THREE

From Maximillian Solomon’s production notes:

The original headquarters of The Last Gathering has become available for rental and is between tenants. I’ve secured permission to film inside. Exterior and interior footage is, I would say, essential to our project. One of the original members of The Last Gathering will meet you at the address below, and provide an interview about life in the very heart of where it all began in 1967. Her name is Susan White, aka Sister Isis [see biography section]. We have the 11th and 12th of June to record this segment.

CLARENDON ROAD, HOLLAND PARK, LONDON. 11 JUNE 2011. NOON.

‘This was ours with the red door. It wasn’t red back then. They’ve painted it.’ Speaking as the first of her small feet touched the pavement, Susan White jabbed a thin hand at the three storeys of elegant Georgian stone. Her Hackney cab shuddered away from the kerb, its black carapace gleamed in the dull aluminium light of the overcast sky.

Kyle returned his attention to the spectacle of mad white hair atop a hunched body that was Susan White. She hurled an immediate impression of absurdity at the onlooker. Clown. The word popped into Kyle’s head. His smile was determined to become laughter. He avoided Dan’s eyes, whose surprise also boiled towards laughter. Dan turned his broad back away and began a pretence of adjusting the camera. If they exchanged just one glance, they would lose it.

Green eyeshadow had been applied in an operatic fashion and an absence of lips enforced a painting-on of a red mouth. Under the wild snowy hair, a pale scalp was too visible. She’d clearly made an effort for her confession, with an outfit that hit that curious middle ground between high fashion and rag-market bad taste that only a trained eye could determine the difference between. Sunlight through the vast canopy of the trees made shadows dapple and piebald her amethyst dress. A turquoise shawl rustled about meagre shoulders to complete the ensemble.

But for a period of time that went beyond being awkward, Susan White never once removed her rheumy eyes from the tall flat facade of the house.

Kyle spoke to repress his urge to grin. ‘Hi Susan. Or do you prefer Sister Isis?’

Her small brittle body turned and lurched at him, the head extended in rebuke. Crystals on thongs drooped from her scrawny neck and chimed together, their sound accompanied by wooden bracelets rattling on her thin wrists. ‘Never call me that!’

Kyle flinched. The elderly woman cast a wary glance back at the house, as if this sufficed to explain her reaction to the name the cult had given her. ‘Not here. Please. Susan is fine.’

‘Susan it is.’ Kyle took her cold hand. The skin papering it was transparent; black veins networked under livered flesh, but the skin was as smooth as lambskin against his fingers. He looked into her intense blue eyes. ‘This is Dan. My partner in crime.’ He nodded at Dan, who turned towards them at the mention of his name. His face was red and his eyes filled with water from suppressing laughter.

‘Can you feel it?’ she said, her attention again reclaimed by the house.

Here we go. Trying too hard. He hoped she wouldn’t see his abject disappointment. It was a dull day on a West London street that recognized nothing but its own tranquil elegance in any season; a setting too incongruous for what Susan White already suggested. Her attempt to conjure an atmosphere of lingering presences and special psychic boundaries immediately wearied him. His estimation of Max’s ability to find suitable interviews also plummeted. Having a creature like Susan White in the film would undermine any credence of the surviving adepts’ mystical claims; the very sight of the woman encapsulated all that was ridiculous about the sixties.

Kyle nodded at Dan; a cue to switch from the exterior shots they’d been shooting of the street and building to set up for the first close-ups of Sister Isis. ‘Feel what?’ His question was more abrupt than he’d intended.

Silver earrings jingled against her pantomime cheeks when she shook her head. ‘I . . . I’ve not felt that way since 1969. Extraordinary.’ She closed her eyes and turned her head on an angle, as if listening to distant music. Her face seemed more haggard in the skein of sunlight that found it, if that were possible. The harsh lines scoring her chin deepened as her mouth sagged. ‘This is the first time I’ve been back.’

Kyle rolled his eyes. Dan smiled, and occupied himself with the light meter closer to the house, where Kyle wanted an establishing shot of Susan beside the front door. ‘And you live in Brighton.’

‘Yes.’

‘Never fancied revisiting old times then?’

‘Could not bear to.’ Susan White now kept her eyes closed against the sight of the house. But tottered forward like a woman upon black ice. Quickly but carefully, Kyle put the boom and sound mixer down, and moved to her side. Susan clasped his forearm. ‘I’m not sure I can.’

Dan peered over to see what Kyle wanted of him. But Kyle didn’t know whether it was appropriate to film her discomfort and frailty before a proper introduction, or even a semblance of familiarity had been established; probably not, though he wanted to. This was good footage: forty-two years after The Last Gathering fled the building and an ex-member was collapsing at the mere sight of the place.

The light was fine, but they’d need to mic her up and do sound levels quickly if they were to get any of this. After catching Kyle’s eye, Dan hurriedly fitted the camera back on the tripod.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. The powder on her face looked ready to fall away in floury platelets.

‘You want some water?’ He looked up at Dan and mouthed hurry.

‘Please.’ Susan sat down upon the first of seven steps that led up to the stone porch. She seemed to have sunk inside her dress, which now looked uncannily like a set of robes sweeping about her little feet. Her spine curved like a sickle, as if it suffered from a deformity.

Kyle uncapped his bottle of water. She gulped at it with her withered mouth, then gasped and offered the bottle back to him. The rim was smeared with red lipstick and he knew he wouldn’t be drinking from it again. ‘You’re very kind. Thank you,’ Susan said, which snapped Kyle out of his unpleasant thoughts with a pang of guilt; she was old and frightened. ‘You have to understand . . . But how could you? How foolish of me.’

‘Just get your wind back. Get yourself settled. And then—’

She clutched the back of his hand. Looked up; her eyes so bright with genuine fear, he thought her seriously disturbed. ‘What happened here. What began here. It was terrible. There are so few of us . . .’ She actually trembled inside her collapsed garments.

‘Are you all right? A doctor?’ Kyle felt his scalp tingle with panic at the suggestion of a medical emergency, though her insinuation about the ‘evil’ house left him totally unaffected. He tried to remember C.P.R. Nothing came to him besides something vague about tilting the head back, and forming a seal over the mouth. Now it was his turn to shudder.

‘I thought I’d be all right. I told Max I would be all right. I don’t want to let him down. He sent train tickets to me and everything.’

Kyle looked at Dan, who had raised two impossibly thick eyebrows.

‘If this upsets you too much,’ Kyle said, ‘we can talk somewhere else.’

Susan shook her head. ‘No. No. What’s the point of me being upset now!’ Then more quietly, she said, ‘Bit late for that.’

A woman in tight jeans and high heels paused beside Dan. Kyle heard Dan say, ‘OK, I think. Just a funny turn.’ The woman nodded, her smooth face creased by a frown. She carried on, the tips of her heels ringing out in the damp air.

‘Susan.’ Kyle held her hand. ‘You OK now?’

‘I feel foolish,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t. We’re really grateful you made the effort to come up. You sure you can do this?’

She nodded. ‘People need to know. They need to. Max is right.’ She screwed her face up and tried to stand. Kyle helped her back to her feet. ‘So much of me is still stuck inside there. And I wanted to see if I could get it back. By coming here.’

