out to where Kyle gawped. ‘That was a bar. Two outside bars here. Other one’s on the roof in a lifeboat.’

‘You’d think he could have stretched to a swimming pool.’

‘That’s inside,’ Jed said.

Six sets of patio doors at the back of the building were sealed from the sunlight by long funeral drapes. Steel grilles were locked in place between the drapery and glass in the door frames. It looked deserted, shut down after a season of frivolity had long concluded.

Jed broke out glass-cutters from his rucksack, then a set of lock-picking tools for the steel grilles. ‘Gimme some room here, boys.’

As Jed cut the beginning of a large circular hole in one of the patio doors, Max continued to sweat heavily, wiping at his scrawny orange neck with a white handkerchief. He peered at Kyle and tried to smile, but his lips quivered instead. His eyes were wild with fear. ‘There won’t be any electric light. Not inside. Chet would have disabled the lights by now. The rooms in the middle of the building don’t even have windows. And it’s the time of Ascent. I’m sure of it. So be prepared. It ends here. The bloodline.’

‘You know that for sure?’

‘Chet goes and Katherine goes with him. Trapped inside his remains. There is no other way. Katherine is the only earthly conduit for the Blood Friends. She calls them, maintains them. Always has done. The way of things must be re-established today, here. So know that this is a good thing we are about to do.’

Kyle could barely speak, was becoming breathless with fright again. ‘She brought Lorche, or whatever the fuck he was following back, Max. Someone else might.’

‘Who knows how to? Who’s left now? It takes years. Years of determination and belief, concentrated in the right places, with the right offerings. Different world now. One more transparent. It would be near impossible to achieve what she did back in the sixties. The history of their intrusions since 1969 ends with us. The family in Antwerp will keep a careful watch after our business is concluded here. And when the time comes, film them, you have to film them, Kyle. It’s our only security.’

Max looked at the sky for a moment, then back at Kyle with as much remorse as he could summon to his twitchy face. ‘But I’m afraid it’s why the film can never be shown to a soul. It cannot be risked. Because fools will try to speak with the old friends again, as she once did. Your work has been invaluable. But no one can go through what we have, Kyle. Not again.’ Max nodded at his bag. ‘So we’ll need that camera when it’s over. And all copies of the rushes.’ Max nodded at Jed’s back as the man worked at the glass. ‘Please don’t force me to have the material collected from your colleagues. It would be a very foolish thing to broadcast so much as a clip, my dear Kyle. There would be serious repercussions.’

‘This is my surprised face. There never was a film, Max. What I was forced to take part in was probably going to prevent me from finishing, let alone broadcasting anything. You knew that.’ Kyle nodded at the patio windows. ‘But give me your word now that you’re not going to leave me inside there.’

‘Of course. Without question. I’m surprised you would think that of me.’

Kyle shook his head. ‘For sure, Max. For sure.’

Jed carefully extracted a ring of intact glass, leaving a hole they could step through. He placed the glass circle on the concrete patio. Reached inside and unlocked the steel grille. Concertinaed it to the side to clear a route, then withdrew and said, ‘Showtime, folks.’

Max opened his holdall and removed the pistol, his silver salt-shaker, night vision goggles and a torch, and pocketed them about his overalls. Kyle shuddered at the very sight of the gun. ‘You even know how to use that, Max?’

‘Pray I won’t need it, but Jed was good enough to give me lessons.’

Jed fitted his weapon onto a black canvas utility belt. Hung bolt cutters upon it and a series of flares. He caught Kyle watching him. ‘Magnesium. In case of emergency. Light the place up like the fourth of July. You seen how much they like gettin’ burned too. Reminds them of the damnation they escaped in hell.’

Max looked at Kyle. ‘In every room we can, we open the curtains, to secure the area behind us. We need to return as much of this building to light as possible as we move through it.’ He looked up at the walls. ‘She’s up there. Somewhere.’

‘You don’t know which room?’

Jed chuckled. ‘Now where’s the fun in that, Spielberg?’

‘What, what if she’s, he’s, whatever it is, is behind a bloody iron door?’

‘Acetylene rig in my pack. Have a little faith, Spielberg.’

‘The child? What do we do with it?’

Jed frowned. ‘Child? No one mentioned a child to me.’

‘The fucking kid he adopted?’

‘Now you sure that it’s a kid, Spielberg. ’Cus I ain’t.’

Kyle looked out at the terraces and court and was momentarily convinced he should run. Jed’s timely checking and cocking of his handgun kept him stationary.

‘Wait here.’ Jed slipped his night vision goggles down and ducked through the hole in the glass.

They came into a dining room worthy of the Queen Mary.

Golden light fell onto a broad floor of black and white chequerboard marble. Kyle stared about himself in astonishment, then remembered to resume filming. Max couldn’t get the curtains open fast enough to expose the room to the sun. And there was something undignified in his haste to clear them back to the walls of the room, on either side of the hole they had ducked through.

Behind the giant bar of maple inlaid with chrome, on the right-hand side of the room, the peacock-tail motif was emblazoned across the wall in stainless steel. All of the tables were white and made from Bakelite, but bare and without chairs.

‘No chairs?’ Kyle said.

‘You ain’t here for Home and Garden,’ Jed said, and pushed his goggles on top of his baseball cap. He jogged across to Max, who said, ‘What next? I can’t remember. I can’t . . .’

Kyle moved to stand behind them. Filmed the conversation. Even if the footage was never going to win awards, if it fell into the hands of the authorities he wanted them to acknowledge who was calling the shots here. Maybe then he would only need to serve most of his life behind bars, and not all of it.

‘We got the kitchen next door. Beyond that is a laundry. Other side is a lounge and then a billiards room facing the back. We get the sun in there first. Then we know we can always fall back down here.’

Kyle went and filmed the enormous fireplace, tiled in pink and aquamarine, on the opposite side of the dining room to the bar.

‘Spielberg!’

Kyle looked over his shoulder.

Jed grinned. ‘Stay away from the chimneys. Real dark in there. Don’t know what might come down.’

Kyle stepped well away, and turned instead to the elegant arch leading out of the dining room. Zoomed in on it. But couldn’t see beyond a lightless space that seemed to offer the end of existence as they knew it, for anyone foolish enough to step through.

Jed’s voice came back to him. ‘Up front we got the swimming pool, a library, drawing room, morning room and boot room. Oh, yeah, and the lift we ain’t going anywhere near.’

‘That’s right. That’s right,’ Max said, gulping at the cool air, and Kyle was absolutely certain that Jed should disarm the old man now and hand his Gloch over.

‘Max. Swap you the camera for the gun?’ No one answered him.

They approached the arch: Jed first; Kyle in the middle; Max shuffled in the rear, panting with fear and nerves. Before they even switched on the little Maglites on their handguns, the stench hit them. ‘They’re here,’ Max said, coughing in the miasma of dead birds, stagnant water, and ancient clothing contained in what had been a sealed building. The smell seemed to drop directly from the enormous mausoleum rearing above them, from upstairs.

