The Magus of Hay(149)

The gleaming at the end of Gwenda’s right hand was not a knife. The champagne flute was half smashed, Gwenda’s fist tight around the stem up against a jagged open tulip of good crystal.

Merrily stumbled over a lump in the grass, nearly went down. Gwenda came another step closer. Lifted the arm with its crystal prongs.

‘All right.’ Merrily scrambling up, backing off. ‘That… that’s what I think you did.’

‘Say it!’



‘Yeah, right, exactly… Say it… yes. That’s what you said. Say it, you were hissing, say it… And because he was bloody terrified of you by then, he said it. He said, I sacrifice you in the name of my father. And that was… that was all you needed. All you needed was his voice, saying the words. His voice, your blade, and that was all he had to do. That and hold the camera while you stood there. Killing Cherry Banks. The detritus. That’s what I think, Gwenda. That’s how I think it went.’

Limping away, gasping. Her left foot had found a hollow in the grass and, stepping out of it, she’d twisted an ankle.

Oh God, don’t let her see you limp. Divert her… anything…

‘Was Cherry your first? Easy… easy to get her down from the Bluff?’

‘Told her there was a wealthy guy in Hay who was into trashy girls. Dirty girls. You didn’t have to tell her twice.’

‘Jerry say she could use his place?’

Gwenda seemed to relax.

‘We took her to Jerry’s place, and the wealthy chap obviously didn’t turn up, so Jerry fucked her himself, then we had a threesome, and gave her some sleepy pills. Just another homeless scrubber tagging along with the Convoy. She told us this would’ve been her last time anyway as she’d seen the Holy Mother… in the air at Capel-y-ffin. Well, that fucking did it, far as I was concerned.’

‘She said she’d seen the Lady of Llanthony? When did she tell you that? Before she was drugged? Before she was part of a threesome?’

‘Don’t remember, darling. Except that it was like a sign. Prostitute discovers faith. How lovely.’

‘And what did it feel like afterwards? After you’d done it. An explosion of consciousness? Halfway to the astral plane, was it, Gwenda?’

Gwenda took a step up the bank, the crystal flute swinging at her side.

‘Or was it just about initiation? Your initiation… Jerry’s initiation… whose was it? Never going to be able to prove it wasn’t him, so that… gave you a hold on him. The ultimate hold. You and Jerry going all the way together. How… how touching.’

‘Thank you,’ Gwenda said, ‘that makes it a lot easier.’

Swinging her arm like a pendulum, a keening whisper in the air and Merrily’s left arm was ripped from wrist to elbow.

Oh.

The temperature dropped.

‘How can you—?’

She was trembling now, in severe shock.

‘How can you do this? How can you go on doing it?’ How can—’

Pop.

Was it extreme fear that did this? The inner camera pulling back, the blur of images, the vivid sense of yourself under a milky moon, not quite full, an arm banded with bright blood.

Your fresh blood. Cherry’s black blood. Tamsin’s dried, waxwork blood.

‘Tamsin? Was that you, too? Was it?’

… and the blood matted on Tamsin’s chest and the blood that flowed back into Cherry’s throat in the rewinding video. Outside of all this, you saw the actual hatred burning inside you like a blue light, like a gas jet turned up full.

You saw Mephista lunging with the glass at your face and losing her footing in a patch of mud and starting to slide down the bank, unbalanced.

And you might not be able to walk, but you could throw yourself down the bank, giddy with rage, breath pumping, until you had a hand under her jaw and the other groping for the eyes.

Seeing it happening, as if from somewhere else, higher up.

As if through the round eyes of Mrs Villiers, sitting directly above where you were pushing Mephista’s head under the water, where the Dulas Brook emptied itself into the Wye.

The old woman’s eyes reduced to smudges of shadows, her jaw fallen.

Her whistling in your head.





68

Martyr


FIRST FLUFFS OF white in the sky, blue and orange beacons on the ground, radio crackle. The futile scurryings of baffled cops. Bliss’s Honda parked at the edge of the market square, under the castle.

Merrily in the passenger seat, still unable to keep a limb still, a white bandage on one arm, to the elbow.

‘Tried to kill herself,’ Bliss said. ‘Ostensibly. She threw herself into the river, and she let herself float out on her back, and there she is like the Lady of friggin Shallot, screaming at them not to try and reach her. I’d got there by then. You know what I did, Merrily? Stood there and had a bit of a laugh.’