‘Flats now. But we had the whole place. Right to the roof.’ Susan White miraculously regained her strength on the inside. As they did the walk-through, she flapped about the ground-floor rooms like a flightless tropical bird trying to escape its captors.

All three of the luxury flats the building had been subdivided into were now vacant after a recent renovation. Steely light shone through the large sash windows and warmed the empty spaces, gilded laminate floors and silvered the bare walls in three unfurnished ground-floor rooms and the kitchen. A scent of fresh paint lingered about the white walls, the skirting boards, and the wainscoting around the high ceilings; all vast and spotless save for the decorative moulds framing the light sockets, from which bare bulbs hung on cables.

‘In here they printed the magazine, Gospel. We sold it all over London! In there was the office, where we brought the donations. Every day at six!’

Once she burned off the initial excitement, Kyle would need to step in and slow her down, then partition her narrative between the rooms to vary the footage; take it room by room as Susan imparted stories about the purpose of each space. He’d cut her narration with B-roll slides from the London period. They’d take light readings and line up the sound in each room as they moved through the building; do every segment from two cameras. In all of his films he edited mentally as they shot.

Downside: there was little variety to form backdrops to Susan’s dialogue. The rooms would have been better furnished, so they’d have to do something clever with the lighting. There was a front room with the glamorous street in view; a rear ground-floor room overlooking a painfully green garden; a second smaller bedroom; and the sombre stone steps before the front door. Two higher storeys had the same floor plan as the ground level, and there was a basement too according to Max’s notes. The entire second floor had been the penthouse for Sister Katherine, which he’d shoot last.

In the rear room the sun wasn’t so bright. Kyle asked Dan about the lights. ‘I’ll throw something soft against a wall. Use white paper. Bounce the light off. Maybe use a background light too. A rim. Get some ambience.’

They’d learned through experience to adapt the lights to each unique environment on location, at whatever time of day or night they shot. He knew what most of his peers would do here: they’d use a fill light and blanche Susan’s face because of all the white walls.

‘Key light can go on her face from the side. Get some depth, get all that character she has.’ Dan grinned.

‘Good man. Could even use the soft tubes,’ he dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘get some Lon Chaney action going on.’

Dan wandered off and left Kyle looking through the viewfinder of the second camera, the Panasonic HVX200, until Dan called for him from somewhere in the rear of the building.

In the room across the hall from the kitchen, Susan stood in silence in the middle of the bare floor. Painted claws clasped to her cheeks, her intense eyes gazed at the ceiling.

Here we go. Though her stance and expression eroded his immediate suspicion of more hamming.

‘In here. The renunciation began.’

Dan took up a position to the side of Susan, to check the light.

‘Maybe we should start here then, Susan?’ Kyle offered. ‘With the renunciation.’ He kneeled down and untangled the cables and unpacked the sound equipment.

Susan removed a tissue from her clutch bag, sniffed, dabbed under her nose on both sides. ‘I gave away so much in here. So much of myself. And have never stopped wondering whether it was the right thing to do.’

‘What was it, the renunciation?’

Susan held two hands in the air as if she hadn’t heard Kyle. He still wasn’t sure if she would play up like this for the camera, or whether she was so eccentric she was already oblivious to what a freak show she would be on screen. ‘She presided over everything. Every session. Listening. Always listening. Assessing us. Gathering intelligence. Things she could use. Later. Use against us. I have never forgiven her. I knew it would end badly for her.’

Kyle looked up. ‘Why do you say that?’

Susan laughed to herself, as if he and Dan weren’t present. Sniffed, dabbed at the corner of her lurid eyes with the tissue. ‘We gave her everything. Everything to be a part of this. Our families, our jobs. You have to understand, some people left marriages. And their children. Their poor little children.’

‘So what went on in this room?’

‘Sessions. Sometimes they went on all night. Started in the evening and finished in the morning when you were empty. Endless, it was endless. She was a seer of our shames. We were here to be cleansed of our pasts, our woes . . . responsibilities, disappointments . . . our attachments to anything but her. Everything. Memories even. She wanted everything. All of it. Out of us. Everything that makes us people. Makes us unique. Anything that was a barrier between us and her.

‘You have to understand, back then, we were different. Buttoned up. Terrified of boredom. Of being trapped. Afraid of the world ending. We were young. We wanted adventure. Life! We had so much to say. To prove.’ Breathless with excitement and shaking with emotion, Susan turned to Kyle. He paused in his hurried attaching of the XLR cables to the second camera and DAT sound recorder. Her eyes flashed wide and bright. A pinkish hue grew beneath the heavy make-up. ‘Think of finding a mentor, a teacher, who could release you from yourself.’

‘This was Sister Katherine, yeah?’

She slapped a hand against her forehead. ‘Someone to unclench the fist here.’ Dan jumped behind the first camera tripod. She slapped her bony chest. ‘And here. Wouldn’t you take it? I was a bloody typist. I lived at home. With Mum and Dad. But I wanted music and love and friends. I wanted to do something, be someone, to live. And this was new. You could talk here. Say anything. I was so shy, but she freed me. She could be so kind. She was your best friend and your mother and your priest in the beginning. Oh, I cried here. Cried as it all came out. You’ve no idea how good it felt. For all of us. To be here, together, sharing this. Young and foolish and in love all of the time. Living a life without secrets, but seeking the greater mysteries of life. We thought we were so free.’ Susan stopped. She released a long, weary exhalation and said, ‘And before we knew it, she had us all.’

‘You stayed with The Last Gathering for two years. Why did it take you so long to leave?’

Kyle wore the cans, had the sound mixer slung over one shoulder, and held the mic boom with both hands. He stood behind the second camera, while Dan filmed a close-up of Susan with the first camera. She was wired up with two Sennheiser radio mics. All three mics went into a hard-drive field recorder beside Kyle’s right foot. It was already the second take because Susan’s scarf had been playing hell with the sound on the first one. They were rushing and hadn’t noticed the scarf when lining up the sound. Dan had set up both cameras to get parallel shots of Susan from different angles at the same time; they knew from experience to get as many cutaways as possible to give Finger Mouse a palette if the interview became long. Which was just as well, because it was as if a dam had broken inside Susan White ever since she stepped inside.

‘Oh, no, you couldn’t leave Katherine. No, no, no.’ Susan stood beside the sash window of the room on the first floor, and stared at the garden. ‘And we were special. We’d beaten the system, you know. We were very pleased with ourselves for what we achieved by being a part of this.’

‘But you gave her all of your money to be included.’

‘We didn’t need anything! I sold whatever I owned. Some jewellery from my grandmother. Cashed in my little savings account at the post office. I gave it all to her. To the Gathering. The same thing, really. Katherine was the Gathering. A few poor girls gave up big inheritances, you know. Like Sister Urania and Sister Hannah. Trusts. Surrendering your worldly self was essential for entrance. One couldn’t be a part of the family otherwise.’

‘It must have impressed you.’

‘It was a movement. A future! A revolution, we thought. We were to be wandering missionaries. Reliant on our wits, you know. We had to “purge” ourselves “through poverty” she used to say. Start again. Rebirth.’ Susan paused and shook her head. ‘But I think the only thing that kept us going was the kindness and charity of strangers.’

‘What was this floor of the Temple used for?’