They came to a wary standstill in the middle of a vast reception, the floor continuing the chequerboard theme. A great marble staircase on the right side rose into darkness. Torch beams and the camera’s spot raked around the space designed like a grand theatre lobby, and briefly illumined the lightless arches leading out of it. The giant porthole windows beside the front door that they’d seen from outside were barred and sealed behind black drapes long as royal flags. All four walls were patterned with tall light-panels of green glass, inset between long strips of red crushed velvet that reached the vaulted ceiling. There was a candy machine, a popcorn machine, even a little box office beside the front doors, its chrome grille resplendent like the front of an old car; a shuttered and locked cloakroom for guests long gone.

Jed ran across the lobby in a crouch to the front doors, looking towards the stairs on his right as he moved. Max hobbled after him. Between them they raked the recalcitrant noisy drapes aside to reveal locked steel security grilles. Shafts of dusty light, barred by shadows, shot through the portholes and illumined the lobby floor. But even with the sudden comfort of sunlight, there was no way out of the building save going back through the hole in the French doors. Kyle was about to suggest creating other points of egress when Jed whispered tensely, ‘Move out. On me.’ And did his crouching run back across the lobby to the doors beside the dining room.

Kyle was happy to see him enter the enormous kitchen first, pistol out forward, one hand in support of the fingers that held the gun.

‘Kitchen clear!’

And they moved in a huddle through arches or doors of patterned glass, room by room on the ground floor, as if exploring the hull of some forgotten Titanic, preserved and undisturbed in black waters for the best part of a century. Hazy spheres of their lights, in those first few terrifying seconds on entering each room, moved like desperate eyes, cast from their torches to strike distant walls. Jed always out front.

Art deco lamps and strange furniture had a habit of suddenly rearing into sharp focus, to the soundtrack of Kyle’s ‘Shit. Shit. What’s that?’ Max’s sharp inhalations acted as percussion. Glimmers of aluminium, stainless steel, lacquer, and Bakelite were thrown back from fittings, fixtures and furniture hiding in the dark. Chevron patterns, ziggurats, a fountain of chrome, and mirror tiles glared out of the enforced dusk. The peacock spread its tail-feather motif on every wall.

In the larger rooms the darkness was at first so dense it emitted a tangible gravity, that pressed them from all sides, additionally loaded with their terror, until they tore the curtains open, and sometimes even tore the drapes from the rails with both hands when they stubbornly resisted drawing.

They lit the place up with California sunshine. Revealed its sealed treasures. Poured the sun’s gold through the French doors of the lounge bar; doors longing to be opened again to the stately vista beyond. Sweeping curves came back to the world. A step pyramid rose to a rectangular fireplace. Brass-framed screens featuring nouveau fairy mermaids, encased an elegant gathering of polished maple chairs, each upholstered with satin and fur, positioned about glossy lacquer coffee tables, but appearing mournful at the absence of guests.

When stray torch beams brushed against their icy stillness in the darkness of the drawing room, the chandeliers flashed shards of bluish light. Purifying rays soon shone and sparkled upon the hand-crafted oak bookcases of the library. Ash, maple, and rosewood chairs in the morning room were quickly drenched with solar brilliance. The veneered teak of the boot room was made magical once again by their throwing wide the drapes. Italian marble and the walls gilded with sculpted peacocks in the billiard room rediscovered their familiar burnish. And every room, immaculately preserved from better times, proved empty of life and the animation of those who masqueraded as the living. It encouraged Kyle to hope the building was empty of what they had come to find. That it had vanished, leaving only a scent and a few stains behind, as was often its wont. But if it had, what then? Did he just lie and wait for his throat to be torn out one night by a dirty mouth?

Once Jed had bolted enough water from a black military canteen to satisfy his thirst outside the windowless swimming-pool room, the water within still and black beneath greenhouse walls of white steel and green glass, he said, ‘Things get too hot upstairs, we fall back down to the lobby. Safe zone. But only on my word. No one turns tail until I give the get-the-fuck-out-fast sign.’ He winked at Kyle and said, ‘Oora!’

They followed him to the foot of the lobby staircase. Metal banisters chromed and gridded with a Charles Rennie Mackintosh pattern, pointed upwards to the first-storey landing, partially visible through an arch bordered with a white peacock tail and the now familiar initials of R.F.

‘Y’all ready for this?’ Jed whispered.

Neither Max nor Kyle answered him.

‘Windows upstairs are shuttered. And locked. Ain’t gonna have time to cut them all open, so it’s torches and the camera light from now on. Night vision and flares as backup. We do it room by room. Same as down here. Until we find the queen of the hive. Capiche?’

The connotations of the word hive made the strength liquefy in Kyle’s legs. Max didn’t seem to be faring much better on the stones front. But Jed maintained the confidence and self-assurance of the professionally fearless, or the plain psychopathic. And took the first step up there.

They passed through the regal arch and entered a long corridor that ran between the exterior walls of the house, facing north and south. In the thin beams of light from the handguns and camera, every room on the long passageway was fronted with a closed white door, inset between walls of luxurious cream. ‘The guest bedrooms,’ Jed muttered. ‘Wonder who’s staying over, eh Spielberg? Want to go see if they want an interview?’

‘Jed!’ Max hissed.

Occasional drifts of dusty light from the lobby below, filtered up and faded about them, as if distant hatches had been opened in some great surfacing submarine, only to reveal little more in any detail than their feet on the red carpet; the light from below barely made it further than ten feet on either side of them. At both far ends of the corridor, torch light revealed a great nautical window concealed by a locked shutter. Modern additions. Preparations. Chet. It seemed the man had desired a permanent end to light in his home. Other passages turned off the main concourse before they met the far walls.

Kyle switched the camera spotlight on.

Jed turned the handle of the nearest room. ‘Locked.’

‘We need to check them all?’ Max said.

And then they heard it. Ten feet inside the first corridor: above them. Whistling down the staircase from the floor above. Shot from a mouth none wished to see open. A long avian call that cut to a nasal whine. Kyle knew the sound well; had been chased out of the house on Clarendon Road by something similar.

In response, another whine, more sibilate and canine than birdlike, issued from much further away, perhaps above them, somewhere in the distant confines of the dark house.

Jed and Max both peered at the staircase that led up to the next floor, their eyes wide and guns raised. Max’s business hand trembled like he had palsy. And once their torchlight vanished from where they stood, an intense blackness rushed in and filled the space around Kyle. Which he remedied by flashing his camera down the passage in the other direction.

Something rushed through the far reach of the camera light beam at the end of the long corridor. A scampering. Accompanied by the sudden glimpse of a figure on all fours, thin as a greyhound but trailing cloth long and white. ‘Guys!’ It briefly turned its eyes to him; distant and opaque, a suggestion of blindness. A dark head draped wisps of colourless hair.

Jed and Max spun about and aimed their lights at where the camera attempted illumination. And lit up an empty corridor. ‘What was it?’ Max said with a stammer.

Kyle peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth. ‘One of them. In . . . In . . . I don’t know. Something white.’

