The Magus of Hay(47)

‘You’re saying that when he wrote the book he was allowing himself to empathize with the Nazi shamans or whatever—’

‘Precisely. Entirely factual material, but the presentation was a creative exercise. Never entered his head that he’d be seen as a sympathizer. By the time I was following him around he’d become a latent hippy, growing his hair, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. He was giving talks and interviews about Nazi occultism only because his publishers were making him. And for the money, of course. He was also becoming alarmed about the kind of people who were pursuing him.’

‘Pursuing?’

‘Writing long letters to him, waiting for him after his lectures. Tracing him to his hotel. Sitting next to him on trains. My own masters, of course, by this time, were now far more interested in them. Which is how I came to befriend him.’

‘You were told to.’

‘Well, of course I was told to. He just wanted to run away, but the service was keen for him to stick around and quietly encourage these individuals so that they could be identified and kept under surveillance. My job was to get him to cooperate.’

Well, well…

‘You’d have been about… my age, then?’

‘I would imagine.’



And doubtless very sexy.

‘And, erm… did you succeed?’

‘For a limited period. And, before you ask, I have no intention of going further down that particular thoroughfare.’

‘Heavens, Athena, you were a honey trap?’

Miss White gazed into the hills, expressionless.

‘Remove that foolish grin from your face,’ she said, quite mildly, ‘before I’m compelled to slap it. It was never going to be a long-term thing. Peter hated playing a double game and hated, even more, having to associate with these wall-eyed maniacs in their leather coats.’

‘But he rather liked you.’

Miss White sighed.

‘In that sense, it was an extremely brief affair. A certain mutual respect remained, however, and we kept in touch, mostly by telephone. We, as they say, looked out for one another. When he moved to the mountains, he asked if I’d like to be involved in his study centre. I declined. The thought of all those ghastly people in search of spiritual fulfilment… besides, I knew it wouldn’t last. These things never do.’

‘But when you retired, you came here.’

‘Some years after I retired, I came here. I like the air.’

‘Do you remember when Rector came to Cusop under the name David Hambling?’

‘Of course I remember. It was about a year after he phoned me one night and said, “Why do they keep coming back? Why are they doing this to me?”’





22

Worm in the apple


‘YOU MEAN THE Security Service?’ Merrily said. ‘On his back again?’

The laburnums were aglow under a sky now an ominous sage-green, Radnorshire rain clouds sailing in. But it was still warm, no breeze.

‘Good God, no,’ Athena White said. ‘Peter Rector was no more than a curling file in the bottom drawer by then. I’m talking about the vermin with swastika tattoos in their armpits and shrivelled paperback copies of A Negative Sun in their back pockets.’

‘What were they doing?’

‘They were turning up on his courses. Didn’t have far to come either, some of them. This was the era of young people fleeing into the countryside to set up smallholdings. The Welsh Border being one of the cheapest areas of southern Britain to buy into and reinvent yourself. Get a cottage and an acre of scrub for a few thousand. Live off the land. Self-sufficiency, small is beautiful.’

‘Was it?’

‘Hardly ever. It was usually damp and gloomy, and everything died. And amidst all the silly little hippies you’d find a more sinister survivalist element with primitive weaponry. And these deranged followers of the Aryan left-hand path.’

‘I didn’t… actually know about that,’ Merrily said.

Warily.



‘You’ll find them on the Internet to this day. Probably the one named after Peter Rector’s book. OSIS – the Order of the Sun in Shadow. Its central premise was that mankind evolves only by acts of extreme violence. Its targets were the usual Jews and gypsies, sundry foreigners and those it describes as The Detritus – people deemed to be a drain on society, whether unwilling, unfit or too old to work. I’d qualify as a prime example. Accept voluntary euthanasia or we’ll have to kill you.’

Maybe it was an effect of the colours of the sky but Miss White’s cheeks looked drained and sunken. She’d always been the old woman in the poem who dressed in purple, living on her wits and her witchery. Merrily glimpsed cracks in the protective layers, felt her inner rage and the terror of its containment in an old lady’s body.