Susan looked about the floor. ‘We slept in here. And in those two rooms back there. The kitchen was used as a quiet room then, where we prepared for the sessions, or sat and thought about what we had learned from the previous night’s meeting. Sat and thought of how greedy and needy and selfish and jealous and childish we were.

‘About fifteen of us slept on the floors in here, in sleeping bags. On thin mats. There were people everywhere. At one point there were over fifty of us living in this building. You had no privacy. It was forbidden. For two years of my life I slept in this room.’

‘But you stayed.’

Susan threw her head back and shrieked with laughter. ‘We were celebrities, my dear man. Famous! People loved us. Barefoot in summer, or sandals. Tight leather boots in winter. Black capes and long dresses. We were witchy, darling. And the guys with their little shaped beards and long hair. Their intense eyes. The pentagrams in red silk thread. Or the Circle of Solomon, the ankh, the Celtic knot embroidered on our uniforms. What we believed in was irrelevant, but we had charisma, darling. We were dangerous. I mean, the stories the press used to write about us. Our orgies! Worshipping the devil, they said. Black masses! Nudity!’

‘Was it all exaggeration?’

‘Ridiculous. Every bit of it. We remained celibate as adepts for the entire first year. And later on, only after a promotion, could you go with a guy. But only the ones that she chose for you. Never the ones you wanted. Unless you were a favourite, of course.’

Susan narrowed her eyes, and gave the camera a knowing look that Kyle picked up on the laptop they were using as a monitor. ‘But men were intrigued by us Gathering girls. Katherine only allowed make-up and perfume when we were out collecting donations and selling the Gospel. Encouraged us to flirt, she did. Made us better collectors. She taught us how to look into their eyes and to smile sweetly, like innocent little nuns and country girls. Guileless. “Make them dream of another life,” she used to say. “Our life. And you.” But we could be aloof too. She taught us how. So were we virgins or were we whores? Men never knew. Were we a cover for devil worship, and temptation? I think Katherine had a peculiar relationship with sex. With men and their desires. But she was happy to let us use it to get donations. Make no mistake about that.’

‘I’ve never been in here.’ Susan shook her head in disbelief in the rooms that had once formed Sister Katherine’s former penthouse, astounded by the discovery that so much light and space even existed on the top floor of the building. ‘No one beside The Seven were ever permitted up here. She had a front door with a big brass knocker put in at the top of the staircase to separate herself from us down below.’

The top storey of the building had been remodelled just like the flats downstairs: wood floors, white walls, fresh paint. What it had looked like in the Gathering’s London heyday Kyle could only imagine. No photographs had ever been found.

‘Who were The Seven?’

‘One of the reasons I left, dear. Her chosen. A lot of people were promoted and then demoted from The Seven in the first year. But her favourites for most of the last year in London were Serapis, Belus, Orcus, Ades and Azazel. And Sisters Gehenna and Bellona. They were bullies who kept control for her. They had this way of being aloof all of the time. They never smiled, but they would turn and stare, intensely, straight at you. Inside you. And when they did, you were terrified. Of displeasing Katherine. Who they reported to, of course. We were always so scared it would be our turn next for an attack in the sessions for being weak, for letting the Gathering down.’

Kyle’s instincts told him they were getting good material. Not just Susan’s natural storytelling and the abundance of information she was supplying with few prompts, but the lighting looked fantastic on the monitor. Dan had created a claustrophobic feel around Susan as she spoke in each room. It helped dispel his earlier misgivings about her and the empty location. But what he had picked up in the building’s ambient sound, while he lined up the levels in each room as the shoot progressed, was an unexpected bonus.

Since Coven in Scotland, when he accidentally recorded some inexplicable subterranean noises in a tunnel beneath a ruined Bishop’s Palace, he’d made sure to record a lot of ambient outdoor sound and indoor tone in every location on their last film, Blood Frenzy. What he could pick up was often better than music for the soundtrack, and the ocean sounds of the Swedish forest alone had formed the entire soundtrack to the Blood Frenzy documentary; he’d never needed anything else to suggest such a sense of belittling vastness and age in a Boreal forest. But inside his cans, before they recorded Susan’s renunciation segment, deep inside the cult’s West London headquarters, he’d heard what sounded like a distant crowd. Before it faded, he’d then become certain it was wind. Far off. But like it had struck the top floor of the house. And come inside.

The boom mic must have picked up draughts and air currents in a riser, because all the windows were shut; they’d checked to reduce traffic noise. But the house had supplied its own naturally eerie sound effect, and one they’d be hard pressed to find in a sound library.

‘Susan, can you tell us about Katherine’s changing role?’ Susan was nervous again. Or anxious after her disclosure about The Seven, or by the very fact that she was actually inside the penthouse. ‘Susan? Susan?’

She looked up. He repeated the question.

‘Yes. Yes. Katherine. In the second year she rarely led a session. She withdrew up here.’ Susan peered about the walls, as uncomfortable as a kitten beneath a shadow. ‘That would have been in 1969. We saw less and less of her from the Christmas of the previous year. After April of 1969, I never saw her again.’

‘She completely withdrew?’

‘Totally. Stayed up here. When we were out during the day, she tutored The Seven. They ran the sessions through the night in her absence.’

‘So while you slept thirty to a room, she had this entire floor to herself?’

Susan rolled her eyes. ‘And her dogs. Her beloved “vargs”, who ate like kings. That’s when it became known as the penthouse by some of us who were fed up. She’d taken to wearing a purple gown too. Imperial purple with an ermine collar. And The Seven wore red. You know, to set them apart. As the leaders. Our spiritual guides. But I didn’t like it. This sudden exclusivity, when we were all supposed to be in it together.’

‘Is that why you left, because of the hierarchy she imposed?’

‘That was one of my reasons. She began electing favourites amongst us adepts too. Usually girls. The best earners and arse-lickers. The girls who indulged her without threatening her. The clever ones. The ones most like her. Manipulative. Who had their choice of the guys. And her favourites were always the attractive girls. Because she used them as honey-traps, and they started giving personal meditation and therapy sessions to private clients. Rich marks. Most of us were forced into celibacy and she was running call girls, dear. These girls would do anything for her, for the Gathering. You know she’d been a madam in her former life?’

Kyle nodded as he watched the monitor.

‘Well, we never knew all that then. That all came out later, after what happened in America. But she set up rooms on Wimpole Street for her favourites. A couple of the pretty boys too. Gave them very expensive gifts as rewards for their services. They had their own room on the first floor, at the front. To motivate the rest of us and to make us jealous, to pine even harder for her attention. And we must have given ourselves away. How we felt. The long faces. Chatter. Gossip. The Seven had informers amongst us. Oh, yes.’

‘So what do you think she was doing up here?’

Susan screwed up her small face with frustration and anger. ‘We were told Katherine existed up here in a state of permanent repose, meditating. But that she was with us always. Her presence. That she knew everything about us, all of the time. What each of us thought, and felt. The Seven said she was protecting us. And assessing us for election. For ascent. But of course, we’d already confessed everything about ourselves in the early days of the Gathering, so she knew all of our secrets. She had a pretty good idea of what we were susceptible to. And on her instruction, The Seven used that information to accuse us of dissent. In the sessions. To weed people out. And they always seemed right about us. We couldn’t deny what we were accused of, so we just confessed to more and more.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘We were desperate to be accepted. Terrified of exclusion. Of her disapproval if we did not confess something. Her retreat from us just added to the secrecy, the mystery of it all. Of her. Oh, she was clever. And lazy. Being up here only made her more powerful without lifting a finger. Everything she did was strategic.’