‘Gone now,’ Jed said. ‘They know we’re here. Which way did it go?’

Kyle swallowed. ‘Left. Towards the back.’

‘These floors are built like a ship’s decks. Corridors run around the inside of the building’s outer walls. If these doors are locked, they ain’t got much choice on where to run. Floor plan is a big square. So we smoke them as we go. Come on,’ Jed said and stalked down the corridor quickly, forcing them to hurry behind him. ‘Max in the rear. That way, ain’t nothing gonna take us from behind.’

Kyle thought Jed had just outlined the dimensions of a place perfect for entrapment, but was too tense to speak up. Until Max overtook him. ‘Max, watch behind us. Behind us!’ But Max was intent to push past him to get into Jed’s slipstream, leaving Kyle vulnerable to the darkness behind, and what he could vividly imagine crawling through it.

‘Keep formation, Max.’ Jed called out, but quietly.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Max obeyed, but no longer seemed entirely with it.

At the end of the passage, Jed looked both ways quickly. Then turned and ran to the left and disappeared from sight. Left them behind. They heard his feet bump away quickly, the light from his torch dimmed to nothing.

‘Jed!’ Max cried out, a squeal in his voice. ‘Quick, follow him!’

But it seemed that not all of the doors to the guest rooms were locked. The sound of one opening behind Max in the dark nearly made Kyle faint away from the world. They turned at the same time. Their frail white lights raked through the unlit burrow behind them. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Kyle said.

Max fired three shots indiscriminately. A puff of plaster exploded from a wall. The carpet ruffled. But the thing rising to its feet from the floor never flinched. The dry mouth that opened was black inside, toothless. And for a moment neither of them spoke, and the gun was not discharged, and even the earth seemed to stop turning as they gaped at what it had draped upon its foul head and body.

A white wig. Lopsided above a shrunken face, its features diminutive like a chimpanzee’s and as black as ancient leather. Emaciated remains of a small man, who looked to have been busy in a dress-up box. They studied it momentarily, with a grotesque fascination. Looked appalled at its apparel, the satin nightie stained down the front with old blood. Until it screamed with rage, like an ape, and came at them on fleshless legs thin as bamboo.

‘Shoot!’ Kyle bellowed.

Max did, twice. But missed, putting two rounds in the wainscoting four feet above its tatty head. After that Max threw his hands up and over his face and screamed. Kyle tripped over his own feet and sat down with a cry.

It was reaching for Max when it suddenly drew back, as if yanked on a rope from behind. Its bony feet left the carpet. It jerked in mid-air, then dropped hard, to pursue an intermittent twitching on the floor.

‘There was me thinking Spielberg would flip out first. Goddamn it, Max. That’s five rounds going south at fifteen feet.’ Jed stepped around where Kyle still sat on the floor in shock and walked straight past Max to where the thing quivered on its back. The light from Jed’s torch made it raise its groin as if in some horrible provocation. Jed stamped on its throat and fired from close range into its face. Its limbs fell still. ‘It’s wearing a goddamned dress. And a friggin’ wig, like some bony faggot. Looks like a bitch. Though you can’t tell and I sure as shit ain’t rooting in its panties.’

Max was insensible with fear and leaning against a wall. He bent over and was sick onto his legs. Jed shook his head in dismay. ‘Hey Spielberg, can I trust you with a bit of firepower? Max is strictly intel-gathering from here on.’

‘You bet.’

‘Get your light on this, Spielberg.’

Kyle moved on wooden legs to the corpse. Jed opened his rucksack and fished for the third Gloch. Kyle concentrated the camera on to the thing’s face, open now and glistening like the broken husk of some leathery fruit. Before his eyes and the camera’s light, its entire shape perceptibly dried and withered within its loose apparel.

‘You get it?’

Kyle nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Fucker’s gonna be dust in about twenty seconds. Max, can you get your shit together enough to salt this piece of crap and make sure?’

Kyle looked at him. ‘What about the other one?’

Jed was already flashing his light back and forth, back and forth, around their position in the corridor. ‘Got away. Won’t get far. Let’s move out.’

‘They’re dressing. Dressing?’ Kyle said as he moved after Jed. The Gloch, with the safety clicked off, was now reassuringly heavy in his trouser pocket. Max followed them, wiping at his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘They mimic life. Which means they have been here for long enough to copy what they once were. They’re being sustained.’

‘Sustained how, Max?’ Jed called back. ‘By the darkness?’

‘I don’t know. But a lack of light wouldn’t be enough to keep them here. Their presence doesn’t last long. In my rooms they would come and go within minutes.’

‘Which is all it takes to get fucked up by one of them. Eyes and ears, men. Eyes and ears. This ship could be full of rats.’

They nearly walked right under the next old friend, without realizing that it had clasped itself to the ceiling behind an ornamental light, tight inside the second turning on the first storey, to lie in wait.

Jed shot it three times before Kyle even got his hand to the thigh bulging with handgun. It let out a scream he was sure had perforated an eardrum. He and Max clutched their ears as it hit the carpet with a muffled clatter of bone in fabric. The sound of the world went underwater like his head was submerged in a pool. Jed grinned, his eyes wide like an excited drunk, or an unmedicated lunatic. ‘Real close, eh boys?’

And this thing was draped in a long gown. Some kind of sleeveless nightdress, or long slip, with a lacy neck, which hung loose about petrified collarbones, beneath a throat no thicker than the neck of a guitar. Like the other one, the front of its commandeered outfit was soiled with blood. ‘These mutha fuckers been feeding on someone, Max.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ the executive producer of the quickly derailing production whispered. His throat worked up and down in panic.

And the sound of gunfire, and of the agony of their own, seemed to have projected outwards far enough to reach other sets of desiccated ears. At the next bend on the first floor, either above them or even on the same floor, they heard a series of bangs amidst a surge of whistling shrieks. At least two doors slammed shut in the distance.

Kyle was too frightened to speak. Jed’s arm roared into the air, held aloft a flare to momentarily blind them all with a phosphorescent burst. It carried through the corridor the entire length of the building’s rear. ‘Shit,’ Jed said.

Something on all fours, as thin and naked as the embalmed corpse of the Egyptian priest Kyle had once seen at the British Museum, crouched down and clawed at its face about thirty feet ahead of them. Behind it, the suggestion of other thin silhouettes, though it was impossible to deduce how many in the encroaching darkness, retreated like crabs from the flare. Terrible shrieks and hoots filled the corridor.

‘Come on,’ Jed said and carried on, his magnesium flickers thrown forward. Ahead of them sharp feet clawed away, either disappearing back inside the rooms they had emerged from, or fleeing around the next bend to lie in wait.

Jed stopped. Inside the next room on their left, something thrashed about the walls until it settled for the frantic slap of dry hands against the inside of the door. ‘Back up. Back up.’ Jed reversed two steps into Kyle’s camera. ‘’Less that thing has got a cannon in it, Spielberg, you need to put the toy away and draw down in here.’

