The Magus of Hay(122)

‘I’ll work that out sometime. What about Beryl Bain-bridge?’

‘You’re very well informed.’

‘Psychic powers, Claudia.’



Claudia didn’t smile.

‘Beryl was… a natural. I met her once. Entrusted with the old marketplaces – the Buttermarket, which even looks like a temple, and the square below the castle. She was famous for liking a certain clutter – house like a Victorian museum, full of statues and icons and stuffed animals. Think of Beryl in the town on a market day, absorbing the atmosphere. Hay market representing commerce – local commerce. An unusual talent for projecting herself into a place and time and then condensing it into the essentials. Surrounded herself with chaos, yet her books were models of concise precision – like sigil-magic, where everything is reduced to a symbol.’

‘I kind of remember reading once that she was an atheist.’

‘May well have been. But when she died, in 2010, her funeral was at the church of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town – a service so High Church that some of the mourners didn’t realize it wasn’t very traditional Roman Catholic. No one has quite managed to explain that.’

Merrily stared at the moon. Miracles and magic.

‘Take me through this, would you, Claudia? On a particular night…’

‘Might be the night of the full moon or the equinox. But you have a group of people, all over the country, alerted these days by email, who go into some private place in their home at the appointed time… and are sent a specific phrase or a clearly defined concept or an image, and… begin.

‘There’s a temple. You’ll see. A proper temple. With a magic circle and cardinal points, all the necessary stuff. And sympathetic props. The most significant of which was a poppet. You know what that is?’

‘That’s a witchcraft thing, isn’t it? A doll.’

‘You take what you need for the purpose, from any tradition. It’s become known as chaos magic. Customized ritual, virtually nothing forbidden. Peter liked the idea, whilst believing it was terribly dangerous for a novice magician, on the basis that you can’t break the rules with the necessary confidence if you’re not fully conversant with the rules you want to break.’

Merrily was thinking of what Athena had had to say about chaos magic.

‘So you can take the Christian tradition and marry it to something… else.’

From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse.

She was thinking of the figurines in the alcoves in Rector’s library: Isis and the Virgin.

‘I didn’t think you’d find that terribly acceptable. I’m just telling you how it was. The concept’s credited to the artist and magician, Austin Osman Spare, whose images you might have seen—’

‘In the library, here?’

‘The library has drawings by Spare and Eric Gill, who was at Capel-y-ffin.’

‘An obsessive Catholic with a taste for breaking taboos,’ Merrily said. ‘I believe incest was a favourite.’

‘I can only assure you…’ Claudia was now little more than a shadow ‘… that however much you might reject his methodology, Peter Rector’s intentions towards Hay were entirely positive.’

‘Odd, though, how the kind of occultism favoured by neo-Nazi groups like the Order of the Sun in Shadow seems to have absorbed some of the principles of chaos magic.’

Merrily was shaken. There was a tightrope here between good and evil, and the rope was woven from strands of a disturbingly convincing madness.

‘He’d left all that behind,’ Claudia said coldly. ‘As you keep being told.’

‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t still being followed by people inspired by Rector. Do you know anything about Jerrold Adrian Brace?’



‘No. Who is he?’

‘Forget it. What was your role in the last redemptive project?’

‘I was never directly involved. As I’ve indicated, he still considered me a student. He’d tightened up a lot on the people he used. The days of the Convoy were long over. It was all very clandestine – the chosen few. I’ve been mainly the help. The one who helped his solicitor handle his affairs, managed his money, went to his bank, made sure David Hambling and Peter Rector lived safely and happily apart. But he trusted me with knowledge of what was happening. All vibrantly exciting. At first.’

Headlights in the lane.

‘Go on,’ Merrily said.

‘Quite dizzying, seeing Hay mushrooming from a forlorn farming town to somewhere known all over the world. I was here when Clinton came to speak in a huge marquee on the green behind the castle. Thousands of people… a limo with smoked glass windows… the world’s media. Businesses booming all over town, you could almost hear property prices blasting through the roof.’