‘What did she do, Susan, to people who fell out of favour with her?’

‘There were terrible penalties for disobedience in my second year. Terrible.’

‘Can you tell us? Was this physical punishment?’

‘In a way. But at first you would just be excluded. Which was even worse than what came later. You were mocked by the others in the Gathering, who were told to say the most awful things about you in the sessions. In that room, where we’d renounced everything. In that place of openness and nurturing and togetherness. It was like a sacrilege. What it turned into.’

‘But is it true there was physical abuse here?’

Susan moved her face into a scowl. ‘Yes, but not like they said in the papers. You had to do it to yourself. With the ropes. You know, beat yourself. I never saw anyone thrashed by anyone else. I don’t think that ever happened here. But they got the idea for it here. For what they did in France and America. Physical humiliation. To degrade a person physically in front of the whole group. Use them as examples. I only saw it get physical about four times here, when they made some of the adepts beat themselves with the ropes. What’s it called? A flail.’

‘And all that time, she was up here. Leading a life of luxury.’

Susan nodded. ‘I began to feel like a slave. Out there all day, selling that wretched magazine. It was hopeless. Some days you wouldn’t sell a single copy while the best sellers were rewarded. I couldn’t bear it any more. I ended up just begging for money. I hated coming back here. Because they would punish me and the others who fell below their targets, by making us stay out all night until we reached the donations set us each morning. Is that what we had become, penniless slaves? Some girls even, you know, exchanged favours for money. On the street.’

‘Was this the catalyst for you? The final straw? Working so hard for no reward, while she enriched herself?’

‘I, I need to sit down. Do you have any more water?’

Kyle walked into shot and helped Susan to the floor, where she sat crumpled into herself. Outside, the sun had lowered; the sky fumed with orange and pink clouds, the sky in between the clouds purpled. He gave her the bottle stained by her lipstick and stared at the little collapsed figure on the floor. Once again, Susan White had been reduced in this place. No wonder she could barely face looking at it from outside.

When they restarted, she stared into the middle distance, as if forgetting the cameras were even in the same room. It was no longer clear who she spoke to. Three times, Dan asked her to look into the camera.

‘I suppose I made the decision to leave when I was out selling the Gospel in the second year. I remember a day when I was feverish and cold and wet. I had a terrible flu and I was somewhere behind the British Museum. I fainted. Then I came to and I was sick. So I went to rest on a bench. That day I was with Sister Hera, but I couldn’t find her. So I just sat on my own, on this bench, soaked to the skin. Without a shred of dignity or self-respect left. I was broken. And as I sat alone in the rain on that bench feeling very sorry for myself, I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard. Someone had left it on the bench and I went to raise it and keep my head out of the wet, and I saw a headline. You know, like it was a sign. Everything was a sign back then. You have to understand, it’s how we saw the world. And the headline said something like, “London’s Top Spiritualists Revealed”. And I turned the pages and I looked at this article. And there she was. Katherine. In the society pages. Dressed like a film star, at some party. With jewellery and beautiful hair. Surrounded by glamorous people. And there I was, dying in the rain. Well I went straight to the seller and I bought twenty copies. Spent all of the money I’d earned that day. And I brought those papers back here and I gave them out. To show people who it was we were working for. What we were working for, out there in the rain and the cold, day in, day out. I asked them, is this what we have given up everything for?’

‘Did it begin a revolt here?’

Susan shook her tired head. ‘No. Not really. It just confirmed what those of us who were fed up believed about Katherine. People had started leaving around that time anyway. In droves. She’d had threatening letters from the parents of Sister Urania. A powerful, wealthy family. Her inheritance was being paid to Katherine every month from a trust fund. I heard that Sister Hannah’s lawyers were constantly writing to Katherine too. It was all starting to go wrong. Very wrong. Attracting the wrong kind of attention. Especially after what Charles Manson had done in California. But I’d say the majority of the people just accepted what I had found in the newspaper. They were too in love with her. Devoted to her. Nothing could change that. Even I gave the Gathering another chance, despite what my intuition was telling me.’

‘What happened to you for bringing the papers here? Were you punished?’

‘No. Katherine sent me a gift instead. Pearl earrings. We were forbidden jewellery. I didn’t understand. How could I? But then . . . then something else came here that winter. We called it the holy dread. And that really was the final straw for me.’

Kyle’s gut tightened inside; this was what Max wanted. ‘Can you tell us how it began, Susan? What form it took?’

She nodded, visibly uncomfortable again, and tired. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d seen anyone look so fucked before. ‘It wasn’t just the nature of the sessions that changed under The Seven. The atmosphere changed. Everything changed. The ideals of our group changed. Significantly. That’s what brought it about.’

‘How so?’

‘It wasn’t about self-discovery any more, like in the days of the renunciation. We weren’t exploring ourselves in the same way. It was no longer about equality in the group, or honesty with yourself. Instead, the emphasis was on being chosen. We’d always thought ourselves special. Different, you know. But now we were taught to feel superior to anyone not a part of our Gathering. We were encouraged to feel contempt. It was a contempt that was being cultivated. For the world outside of our walls. And for the first time, people started using the name “Crude” to describe anyone who wasn’t part of our little family here.

‘I remember being told that taking anything to support the Gathering was now justified. In the service of Sister Katherine, we could be free of guilt. We were to be free of conscience and compassion. It was all about self-belief now. Our will was to be focused on the interests of the Gathering. “Empowerment through enrichment” was one of our new mottos. We were taught to use people, and encouraged to practise on each other.

‘And sex was used to control the men more and more. You would have to sleep with any man if The Seven ordered it. I can’t remember there being any favourable matches. But that was the point. We were paired off with people who we weren’t attracted to. If two people fell in love naturally, and people were falling in love all the time, The Seven would break the couple apart by making the woman go with another guy. Our only attachment could be to Katherine, and Katherine alone. It seemed to me that the worst part of ourselves was being groomed. And that the most cunning among us were better off in the new regime.’ Susan stopped speaking and looked at the floor, if he weren’t mistaken, in shame. Kyle exchanged glances with Dan, who raised his eyebrows questioningly. Kyle shook his head, mouthed keep rolling.

‘You never saw her once. You never heard her speak at all in the last year. But it seems the more removed she was from you, the worse her behaviour became.’

Susan raised her weary face. ‘Yes. Through The Seven, she was becoming more and more despotic. We were all given lockets filled with mana. Locks of her hair. We had to carry them around our necks. Like talismans. We were told they had power. And gifts from her were called holy relics. They were always expensive and seemed unworldly to us, because we had nothing. Just our uniforms. We were living like beggars and she was buying expensive jewellery for her favourites. I don’t think anyone wanted to admit we had all been taken in. But we’d been fooled by some streetwise madam. Who’d learned Scientology techniques for mind control in a woman’s prison. Who’d been sent there for running a bloody brothel!’

Susan closed her eyes and let out another long sigh of frustration and fatigue. Kyle let her sit like that in silence for a minute. She was the real deal, authentic.

‘Susan, it’s been claimed she thought she was a saint. Did any of you really think she was actually holy?’