‘Behind us!’ Max faced the way they had come, his light flashed off the walls, carpet, and ceiling behind them, and eventually found the far wall that leaped with indistinct shadows. ‘I saw something.’

‘Shit. There’s too many of them. We walked into a friggin’ ambush. They could come out any of these doors. We need more bodies. Assault rifles.’ They retreated back to the last turn in the corridor. Jed’s flare showed it empty. ‘Shit, they’re fast.’

Kyle was grateful for the brief return of his rage. ‘It’s too much for three of us, Max. You fuckin’ idiot!’

Max’s sweating face moved closer to the light in Jed’s hand. ‘We have to finish it. She’s here. It’s the right time. They’re guarding her.’

Jed didn’t seem so sure. ‘Take another clip, Spielberg.’ Jed unclicked a magazine from his utility belt, quickly showed him how to load it into the gun. ‘Real tight till you hear the click.’

‘Gottya.’ Kyle tried to keep his hands steady. Had stuffed the camera back into the rucksack, and now wondered whether he’d switched it off.

Jed wiped sweat off his face. ‘OK. Change of plan. Seek and destroy is off the table. Too many of them, and too risky. We take the next set of stairs. I flare up. We come across another crowd, we fall back to the ground. Operation over. Max, you can’t shoot for shit, and I ain’t putting money on Spielberg being any better. I’ll drop them far out as I can. Any get past me, you two take them close. Heads and chests. Brains and hearts.’

‘OK,’ Kyle said, but barely heard his own voice.

‘Max in the middle. You pick up the tail, Spielberg. You holler you see anything. And boys, ceilings and doors, ceilings and doors, eyes everywhere. Mutha fuckers can climb like bats.’

‘Oh, dear God.’ Max crouched in the darkness. He peered through his fingers with frantic eyes.

‘Shit,’ Jed said.

Kyle stayed quiet and withdrew the camera from the rucksack; it was still running. He pointed it at the walls and ceiling of the second-floor lobby; a miniature reception modelled on those in old theatres, found outside the royal boxes on the upper tiers. The lobby had opened around them as they reached the second floor, before the stench of decomposition and unclean water brought them to a halt and held them fast; a foulness that lingered about the evidence of a great birthing.

In three beams of torchlight, entry points upon the blackened wallpaper were visible; imprints of the Blood Friends as they manifested. The plaster of the ceiling revealed a dozen fossilized silhouettes of those that had dropped to the marble floor, wet and mewling for life. A foetal abhorrence. A postnatal blasphemy.

What he saw in greater detail inside the viewfinder nearly shut Kyle’s mind down. When his thoughts reassembled after the quakes of shock, a disinterest he identified as the numbing of his parts calmed him, but left him unable to move his jaw or his legs. When mobility returned, afterbirth was tacky beneath the soles of his boots.

When reborn to the world, he believed they were like newborn calves: sticky, semi-transparent, clumsy, blind, and amniotic, kicking with half-realized limbs on the other side of where they had been trapped for so long. He had heard their labours in the night during the trauma of gestation. Heard their mouths open to cry for food on waking in the air of the world, before the rooting for sustenance began in earnest.

Another flare from Jed lit up the catacomb mural, this Neolithic cave patterned with petrified relics of the long buried who had risen again. The Satanic graffiti seemed to fade, immediately, like photographs exposed too early to light. But the flare also brought out the suggestions of scurrying nearby.

Two arches led out of the lobby, and beneath the hem of darkness the flare peeled back, Kyle glimpsed thin limbs kick away into the security of the lightless. From beneath their feet, hoots and whines and whistles came together to form a hellish crescendo one floor down, close to the staircase. Doors opened and slammed shut, opened and slammed shut, as if in protest, or excitement.

‘We gotta find her real quick, Max.’ Jed’s grinning days were over. Their current situation had finally called time on his levity. ‘This is the penthouse floor. Chet’s gotta be in one of the big rooms. There’s twelve up here. Left or right?’

‘I don’t know!’ Max screamed.

‘Gimme one of those flares!’ Kyle called to Jed and shoved the camera back inside the bag. ‘You find the room. Max in the middle. I’ll take the rear.’ Jed threw a flare to Kyle. He snatched it up, said, ‘How does it bloody work?’

‘Light the frigging touchpaper. Strike it like a match.’

‘They’re coming up the stairs.’ It was Max; he fired two rounds down and blindly into the darkness they had just ascended.

‘Make them count, Max.’ Jed threw his flare down to the next landing. Shadows fled until the magnesium burst sputtered on the marble. ‘Let’s move.’ Jed walked to the arch on the left. Crouched, fired twice at the ceiling inside the corridor. A shape dropped from the darkness and smacked the floor. ‘On me.’ Jed walked. Max followed, almost squashed into Jed’s back. As they moved past the kill, Jed smashed a brittle skull under his boot heel to stop it twitching. Kyle looked down at the thing Jed had shot from the ceiling. It wore a smock so soiled with age and blood the old linen had plastered and dried around a prominent ribcage. He looked away.

Moving as fast as they dared, they moved through another between-decks corridor. The doors were grander: peacocks fanned over the top of each gilt-edged door; a willowy silhouette of a beautiful woman, inlaid into the wood with lacquer, curved around the door handles.

Jed turned the handle of the first penthouse suite door. Stood back and kicked it open. The beam of his torch flashed back and forth in the dark, before he went in side at a crouch and ready to fire. Max followed Jed inside. Kyle heard Jed say, ‘Jesus Christ.’

Kyle remained in the corridor, directly outside the doorway, and held the dripping white flare aloft. It illumined the entire corridor down to its end, where occasional whistles and barks echoed from the mouth of the connecting passage. Back in the lobby, on his left, he could still see through the arch they had just run through. And a thing raced around the surge and retraction of chemical light, bent over and using its hands like feet; the limbs were as thin as a dog’s. The face was turned away, the back of the head was pale and strung with laces of dark hair. He gripped the Gloch’s handgrip tighter.

Behind his back, he heard Max talking frantically to Jed or to himself. He sounded unhinged. ‘The blood is drunk quickly. It keeps them here. In France, Lorche’s angels even cultivated the tastes of the town under siege. They became cannibals. Their suffering was so terrible, they marked the sky, the air, the world . . .’

Kyle glanced over his shoulder. And saw plasma bags hanging from a long steel rail on wheels, the sort of rail seen backstage at a fashion show. Flat but stained plasma bags from a blood bank hung and dripped feed from plastic tubes into a trough, as if to suckle piglets. Beside the rail, two elderly women sat side by side on white chairs. Their eyes were wide open and glassy. ‘Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona. The last of The Seven,’ Max said. ‘Katherine’s most beloved. Most fanatical . . . they gave themselves. Even after . . .’ Max never finished, his voice died out into a wheezy hopelessness.