‘I never. It was another reason I left. I don’t know where it started exactly, but people began to say all kinds of things about her. I remember Brother Ethan calling her a “living saint”. And a terrible argument broke out because I laughed. You see, the Gathering was never about God in that way. The whole point was not to be like an organized religion, and here we were with high priests and a bloody living saint controlling us. It was so disappointing for a lot of us. But I had given so much to the Gathering, part of me just kept refusing to give up on it all. A lot of us felt the same way.

‘But in the sessions we were being told by The Seven that Katherine was so advanced in her rebirth that she was transforming back to the original holy spirit. Her lifelong search for the divine in herself had succeeded. So all of her actions were now divine and allowable. Whatever her nature suggested to her was justifiable. We were told that she was evolving beyond the mortal stage and by following her we were becoming an elect. The blessed. Because we were so innocent. Under her guidance we had unravelled ourselves all the way back to original innocence. Like angels. And anyone could be exploited by the blessed elect in the pursuit of their goals, because of our purity. And because she had been through something she called the seven stages of the soul, she would be capable of achieving what we were told was called “complete divinity”. The Seven once told us that she could not be with us, because she was incarnating. She was ascending.

‘And her holiness had attracted the company of others. Presences. Who had imparted the power of prophecy to her. We were told that she had been in direct contact with these “presences”. That was when the atmosphere really changed.’

‘The holy dread?’

Susan nodded.

‘How did it change? Was it a physical change?’

‘Yes. Yes it was. In the early hours of the morning, the sessions would reach their peak. People would be exhausted. Weak. Worn out from crying, and from confessing, and from withstanding the terrible bullying. And it was at those times that we were told that “beings” or “presences” were amongst us.’

Kyle knew it was time to ask another of Max’s questions. ‘Did you see anything materialize? Or was this a sense of an atmospheric change?’

‘I think, the air was different. Maybe colder. Fuller. Like people had entered the room, and added themselves to it, but behind us. All in my imagination you think. I can tell by your face. And I don’t blame you. I did too. God knows what we were all susceptible to by then. We were exhausted and hungry and nervous, and frightened. But I do remember that there were strange smells too. Horrible smells. Like stagnant water. Like damp clothes that have not been aired. Around us. Down there with us.’ Susan pointed at the floor. ‘In the sessions, always. And then in our rooms where we slept. I would say it was worse there.

‘We were told the “presences” were here to communicate their wishes to the chosen amongst us. And that we were to analyse the dreams and the visions and to recount them in the sessions.’

‘What did people claim these visions were like?’

‘Some people said they had sudden insights into each other. Could suddenly see themselves through the eyes of another person, or find themselves in another room. Others said they definitely heard voices beside them, behind them. Some said they travelled.’

‘Travelled?’

‘Out of their bodies while they slept. And they all acted like it was some kind of holy experience. But I couldn’t believe there was anything holy about it. Quite the opposite. To me, it felt like an infestation.’

‘Did you have one of these experiences?’

‘No. I never heard a thing, or travelled outside of myself or saw through anyone else’s eyes. Nothing like that. I didn’t believe any of it either. People were making it all up to please The Seven and to contribute to Katherine’s delusions, that she was deifying and had these special spirits as companions, as guides. People would believe anything, or pretend to believe anything she said, so that she would like them more. That’s how it was at the end.’ Susan paused to compose herself. ‘But the only thing I experienced that I still can’t account for was a participation in a shared vision.’

‘Will you share it with us?’ Kyle heard Dan snigger behind the viewfinder, and threw him a warning glance.

‘We all dreamed of the same place. The refuge. The new temple. That’s what we were told it was. Katherine had been seeing this place too. The Seven told us.’

‘What did it look like?’

Susan closed her eyes. ‘It was dark. But I remember seeing some stone buildings with wooden roofs in the rain, in fields of long grass. And the sky above them was strange. It was wavy. But wavy the wrong way. Like heat. But coming downwards. Or like the sky wasn’t properly formed. But what was extraordinary was that every person in that session saw the same thing. We couldn’t have suggested it to each other. Someone cried out that they could see buildings. Another person said yes, they could see them too, and counted them. And then people began calling out and describing details and features that we could all see inside our minds. Someone said that the place was empty. It was. You could tell. One building was long and white with four sets of long doors. Another was all made of brown wood, like a barn. Roof tiles were missing in the third building.

‘I never spoke up, but I could see every single thing in my head. Everything the people in that room were calling out and describing to each other, I’d had in my mind before anyone spoke.’

‘What was interpreted from this?’

‘That we had shared Katherine’s premonition. That the apocalypse was coming. And the place in the vision was our refuge.

‘We were told that everything had been leading to this. The long sessions of self-discovery, the removal of our egos. The tests of our faith, and of our devotion to Katherine, had succeeded. And those of us left in the Gathering were chosen. We all now had a clear channel of communication with the “presences”. A time of ascent was coming.’

‘But you weren’t convinced?’

‘No. Not by any of it. But I still can’t explain the vision. Maybe it was suggested to us before, somehow. I don’t know. But the plans for the relocation to France began right after that night.’

‘And you decided not to go with them to France?’

Susan shook her head. ‘The Gathering was paranoid and too poisoned with anger and jealousy by then. I didn’t want to be a part of it any more. It didn’t make sense to me.’

‘Did anyone else leave the group before they moved to France?’

‘A few. About ten of us, I think. But the divisions and the rivalries settled down for a while. The arrival of the “presences” seemed to make things better again. Gave people hope that we were important after all. That it had all been worthwhile and that the Gathering would survive. And we were all shown a photo of the farm that Katherine h ad bought for us with the Gathering’s money. Our money. It was the very place we had seen in the vision. No doubt about it. And that was like a miracle in here. A lot of people forgave Katherine everything after that. But I couldn’t. Neither could Max. So we left on the same day. One week before the first diaspora.’

‘Sorry. Did you say Max? Our Max? Maximillian Solomon?’

Susan looked at Kyle and winced. ‘Please don’t tell him I told you. But, yes. He was here from the beginning.’

‘She was freaky,’ Dan said. He kneeled before the monitor where Kyle had left him to show Susan out and hail her a cab. In the street-facing room of the penthouse, Dan had stayed with the gear to label the last SDHD 8GB memory cards; all of the card boxes were labelled the same as their camera tapes used to be, by title and date, and were then backed up in a notebook so they’d know what footage was on which card. He’d not done this on his first film and wasted weeks logging each tape after the final shoot. Never again.

And once he had laid his rough cut, he would wipe the rushes from his laptop to make space for the next shoot. Finger Mouse had the hard-disc space on the machines in his South London flat to take on all the rushes from a feature-length documentary. Finger Mouse would make two copies of the master reels as backup; Kyle would keep one, Dan another, Finger Mouse would keep the masters. The chance of all three flats burning down on the same night was unlikely. They all lived like seagulls at their respective domestic landfills, but their organization of the footage had become flawless during the documentaries they’d made together. Because, as Kyle often mused, nothing else mattered.

‘You don’t say. But not without good reason. An experience like that? She was great material.’ He wasn’t kidding himself either. But he still fidgeted with puzzlement and disappointment. Max not disclosing his involvement in the Gathering cast a shadow over the end of the interview. Kyle’s disenchantment was further augmented by Susan White’s eagerness to leave. ‘What’s the time? Seven! I never want to be here at night again. I’ll have to go. I’m tired.’

Recalling her life at the house in Clarendon Road had drained her. Watching her swing from elation to despair to grief to a final sad resignation had exhausted Kyle too. She’d been a part of something extraordinary, no doubt, but the damage it had wreaked upon her was evidently permanent.

‘I thought we were going to have to blow this off,’ Dan said. ‘I mean, she shows up looking like Barbara Cartland fused with Mystic Meg, and then collapses outside. She was good though. Lot of colour in that woman. Literally.’

Kyle sat down and sniggered, looked around the chic shell of what would probably soon become a bedroom for an American financier and his impeccably courteous wife. ‘What did you make of it?’

Smiling, Dan shook his head. ‘Pretty incredible. This keeps up we might just get a good film out of it.’

‘You believe her?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Why wouldn’t you? That shit was going down all through the sixties. False messiahs, con-artist gurus, shaking their followers down for all of their money. While the great leaders cruised round in Limos with the Beatles, Rolexes on their wrists. She was a piece of work, that Sister Katherine. I mean, the adepts were like Big Issue sellers in Hammer Horror robes, and she was stepping out to Annabel’s.’

Kyle smiled. Lay down on the bare floorboards with a sigh and formed a star shape with his limbs to stretch his spine after holding the boom all day. ‘What about the presences? That’s what Max wanted me to concentrate on.’

‘Horseshit.’

Kyle laughed. ‘Still steaming?’

‘Oh yeah. Ripe.’

‘I liked it. It was weird. Real weird.’

‘Still horseshit. I bet they were smoking canons the size of Cuban cigars. Eating Quaaludes like Smarties back in the day, maaan.’

Not here. That came later. Irvine Levine claimed the cult never discovered drugs until California, after the second diaspora, when they changed their name to The Temple of the Last Days. But Levine had no time in his book for the mystical angle either, the presences; only the criminal activity interested him, in which Sister Katherine and her devout would come to wallow.

Dan shut the monitor off. ‘So what now, chief?’

‘Pub. Food.’

‘Fucking A.’

‘There’s a place called The Prince of Wales two streets down. Googled it.’

‘I’m there, dude. Then back here to finish up?’

Kyle frowned, turned his head to Dan. ‘You sure? We have this place for another day.’

‘Do as much as we can today. I got that christening tomorrow. Might take all day. And a few days’ work for Reel Store next week so I gotta get my head down tomorrow night. Few other things to catch up on too before we go to France.’

‘I got the ferry tickets.’

Dan nodded. ‘This Brother Gabriel all set?’

‘Yep. Doesn’t have email. Or a mobile.’

‘This is my surprised face. The presences tell him everything he needs to know.’

‘But I called his landline and told him we’d pick him up on Thursday.’

‘Did you tell him I don’t want any presences in the van?’

Kyle laughed. ‘Forgot to mention it.’

Walking back to the red house on Clarendon Road, the sun was gone and the city was coming alive with Saturday-night excitement. Well-groomed human traffic headed to dinner parties and restaurants in Notting Hill and Holland Park and transformed the slow grey afternoon into flashes of short skirts, explosions of feminine laughter, the powerful hum of performance cars and the throaty trundle of Hackney cabs.

‘Poshos,’ Dan said.

‘Ponces,’ Kyle said.

‘Not much sign of an economic downturn around here.’

‘The Big Society stopped at Shepherds Bush, mate.’

Clarendon Road deepened in shadow at the foot of Notting Hill. As they put distance between themselves and the pub, the noise became urban-ambient, far off: sirens, raised voices, an incongruous burst of Bollywood music as the hush and elegance of Clarendon Road’s expensive facades and ancient trees deflected the noise elsewhere.

Dan burped. ‘How much do you reckon these places go for?’

‘Saw one listed for five million in the estate agents by the Tube station.’

‘Must have sold a lot of Gospels to pay the rent.’

‘She thought big.’

The building was in darkness. Kyle fumbled with the keys. ‘Third pint was a mistake.’

Dan started to laugh. ‘My footage is going to make you seasick.’

Giggling, they stumbled into the building, their movements uncoordinated by drink and the absence of light. The lack of curtains allowed some pale street light into the front of the building, but it didn’t penetrate far.

Kyle reached for the reception hall light-switch. It clicked. No light. ‘Shit.’

‘Kidding me?’

Kyle shook his head. His feet boomed further down the hall. He tried the lights in one of the front rooms. No light. ‘Fuses for the lights must have gone. How many batteries you have?’

‘Three. It’ll be OK, if you want to get arty. Be a lot of shadows. Or . . .’

Kyle walked back into the hall where the large silhouette of Dan’s body blocked out most of the light that dropped from the window above the front door. ‘Or?’

‘Night shoot. Slow the shutter speed right down. And I can get all Blair Witch on your ass?’

Kyle rested against the hall wall, hands on top of the radiator, as if warming himself. ‘Not a bad idea. The stuff with Susan is in daylight. So my lines could go over some darker interiors. I was going to suggest we do some footage at night anyway, because it’s all a bit samey.’

‘Cool. Where you wanna start?’

‘Basement. We can use the stuff down there as props. You know, make it look vacant, but full of history. Bit spooky too with a couple of lamps, then a bit in night mode. One camera on the tripod. Maybe some Steadicam too.’

‘You got it. Help me with the gear.’

They left the ground-floor flat and made their way up to the penthouse to collect the gear. As they moved deeper and up into the building, the ambient street light lessened until they were forced to feel their way back into the room containing their bags.

Dan fitted a new battery into each camera and checked the spotlight on top of the first camera, the light from which Kyle found himself ashamedly grateful for. A small round moon was thrown forward from above the camera lens, and beyond it an umbra of thin whitish light formed a wider, fainter circle. As the radiance neared objects, they glinted: brass door handles, gloss-finish paint on the long wooden door panels. Beyond this light there was either a vagueness to the walls and floor, or total darkness.

On their way back down the staircase to the ground-floor reception, Dan suddenly stopped. Kyle bumped his back and Dan slipped down two steps. ‘Dufus!’

‘Why’d you stop?’

‘Shush.’ Dan turned his head and looked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘You shut the front door when we came back in?’

‘Yes. Locked it.’

‘Listen.’ Dan held up one hand.

Kyle strained his ears. The deep spaces of the lightless building hummed quietly. ‘What?’ he whispered.

‘Thought I heard someone. Downstairs.’

Kyle grinned. ‘Don’t start with that shit.’

‘No, seriously. I heard footsteps.’

‘Next door?’

Dan lowered his hand. ‘Maybe. No, you’re right. Was just worried some bum had followed us in.’

‘Come on.’

Back on the ground, Kyle unlocked the basement door. ‘You go first,’ he said to Dan.

‘Why?’

‘’Coz you have the frigging light on the camera. I don’t want to go arse-over-tit down these stairs.’

‘Chicken shit.’

As he went down, gingerly, behind Dan’s bulk, Kyle wished he hadn’t drunk so much Franziskaner Weissbier. But then it was his turn to pause on the bottom stair. ‘Dan?’

‘What?’

Kyle raised his face, sniffed at the air. ‘You smelling that?’

‘What?’