In strobes of torchlight the two bodies were robed in habits like nuns; the red uniforms of The Last Days’ blessed Seven. But once the plasma bags were empty, they had been drained to their sinews and fibres and bones where they sat; emptied by many broken teeth that made incisions in their thin legs, their arms, and finally their throats. It appeared the sisters had let their own blood flow from their wrists, like hellish mothers feeding their young. But it only seemed to have oiled a frantic collusion of the living and the dead; the rusty fragrance of their aged blood must have begun a frenzy; the visible results of which made Max’s knees give way. Jed had to hold him upright and drag him from the room.

Silent with horror and shock, they moved off in formation. Kyle walked backwards and wondered if he would freeze or fire when one of them came at him from down there, from out of the vast lightless tunnels. In that room they had just seen their own end if they made one mistake, up here, in the darkness. Their exhalations were deafening. They all breathed heavily through open mouths, to stifle the nauseating stench.

‘She’s been collecting them.’ Kyle heard Max say in the next large room they broke into. There were no retorts from either handgun so it must have been clear.

‘Holy shit, Max, we need more firepower. Could be hundreds of them up here.’ At that, Kyle did turn his head, to look at what he really did not want to see. But his first view of the room was anticlimactic. He screwed up his eyes and took another look. It resembled a room in a museum. Display cases lined the three walls he could make out. Beneath their glass screens a suggestion of fragments, of brownish remnants, came back to his imploring eyes.

‘Signs,’ Max said. ‘Artefacts from the beginning. From those Lorche’s angels collected at St Mayenne.’

Kyle put his head inside the room. Glanced into the nearest cabinet. Saw a horrible shoe; small and blackened and pointy. Beside the shoe was a smock small enough for a child, marked with ruddy-brown stains. And further along, a crudely hewn crown of wood was placed on white card, as if with reverence. He wondered if it had once belonged to Lorche, the Father of Lies. It was surrounded by blackened bones mounted by steel pins on purple baize. Heavenly letters. The rain of black bones.

He looked back to what the dying flare lit up in the corridor. A shriek of rage or hysteria pierced the far darkness of the corridor on their right. Bony hands and feet drummed against one of the closed doors. Sounds that made Kyle’s stomach soften as he imagined such a fury howling against his face. He aimed the Gloch down there; the end of the torchlight speared a shape thinner than the starving and as naked as the newly born. Before he could take the first gunshot of his life, it slapped at the side of a head mercifully bowed and staggered away on bowed legs stained a dysentery-brown. ‘They’re down there,’ Kyle said to Jed as he came out of the exhibition room.

‘They’re everywhere. Come on. There’s another ten suites up here on the plans. Three flares left. Then we’re down to torches. Gonna draw some fire then, boys.’

The sound of what appeared to be a child’s distress gave them pause outside the next room. ‘In there, the child!’ Max shrieked. ‘Get it open.’ Jed tried to catch Max with a swipe of his free hand, but missed his shoulder. ‘Careful Max!’ Jed slapped at a side pocket; tore a photograph from it. ‘The kid. Make sure it’s this kid, Max. Spielberg, get your ass outside. Cover the corridor!’

‘You’re not killing a child. No! You are not killing a child!’

‘Stay outside, Spielberg!’

‘Fuck you!’

Max scrabbled at the handle and threw the door open. Jed crouched into a firing position.

A child. A child. They are not killing a child. Unthinking, compelled by a surge of reckless energy, before he even realized what he had done, Kyle ran at Jed and threw his weight into the man’s back. Falling to his knees, he watched Jed stumble forward with a grunt, into glimpses of a luxury suite lit up by Max’s probing torch. A place decked out in purple, the bed vast. Giant mirrors on each wall reflected their chaotic entrance, expanded their torchlight.

The infant cries descended into a canine growl. Max gasped in shock, then screamed as something came over the bed in one bound and leaped onto Jed. Who stayed down under a busy mouth and sharp fingers, the snarls of the attacker more terrible than the shaking of the threadbare skull.

Jed screamed. Mottled legs raked at his stomach, like a starving cat trying to empty the abdomen of its prey. An eruption of dark liquid across Jed’s face coincided with a gargle inside the throat of the leathery thing no bigger than a ten-year-old child that hung from him.

In his horror, in his paralysis, Kyle heard the thump and bump of bony limbs in the corridor outside, as if a crowd now rushed towards the room. Jed fired a shot through the little skull tearing at his neck. Twisted onto his stomach. Came up silent, mouth open, a hand clutched to a wet black throat. Their eyes met; there was nothing he recognized in Jed’s but fear and pain. Max screamed again as a scampering of thin bodies came through the door and into the room with them.

Kyle fell against the wall beside the top of the bed. Remembered he had a gun. Raised his arm. Lit Jed up on the ground with the Maglite bolt-on. Two ragged shapes scurried through the thin beam of shaky white light to growl about the feed. One dull retort came out of the scrum as Jed’s Gloch went off, and then he stopped moving of his own volition.

Max shrieked and shot at the crowd upon the floor. Missed. The Blood Friends dug clawed toes into the rug and yanked Jed’s limp body backwards, out of the room and back into the fathoms of darkness.

Kyle lit up their hasty retreat, but couldn’t sight the weapon or squeeze the trigger in time, at those things no bigger than children, hauling a grown man like a toy across their nursery floor. He clutched at his belt for a flare and realized the last three were attached to Jed’s belt.

‘We’ve got to get out!’ Max’s entire face was a quivering of pale flesh about an open mouth. Drool hung from his bottom lip. He ran out of the bedroom and left Kyle pressed into the wall, as still as an art deco lampstand. Kyle found his voice. ‘Max.’ It came out a whimper.

Max’s feet thumped in the corridor outside, heading towards the lobby. Straight into a chorus of avian shrieks. Shots rang out in quick succession. Dull slaps followed the salvo.

Kyle moved to the door, flashed the torch attached to his gun to the right. Saw frantic limbs rake and wet hands slap about in the gloom over the recently felled quarry: Jed. A mottled face rose to show the torch its bleached eyes and a forehead papered in shrivelled flesh. It hissed once before its foul head re-engaged with the grisly business upon the moist carpet.

Kyle looked to the left, following the thin beam of the gun’s Maglite, and sucked in his breath. The lobby suddenly resembled CCTV footage of hell glimpsed through a single ray of light: dark shapes on the walls, the floor, the ceiling; dirty teeth, eyes rolled back and white as billiard balls amidst a writhing around where Max’s little gun still barked and flashed in panic. Kyle dropped his gun hand and put the lobby back into darkness.

His mind screamed: Out! Out! Out! Out! He had to get out. How? He crouched in the darkness, still in the doorway, and used everything he had left to suffocate a scream and to prevent his body breaking into a thrashing rout right into those flitting bones of the dark. Shook the camera from his shoulder bag and changed the function to night mode, killed the spotlight. Which way? He turned the camera and looked through the viewfinder towards Jed’s remains.

The world in the viewfinder was underwater-dark, green, black, relieved with patches of milky luminance. In it he saw the approach of another Blood Friend across the floor on all fours, from the far end of the corridor, clad in some unrecognizable motley of stained shroud and what must have been Chet’s clothes. It had managed to get inside a tailored shirt. And the figure leaped like a leopard intended for the haunches of a gazelle. It reached its target and fell upon it, kicking and raking, its face snapping at Jed’s wet shape. Kyle couldn’t feel his legs; his wide eyes filmed with tears.