‘Move over.’ Kyle walked further into the basement. Dan wheezed under the weight of the camera and gear as he followed.

Dan sniffed. Shrugged.

The dusty light, which had fallen through the barred window of the basement during the day, was now gone. But the window still shone with vestiges of street light from outside. It barely distinguished the cardboard boxes, and oddments of discarded furniture from previous tenants, as anything but silhouettes. The spotlight on Dan’s camera contributed another layer of silvery luminance, which almost returned Kyle’s confidence to a normal level.

‘I don’t remember that before,’ Kyle said, and turned about, looking for the source of the smell. It reminded him of sewage: old-egg sulphurous, gassy-pungent. And damp. There was a harder smell of rank water clothed by something musty, like old wet carpet in a cold room. He thought of what Susan White had said. And then forcibly suppressed his uneasiness.

‘Yeah, I’m getting it now,’ Dan said. ‘Watch where you’re putting your feet.’

Kyle peered about the boxes, but it was too dark to see if anything leaked or dripped or decomposed amongst the shadows. Maybe there was an old bin bag from a former tenant, left down here and forgotten about.

‘Bingo,’ Dan said.

Kyle turned to look at where Dan shone the camera’s spotlight, on the wall behind a disorderly jumble of broom-and mop-handles, their shadows thin and insect-like against the old plaster. ‘What?’

‘The wall. Something’s leaked. See?’

Upon the murky plaster a dim cloud of damp, as wide and long as a door, was streaked with thicker brown veins of moisture that shone wetly. As Kyle looked at it, the miasma intensified about his face. ‘I better tell Max to call the estate agents. Pipe’s burst. That wasn’t here earlier. I’d have smelled it when I came down this afternoon.’

Dan removed the camera light from it. ‘Let’s get started.’

‘OK. But start over here. By the stairs. There’s an airbrick too. And my face is going to be clamped to it soon. Shoot from here to the window. Try and get it all in. We can use that creepy window with the nursery narration.’

‘Can do.’ As Dan manoeuvred himself and the camera tripod into position, set up the two small lights, and chalked up the clapperboard: Scene 6: London, indoors, basement, night, Kyle read through his script and refamiliarized himself with his narration about the first births of the Gathering.

‘Ready?’ Dan asked.

‘Let’s go.’ Kyle cleared his throat and spoke into his tie mic, out-of-shot.

Dan operated the clapperboard and then stepped back behind the camera.

‘It is no surprise that after a year of enforced celibacy, when Sister Katherine began pairing members of her Gathering into couples in 1969, and allowed limited, but often very public sexual relations between members of the group, these unions would begin to bear fruit. Although most of the children born into the Gathering were begat at the farm in Normandy, and later still in the Sonoran desert, at least four children were born at the headquarters of the organization, shortly before the diaspora to France. The babies were kept down here. And their birth mothers’ access to them was limited. Katherine made it clear to her adepts that any child born into their elect was to be parented by the community. To be raised without the hang-ups of their natural parents. Looking after the infants was seen as a punishment—’

‘Shit,’ Dan said looking up at the ceiling.

‘I heard that,’ Kyle whispered.

And again, there it was; a bumping against a door, somewhere above them in the building. And what sounded like a faint scuffle of feet, unsteady steps, completed the ensemble of muffled noises above their heads.

‘Someone is definitely in here,’ Dan whispered fiercely. ‘You must have left the front door open.’

‘I didn’t. I locked it. I remember.’

Kyle was sure the sound had carried from the first-floor apartment, the door of which was still unlocked and open from the afternoon’s shoot.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Dan whispered.

‘Better go look. Come on. Might be nothing.’

Dan didn’t reply, or lead the way, so Kyle climbed the stairs first. Guided himself upwards by the light that fell between his legs from the camera’s spotlight. ‘Keep it running,’ Kyle whispered. ‘Just in case.’

‘What am I, an amateur?’

‘Hello!’ Kyle shouted up the stairwell from the reception hall, as much to build his confidence as to make contact with an intruder. ‘This is private property!’

‘Maybe say the police are coming,’ Dan muttered.

But Kyle couldn’t bring himself to; it sounded foolish. He dialled 999 into his mobile and rested his thumb on the CALL button. ‘Come on,’ he whispered to Dan.

They checked the ground-floor flat. Nothing. Then went upstairs to the first floor and stood in the doorway of each of the four empty rooms. The camera spotlight revealed a stark emptiness. Nothing again.

The only nook they couldn’t see from the main hall that ran the length of the flat was the en-suite bathroom in the master bedroom. ‘Some crack-head weasel might be in there,’ Dan said, his voice tense beside Kyle. They stood together and looked at the doorway to the bathroom, until Kyle became tired of his own anxiety and, in a sudden burst of unexamined confidence, walked across the master bedroom and peered into the bathroom.

Porcelain, wood, chrome: empty.

They went and checked the penthouse: empty. Made their way back to the first floor. Kyle shook his head once the search was complete. ‘Nothing.’

‘Old place. Must be shifting on its foundations.’

‘Could be. No one in here but us.’

Dan peered at him from around the viewfinder. They exchanged glances and after a moment of realizing they were both frowning sternly at each other, they burst into laughter. And Kyle was reminded again, after so many years of being friends, just how much he enjoyed the sound of Dan’s wheezy chuckle.

‘I need a piss. I’m going in there. Shift,’ Dan said. ‘But let’s get this wrapped up quick when I’m done syphoning off this wheat beer,’ he said over his shoulder as he urinated.

Kyle nodded. ‘No problem. Let’s redo the nursery segment. Then do a piece in night mode up in Sister Katherine’s penthouse. Get some shots of the place in night mode on our way back up. We can do audio over them later and cut them into Susan’s piece.’

Dan nodded, zipped up, reclaimed the camera and headed for the stairs. He paused at the bottom and turned his head to Kyle. ‘You don’t think someone got in and hid?’

‘No chance. Come on, big man, shift your arse.’

‘For one year, Sister Katherine spent most of her time in these four rooms. Glimpsed infrequently, she would venture out dripping with jewellery, and clad in the designer clothes she became so fond of, to shop on Bond Street, or to visit the exclusive clubs of Mayfair and Knightsbridge and Chelsea, from which a few photos of her still exist. Palatial accommodation compared to the rest of the building, where the adepts slept crammed against each other, the cries of the infants in the basement nursery perhaps rising up to disturb sleep already hampered by snoring and a total lack of privacy. This separation had a powerful impact upon the minds of her followers. It was the clearest indication of Sister Katherine’s authority over them, and her elevation to the status of absolute spiritual leader. Which would become all too evident at the next two locations where she exiled her loyal, but dwindling band of adepts. Ending in what one writer called—’

‘Dude! We have definitely got company. Shit!’

Kyle jumped, caught his breath. He stared at the side of Dan’s head; his temples were wired with white hair. Dan’s getting old, he thought, stupidly.

And the sound was repeated; a pattern of footsteps outside the street-facing room on the penthouse floor. What appeared to be unsteady steps; the sounds suggested the feet were dry and bare, scuffing at the wooden floorboards in the central corridor. But the entire second storey had been devoid of life besides the two of them; they had even checked again to put Dan’s mind at rest.

‘What is it?’ Dan’s face was stiff with fright. He quickly removed his beloved Canon XHA from the tripod.

Kyle hurriedly untaped the tie mics from inside his shirt. ‘How the fuck do I know?’

Dan slowly lowered the camera to the floor, untangled himself. ‘This is not funny. Just not funny. I’m going to—’ A door, somewhere outside the room, was slammed with such force he never finished the sentence.

Kyle finished it for him. ‘Get the fuck out.’

Dan headed for the door. Kyle hurried after him; the camera’s spotlight lit the room to where they paused in the doorway, but not much further beyond the threshold. ‘Who’s there?’ Kyle shouted. His voice carried deep into the building.

Silence. They looked at each other. Then peered to their right, down the hallway and into the darkness that had taken possession of the remainder of the floor. Beyond the beat of his heart inside his ears, Kyle heard a faint whistle. A whistle? He couldn’t be sure. Must have come from outside. No, it was a dog. One of the neighbours’ dogs. Because he then heard a squeal like a paw had been stepped upon. But in the distance. Far away. But up above them. Impossible. ‘You hearing that? Outside?’

Dan’s eyes blinked rapidly. ‘Let’s take off.’ He turned his body to head back inside the room to collect the camera, then paused. Kyle held his hand up for silence, and squinted, on account of the cold draught seeping through the hallway from the rear of the building. A subtle wind pregnant with the odour of decomposition. Which immediately brought to his mind the memory of a bird he found as a child: tar-gluey with its own black blood, jumping with white tics, dusty and dead-stinky. He placed a finger under his nose. ‘Ugh.’

Dan coughed. ‘I’m—’

But there it was again, a distant burst of whistles interspersed with a sound reminiscent of a gargle heard through a wall. Followed a few seconds later by a dog whining. They stood mute and immobile until the sudden thump of feet raced through the unlit hallway of the penthouse and broke them from paralysis.

For a moment, they became trapped against each other within the door frame. Dan’s elbow knocked against Kyle’s shoulder. He’s pushing me behind him! Panic surged to fill Kyle’s head with a jostle of thoughtless thoughts, and an image of Susan White’s lined and lipless mouth saying, ‘Presences’.

He followed Dan down the darkened stairs from the second floor to the first; the soles of his Converse landed on the smooth edges of the stairs and shot forward; the sound of his breath was smothered by the bang bang bang of Dan’s feet in front of him.

Kyle couldn’t swallow. He looked at Dan’s eyes as Dan rounded the stairwell and headed to the first floor, half running, half scrabbling, and wished he hadn’t; they were wide and bright with fear in a beam of street light that washed across his pale unshaven face. Hysteria electrified Kyle’s gut, spread to his legs and arms, was barely contained and wanted to break out, and to force a thrashing acceleration over Dan and his cumbersome staircase-blocking body. He had no idea who, or what, he was running from, but his instincts screamed: get out!

Kyle’s feet dropped into the ambient street light that bounced off the laminate floors. The light squeezed into the building from the small square windows of the stairwell, but was never more than vague. Between these jump-cuts of half-darkness, he thrust his feet into nothingness and jarred his back as if he walked on legs that refused to bend.

Kyle looked behind him. Saw the front door to the penthouse floor. It gaped. Was black, smudgy and vibrated in his half-sight. Nothing moved within it. But if anything did, he knew he would freeze and wait on the stairs, incapable of movement.

Wait for what?

He kept running downwards behind Dan’s noisy lurches, then across the tiny first-floor landing to the next set of stairs. The world shook in Kyle’s wide-eyed grasp for luminance, for clarity, for the world to reform in light and to return to visibility and to safety. Dan’s breath panted ahead of him, adding an urgency to his own.

A door slammed shut, behind them, upstairs. Maybe in the penthouse. Through the maelstrom of their panting, their banging feet and beating hearts, Kyle also heard a skitter, like a dog’s frantic claws upon a wooden floor as it tried to get up. He became too afraid to look back again, in case something now moved behind them.

A sudden rush of air from above dropped through the middle of the stairwell they rounded like frightened children. Fell like a long hiss and preceded what Kyle thought was the grunt of a pig.

‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck,’ Dan gasped, and slipped and thumped his broad shoulder off a stairwell wall. Kyle passed him on the inside and took the last flight of stairs three at a time, and didn’t break his stride until he was at the front door. Dan pressed himself into his friend’s back. He wheezed in a high-pitched nasal rhythm of terror. ‘Open it!’

‘I’m trying!’ In Kyle’s hands, the bunch of keys jumped and rattled and shone silvery like tiny fish in a fisherman’s net. He jabbed, stabbed and he scraped one, two, three of the wrong size keys at the lock, before dropping the entire bunch. He thought he might cry with rage and fear and frustration.

Behind them, the building returned to silence.

Hands on knees, they gulped at the night air. Hunched over, side by side, on the pavement, across the road from the dark, silent house, the red door closed behind their flight, Dan sounded like he was having a heart attack. Gotta lay off the kebabs, big man, Kyle thought in the idiotic ordinariness of flimsy thinking that wafted into a mind recently traumatized by abject terror.

He put a hand on Dan’s big ham of a shoulder, and pushed himself upright. Dan’s T-shirt was soaked with sweat. It smelled of beef crisps on a horse blanket. Kyle wiped his hand against the thighs of his Levis. ‘You believe this shit?’

Dan couldn’t speak.

‘Man. I mean, Jesus.’ He raised two hands in the air, beseeching the night to provide an answer.

Dan rose like an old man from a wheelchair. ‘See anything?’

Kyle thought hard on the question; quickly ran through the jumble of his jumping vision that he could recall. ‘No. But did you hear that sound?’

‘Which one?’

Kyle heard himself giggle nervously before he realized he was doing it.

‘That was some freaky shit, right there.’ Dan’s face was ashen, his top lip moist with pebbles of sweat between the salt-and-pepper whiskers. ‘What was it?’

Kyle shook his head. Shrugged. ‘I heard feet. That . . . that . . . zooey sound.’

Dan’s anxious face broke into a feeble grin. ‘Zooey?’

‘Birds. Animals. You know, like in a zoo. In the distance. You get that?’

Dan’s wet brow creased in puzzlement. ‘I heard a voice.’

‘No.’

‘Like wailing. This kind of trying to sing. I think. No words in it. Then maybe a dog too. And, like a flute, or something.’

‘Flute? Like a whistle?’

‘Maybe. Dunno.’ He paused and clutched both hands to his mouth. ‘Oh shit.’

‘What? What?’ Kyle’s repetition went up an octave.

‘Cameras. Dude, the frickin’ cameras are still in there.’

Kyle laughed, more with relief than at the absurdity of the situation. ‘You think I’m going back in there without a priest, you’re kidding yourself.’

‘The christening. I gotta be there at nine in the morning. I promised Jared. Shit.’

During a silence that lasted for seconds, but one that felt like minutes, Kyle stared at the house. He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it. A big part of me is now seriously wondering if that was the first, the very first, I tell you, the first experience, the first encounter with . . . whatever . . . I’ve ever had.’

Dan tried to smile. ‘Could have been a rat, a pigeon stuck inside. A dog. Some kind of draught. We’re half-cut. Old buildings have weird acoustics. And we didn’t see anything. We just got spooked.’

Kyle turned his head to Dan. Held both of his hands out with the palms open. ‘Go and fetch your camera then.’

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