But the trio of Blood Friends were too busy with Jed’s remains to notice his fretting in the dark so near. It was the only reason he was still alive. Trying to keep the contents of his stomach in place, Kyle turned and staggered towards the lobby, using the camera’s viewfinder as his eyes to see if there was a way through to the staircase.

He shuddered to a standstill before he’d taken four steps. Max had not made it very far or cleared any kind of route.

And at first Kyle wasn’t sure whether the grunts and squeals originated from Max or the pale but indistinct bulk that must have recently arrived, or been hiding down there, to snatch Max from his feet as he ran for the stairs. A thing the size of a bear, on its hind legs, now held the executive producer’s small body aloft. Away from those others that Kyle was grateful he could not see in any great detail, who jerked around the rear legs of the bulk, all eager to join the feast. Additional snarls and cackles and cries of bestial delight issued from the scrum of small emaciated silhouettes to fill the second-floor lobby, and accompanied the sounds of wet leather strops and gristle pops that emerged from whatever was being done to Max’s diminutive body.

The conclusion of the night vision’s furthest reach disintegrated at the top of the staircase, and yet upon the large figure the night vision’s dimming found a wet snout at head height. Beneath that, the great blackened belly of a sow, the teats wet with brine.

A terrible splash beneath its mass was followed by inhuman snuffles and a snatching clomp of a mouth upon what fell wetly from its prize. In his twitching dismal light, Kyle saw an impression of small black eyes too, set deep behind great dark bristles. A suggestion of a wet maw grunted. Tusks were awash with fluid, parts of the moist bulk enshrouded in vestiges of tatty cloth; it was upright and festooned with what may have been the rags of a bishop dispossessed four centuries before this night. And as the Unholy Swine swayed on its rear trotters, about the blasphemous hierophant of St Mayenne, the congregation of scarecrow parts shrieked and wailed and snatched upwards with thin hands and renewed vigour at what began to fall from the noisy feast in progress above them.

Max’s thin ankles twitched, or even still kicked, until the porcine squeals were cut through with the final shriek of a man opened alive. The second wind of Max’s agony and terror only served to increase the spidery antics of the figures that continued to swarm into the lobby from the floor below and from the opposite lightless archway. Maximillian Solomon was gone, was no more, had found his end trying to finish what he unwittingly started in 1967.

Of more concern, the lobby and connecting stairwell were blocked. Nothing would get through to the stairs alive. What little reason still flickered in a head swimming with nausea and terror told Kyle that he would have to run the other way, back across Jed’s remains and amongst those who were busy upon his fallen comrade. The thought of which made his entire being shudder, while his face screwed up for tears he did not have time to shed. Panic electrified him. He knew he had to run now, somewhere, deeper inside the building, but could only fight the desperate competing urge to just sit down and shake until they came for him too.

End. The end. The end of him right here. Katherine wins. Goes into the child. The child. Another child. Kyle whimpered. Then snapped alert the very instant a clear idea broke from the maelstrom in his mind.

Holding the camera with one hand, he raised the Gloch and aimed it at the squealing commotion in the lobby. Kyle took aim at the indistinct bulk and talked out loud, but was unsure what he said or to whom he spoke. Acting on some instinct he could barely account for, he stood with his legs apart and pumped five rounds down the corridor in the direction of what fed so intently and greedily down there in the dark.

A wet thump sounded as the great shape went down to its haunches. A scream seared then muffled Kyle’s ears like gloved hands. Inside the trembling viewfinder, the black-haired flanks of the swine shuddered in the pallid light and between the green-white walls that juddered as if it were they that had been hit. But the wet bulk, that had been so busy with Max’s carcass, turned heavily upon the floor, and rose unsteadily to what might have been all fours, with the limp remains of the old man still clutched to its belly.

In a heartbeat, the wounded bulk was covered by an opportunist scramble of the thin limbs and clawing hands that had previously only been able to clutch and snatch at the prize held above them. Kyle turned his face and camera away as the vile parish pulled out the first parts of their Unholy Swine.

He withdrew back to the room where Jed had fallen. He was still trapped. The lobby represented an orgy of pain and dismemberment; behind him, the old friends still stripped Jed down to wet bones. But as he’d hoped, Jed’s assailants began to rouse, stirred from their increasingly meagre fare by the sounds of fresh excitement bursting from the lobby. In the viewfinder he watched three dark heads emerge like hyenas from the ribcage of something felled, whinnying, on the grasslands of Africa. The faces were stained but within their white eyes Kyle identified a desire to satiate their mindless appetite elsewhere, to feed anew using those dirty fingers and what black teeth they could summon within their mouths. At the sight of their distraction, and then their eager scurry through the corridor, and right before the toes of his boots, Kyle thought of putting the gun inside his mouth. But on they scraped and bumped and raced to the lobby, where the felled swine bleated and splashed and flopped amidst the scrum of old bones.

From hopeless despair and grief, Kyle passed into lunatic hope, and before it fully registered that he was even moving, he was engaged in a stagger away from where so many small brittle figures now crouched and noisily suckled.

He stopped a few feet before Jed’s now insubstantial silhouette on the carpet of the hallway. He looked down through the viewfinder, and tried not to see, and then un-see, what was left of Jed and his one eye that still stared upwards. One of the flares that he sought was broken, the other two were wet, but intact, and still attached to the discarded utility webbing. Kyle retrieved them both. Wiped them on his jeans. Clenched his teeth as he did so, to stifle the desire to sob.

He let the camera swing away, under his shoulder on the strap. Gripped the Gloch tight and lit one of the flares between his knees as quickly as he was able. Thrust it above his head in enough time to see three figures pause in a stalk across the ceiling towards him from the lobby, their jaws black with blood.

Kyle lurched to the end of the corridor, peering back over his shoulder at those that had paused and clutched at their faces in shock and pain before the flare. Turned right. Remembered what Jed had said about there being twelve rooms. How many had they checked? One, two, three. ‘Shit!’ He had to break into another nine before the two flares ran out. The clip inside the Gloch gave him another ten rounds . . . he thought. Should he go back and find Jed’s weapon and spare clips? He hadn’t seen any weapon or magazines back there; Jed’s gun could be anywhere in the corridor too, or even in the last room they checked, where he fell. And without night vision goggles, once the flares were gone Kyle would have to hold the camera again with one hand and look through the viewfinder while shooting at thin, fast-moving targets at the same time; he’d be dead in seconds. He was no marksman; fighting his way out was not an option. He carried on.

In the long corridor across the rear of the mansion he saw three doors; another three would be further down, another three at the front, on the opposite side of the lobby to the one they had searched. He thought of what was down there waiting for him and felt faint. Where would Chet be? Where, where, where? Max said it ended with him. Hoots and shrieks echoed from the other side of the building about the swine’s still-grunting remains, and pierced the darkness at the far end of the corridor he faced. He dithered. Looked about himself. ‘Shit!’

A door. Try a door. Any door. The first one was locked. The flare guttered. He ran down to the next, yanked at the handle: locked. ‘Fuck!’ The third opened. He kicked the door in. Turned and looked about the corridor left and right. Walls, ceiling and floor would soon be a highway of hideous traffic; he could hear it baying in both directions now, underwritten by a determined scurrying through the shadows. The lobby banquet must be winding down. There was no way he could stand and fight. He had nowhere else to go. An urge to cry out for his mother came to him.

Instead, Kyle lobbed the first dying flare into the room and saw that it was big. Full of chairs facing away from the door. Were they occupied? He whimpered. The flare died. He lit up the second flare after three attempts. It came up frothing and fizzing and beautifully white with intense light and he heard the encroaching tide of mottled bones in the corridor outside pause, then scamper into a reluctant and temporary retreat.

Gun arm outstretched, flare held high and out from his body, Kyle stalked into the room and slammed the door behind him with a foot. He went inside, amongst the chairs. And he stood mute at what sat up straight and grinned within the room he’d shut himself inside.

He didn’t know what to scream at first, because there were so many things to scream at. And he found himself reduced to a strengthless thing that remained still and mute and gaping.

It took him a few seconds to realize that none of the seated figures were moving. The audience propped upright on the white chairs, or even tied in place with silk scarves, were long dead. Mostly bone. A few had teeth, long horsey teeth, still yellow, that protruded from cartilage mouths. Where flesh still existed it was beef-jerky dry as if preserved by dusty, airless places. Eye sockets were empty and noses were long gone. But all brought here? For what? To be seated as if for a performance on chairs from the dining room, which explained the empty tables downstairs.

The silent, fragrant dead sat and looked at the two beds at the far side of the penthouse. Kyle forgot to breathe, until it panted out of him as he moved deeper inside the room, the walls entirely draped with purple cloth, satiny in the flare’s icy reach. Maybe he was still hyperventilating at the atrocity outside, out there, and behind him; the continual display of horror that had marked his progress from the first day of principal photography in London to the top of a mansion in San Diego. He followed the unseeing line of sight from the hollow eye sockets about him. Walked to the two beds.

‘Jesus no,’ he spoke to himself and for the world that should never behold, in any of its parts, no matter how remote or forgotten or Godforsaken, the sight of such things. And he remembered so vividly his own haunted nights when he too had risen in dreadful sleep from off his bed while unconscious, as if occupied by a nocturnal intrusion that rebuilt his dimensions with the limbs and hands and feet of another. This other. In the large bed, surrounded by a clear plastic tent, to protect it and the white instrument panels from the very air of the room, and from those inside it that sat as still as the embalmed on the white chairs, he could just make out the dim shape of a wasted body within.

But he should not have been able to see the soles of its ivory feet or its buttocks shrivelled like figs, or the long carcinoma-mottled limbs, these arms that dropped beneath it and the legs that stuck out straight. Nor should he have borne witness to the hairless head, yellowy with jaundice, the facial skin sucked back to the bone. He should not have been able to see any of this, but as it was raised at least three feet from the bedclothes where it hung suspended on unseen threads like some horizontal puppet, he could see the wasted remnants of a human being in all of its horror.

Hard hands and feet hammered at the door behind him. Kyle turned. The door clicked open and swung wide and the shrieking crowd outside in the corridor darted back and forth across the open space. Grisly heads turned inwards, then away at the hateful light of the diminishing flare that held them back. But as soon as the flare died, they would be inside and he would be overcome. Down amongst the chairs of the already dead he would meet his end. Unfilmed. Undocumented. Untold.

And it came to him them; these upright rags and bones upon the chairs may have once been followers, her constituency. The dried fruits of Sister Katherine’s former following. Those who had the temerity, the unforgivable audacity, to desert her. To reject her. Perhaps the silent dead were the disinterred victims of the farm and the copper mine; the runaways, the missing who had been hunted down and taken to another place, or disinterred from whatever unmarked grave she had left them inside. Another exhibition, but one so exclusive as to be held in the royal bedchamber of a queen. Dry, cadaverous, eyeless, even in death these husks of the misguided must have been brought forth to sit upon chairs against their will. Witnesses. Revenge. At which the thing in the giant bed could gloat. Even in death, and what a terrible end they had seen, they were summoned again to their queen to witness her blasphemous miracles, her monstrous vanity, because all must serve it, for ever.

Once a corpulent madam, a confidence trickster, a psychopath weaned on Scientology, even a woman once, but one that had crowned herself an eternal queen of dust and damnation and the destruction of innocence. A terrible spirit that had journeyed into a child and become this disease-ravaged man, this shell rendered skeletal and effeminate by a parasite’s excesses.

After all he had seen, Kyle wanted it dead. Before it could get, by some invisible and dreadful byway, into that. The small body concealed by white silk sheets in the neighbouring bed, where the small dark head of a child was visible upon deep pillows.

The child moved under the bedlinen, but was not awake. It moved fitfully, kicked out under the covers, muttered. Appeared engaged in some kind of struggle. Perhaps a fight against an unnatural visitor. One who wished to rise again.

Kyle tried to tear through the plastic tent. It was sealed. He stood back, to the side of the plastic cube, so that he could see the narrow flanks of its hovering occupant, and took aim. And fired and fired and fired and fired at the levitating ruin of Chet Regal. And he kept firing until he saw the thin figure jerk and jerk and jerk again. Then fall with a clatter more than a thump, upon the bed, into which it bled black.

Through the bullet-torn plastic, Kyle kicked and clawed and rent and tore until he was inside and at the foot of the bed, where the bullet-ruined thing shuddered and wheezed. A monitor screamed a single note of alarm at the head of the bed. Kyle looked across at the boy. Who had reared up too, tousled, sweat-peppered and mumbling. Had she made it across?

He stared down at the dying figure in the large bed. Its eyes opened, and in the lapis lazuli irises he saw the faintest trace of the beautiful male actor, Chet Regal, the adopted son. The receptacle for Sister Katherine in 1975, on her second Night of Ascent since the siege of St Mayenne in 1566. He looked into the eyes of what poor Irvine Levine had called the ‘mother of abomination’.

It opened its mouth and tried to speak. A claw more than a hand jerked at him. The head came off the darkening sheets. It spat blood onto its withered chin. Choked out a sound so pitiful and foul, Kyle wanted to turn away. It gargled. Then into its eyes seemed to come a realization so terrible, it throated a thin scream. Of rage. Which turned to grief just as quickly. It whimpered. ‘Emperor . . . reign . . . thousand . . .’

To make sure it never would, Kyle emptied the Gloch into its face from three inches away, until there was no longer much of a face left at all.

The flare guttered to a spark and he turned to see what would come to put an end to him too.

Three rows of human remains in their white chairs continued to stare at Kyle from their hollow sockets. Mouths open, he imagined they were cheering him. Beyond them, the doorway in his torchlight was no longer hectic with the Blood Friends. The great house was silent. Empty.

The child in the bed looked feverish, delirious, its eyes stayed closed. Kyle began to cry. He wasn’t sure why, but he said, ‘Sorry,’ to the boy in the bed. Maybe because when he awoke, he’d see his dead father, or surrogate mother, or whatever it was so ruined and ravaged beside him. He’d better call an ambulance. One might even be on its way. The police too; there had been a lot of gunfire. He looked about the room. What to do?

He sat down, cross-legged, and played the torch beam from an empty handgun over the faces of his dead audience. He wondered if even they would believe him; what he had seen and done and knew to be true. His eyes wandered around Max’s endgame. The final scene of the film. Would anyone believe him? That he shot Chet Regal repeatedly while he was incarnating into his adopted son. That Regal wasn’t actually an A-List actor, but a woman who called herself Sister Katherine, the leader of The Temple of the Last Days, who carried a bloodline that began with the Blood Friends in sixteenth-century France.

‘Jesus Christ.’ The catalogue of his downfall reeled through his mind with an unexpected clarity. He felt so cold he began to shiver. Because the authorities would find the last of The Seven in that room: Sisters Gehenna and Bellona. Old women bled out by mouths now unseen and unable to be held accountable. Mouths that could not possibly exist, not according to natural law. Max was no longer around to back him up. Nor Jed. Their remains were both outside too. If there was anything left of him, Max’s bones might even be found amongst the ancient remnants of a pig, draped in antique ecclesiastical garb.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said, to the eyeless, the open-mouthed gawkers on the white art deco chairs. A good crowd was in tonight. Very patient. Kyle started to laugh. There was no Susan, or Gabriel, or Martha to defend his actions. He looked back at the door.

Kyle lit up a cigarette. Wiped at his eyes. There would be stories in True Crime Bestsellers about the sound of dogs and pigs inside a celebrity’s mansion, days before a gun battle, after which bodies were found. Only he and a child would be found alive inside the empty building. The child had been unconscious and endured horrendous nightmares while all of the killing took place. Sweet. The police and the FBI would look at his rushes and talk to Dan and question him. Then they would question and interrogate and cross-examine him in prison for years. Decades. He would be studied like the Blue Oak Copper Mine killer, Brother Belial. History had repeated itself neatly, but so horribly. Every trail led back to him. The obsessive film-maker, broke, harbouring grudges, who investigated The Temple of the Last Days. Indisputably crowned by his final narration to cam era in his flat about the conspiracy madness of Chet’s connection to Sister Katherine. Good ole boys Conway and Sweeney, those decorated police officers, would confirm his avid interest.

He had been used by Max, and Max and the survivors had been hunted and destroyed by Chet, who had been used by Katherine. The Karmic Wheel had not so much turned as gone backwards.

As resigned as the condemned after sentence has been passed, he pondered the paintings in Antwerp and the story they told. Could they help him out here? The Saints of Filth. Believed lost, now untraceable, owned by some Belgian family of guardians he didn’t even have a name for.

He was fucked. Royally fucked. He was going to end up in San Quentin with Charles Manson. He was still alive. They could shuffle about the common room in orange boiler suits and ankle chains and talk about The White Album. But first, would he be forced to recount this tale in court? Would the footage be beamed around the world? The police would trail through the rushes of Clarendon Road, Normandy, Arizona and listen to the strange interviews, see the murky glimpses of those things that would be dismissed as special effects, before the footage was sealed in an evidence room. One man’s horror-show lunacy. One day someone would make a documentary about him making the documentary, about how his mania and delusion had led to mass murder; a bloodbath that included a celebrity and his staff. It all ran through him like a film on fast forward.

While he was in the mood, Kyle looked at the gun and wondered again if he should put the end of the barrel inside his mouth and toe the friggin’ trigger. But the gun was empty. ‘Shit.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it in his pocket.

Eventually he got to his feet, lit another cigarette, and did what he did best: he held the camera aloft and began to film the room in night vision. When he stood over the defunct body of Chet, this pharaoh without a sarcophagus, he said a few lines for a film that would never include its final scene. ‘Maybe Max was right. We revere the narcissist. Because maybe the biggest stars are those who shed oceans of blood for their immortality. The freaks that consider themselves immortal. Who thought they were Gods. Tyrants for sure. But never Gods.’

Outside the penthouse, the Blood Friends were gone, but their marks remained, as did their stench. Those that died in the battle left only their miserable bones behind. But Kyle filmed it all; he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he could not shake the notion that it was the last scene for his final film. His masterpiece. His legacy. The director’s cut that would be consigned to performances in courtrooms and evidence lockers.

When he found poor Jed, he wiped the grip of his empty Gloch and placed it next to Jed’s remaining hand. When he got to the remains he assumed were Max’s, there was no pig, no Unholy Swine to be seen, and he stepped over the mess of bone and dust and rags without a word and carried on downstairs.

On the ground floor, he switched off the camera’s night vision function and took his time going from room to room. He might as well make the most of it before the distant sirens called for him.

When the batteries were dead, he went out through the hole in the glass and sat outside on the patio in the sun. Lit up and drank his last bottle of water. His head throbbed and his eyes stung. His hair was caked in dried sweat. He nearly threw up.

There were no sirens.

Nothing.

No one came.

He walked back down the drive and climbed over the peacock gate. Waited in the street. But still there was nothing, and no one came for him with cuffs. He heard cicadas and crickets, but no sirens, or even a single car engine. The vapour trails of three planes marked the blue heavens. He decided he better make a call for the kid in the penthouse; he’d need help soon enough, perhaps for the rest of his life. Kyle fished his phone out of his rucksack.

And had another idea. One that came so suddenly he gasped.

He smiled for what felt like the first time in his life. If no one had heard the gunshots and screams way out here, issuing from inside a large sealed building, then perhaps no one was coming to arrest him. Kyle looked at the gate. There were no alarms to be tripped. There had been no closed-circuit surveillance. Paramedics would come when he called them for the kid, but if he called from a safe distance, anonymously, the medics would radio the police soon enough after their arrival here, but he needn’t be around to explain the impossible mess they’d discover stuck to their shoes.

He took a long drag on his cigarette and as the smoke drifted from his mouth and passed in front of his eyes, he followed the line of thought. It was even plausible that no one would connect him to the slaughter. There wasn’t a great deal left of Max to analyze and his DNA and dental records wouldn’t be on file in the US anyway. And Max would have erased or artfully concealed anything that might have connected him to the murder of Chet. Who could connect Kyle to Jed? Conway and Sweeney didn’t know Chet Regal was the clean boy. And who else was left alive with any working knowledge of the production? Dan, Finger Mouse . . . so only his mates back in England then . . .

‘Christ!’

Kyle frantically called the most recent number in his calls list. When a sleepy voice answered the phone, he said, ‘Finger Mouse! Thank fuck! Tell me you haven’t uploaded the film. For Christ’s sake! Tell me you haven’t!’

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